They are to have less “brain” than Middlemarch but (I boldly proclaim it) they are to have more form. To produce some little exemplary works of art is my narrow and lowly dream. It raises the standard of what is to be expected of women-(by your leave!) We know all about the female heart but apparently there is a female brain, too…. Three years later, when Middlemarch appeared, James wrote from Rome to his friend Grace Norton:Ī marvellous mind throbs in every page of Middlemarch. Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking. Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end up as I ended, in falling in love with her. To begin with, she is magnificently ugly-deliciously hideous…. I was immensely impressed, interested and pleased. He visited her first in 1869, when he was twenty-six, and wrote to his father: A specter haunted Henry James: it was the specter of George Eliot.
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