George Eliot was a painstaking, laborious writer.  She did not proceed rapidly, so carefully did she elaborate her pages.  Her subjects were thoroughly studied before the pen was taken in hand, patiently thought out, planned with much care, and all available helps secured that could be had.  She threw her whole life into her work, became a part of the scenes she was depicting; her life was absorbed until the work of writing became a painful process both to body and mind.  “Her beautifully written manuscript,” says her publisher, “free from blur or erasure, and with every letter delicately and distinctly finished, was only the outward and visible sign of the inward labor which she had taken to work out her ideas.  She never drew any of her facts or impressions from second hand; and thus, in spite of the number and variety of her illustrations, she had rarely much to correct in her proof-sheets.  She had all that love of doing her work well for the work’s sake which she makes prominent characteristics of Adam Bede and Stradivarius.”

When a book was completed, so intense had been her application and the absorption of her life in her work, a period of despondency followed.  When a correspondent praised Middlemarch, and expressed a hope that even a greater work might follow, she replied, “As to the ‘great novel’ which remains to be written, I must tell you that I never believe in future books.”  Again, she wrote of the depression which succeeded the completion of each of her works,—­

Always after finishing a book I have a period of despair that I can ever again produce anything worth giving to the world.  The responsibility of writing grows heavier and heavier—­does it not?—­as the world grows older and the voices of the dead more numerous.  It is difficult to believe, until the germ of some new work grows into imperious activity within one, that it is possible to make a really needed contribution to the poetry of the world—­I mean possible to one’s self to do it.

Owing probably somewhat to this tendency to take a despondent view concerning her own work, and to distrust of the leadings of her own genius, was her habit of never reading the criticisms made on her books.  She adopted this rule, she tells one correspondent, “as a necessary preservative against influences that would have ended by nullifying her power of writing.”  To another, who had written her in appreciation of her books, she wrote this note, in which she alludes to the same habit of shunning criticism: 

MY DEAR MISS WELLINGTON,—­The signs of your sympathy sent to me across the wide water have touched me with the more effect because you imply that you are young.  I care supremely that my writing should be some help and stimulus to those who have probably a long life before them.

Mr. Lewes does not let me read criticisms on my writings.  He always reads them himself, and gives me occasional quotations, when be thinks that they show a spirit and mode of appreciation which will win my gratitude.  He has carefully read through the articles which were accompanied by your kind letter, and he has a high opinion of the feeling and discernment exhibited in them.  Some concluding passages which he read aloud to me are such as I register among the grounds of any encouragement in looking backward on what I have written, if not in looking forward to my future writing.