Jane Welch Carlyle thought it “a human book, written out of the heart of a live man, not merely out of the brain of an author, full of tenderness and pathos, without a scrap of sentimentality, of sense without dogmatism, of earnestness without twaddle—­a book that makes one feel friends at once and for always with the man or woman who wrote it.”  She guessed the author was “a man of middle age, with a wife, from whom he has got those beautiful feminine touches in his book, a good many children, and a dog that he has as much fondness for as I have for my little Nero.”

Mr. Lewes was delighted, and said, “Her fame is beginning.”  George Eliot was growing happier, for her nature had been somewhat despondent.  She used to say, “Expecting disappointments is the only form of hope with which I am familiar.”  She said, “I feel a deep satisfaction in having done a bit of faithful work that will perhaps remain, like a primrose-root in the hedgerow, and gladden and chasten human hearts in years to come.” “’Conscience goes to the hammering in of nails’ is my gospel,” she would say.  “Writing is part of my religion, and I can write no word that is not prompted from within.  At the same time I believe that almost all the best books in the world have been written with the hope of getting money for them.”

“My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year:  I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties.”

For Scenes of Clerical Life she received six hundred dollars for the first edition, and much more after her other books appeared.

And now another work, a longer one, was growing in her mind, Adam Bede, the germ of which, she says, was an anecdote told her by her aunt, Elizabeth Evans, the Dinah Morris of the book.  A very ignorant girl had murdered her child, and refused to confess it.  Mrs. Evans, who was a Methodist preacher, stayed with her all night, praying with her, and at last she burst into tears and confessed her crime.  Mrs. Evans went with her in the cart to the place of execution, and ministered to the unhappy girl till death came.

When the first pages of Adam Bede were shown to Mr. Blackwood, he said, “That will do.”  George Eliot and Mr. Lewes went to Munich, Dresden, and Vienna for rest and change, and she prepared much of the book in this time.  When it was finished, she wrote on the manuscript, Jubilate.  “To my dear husband, George Henry Lewes, I give the Ms. of a work which would never have been written but for the happiness which his love has conferred on my life.”