A Century of George Eliot Criticism

Sir Edmund Gosse in his centenary article on George Eliot (1919) declares that all her rivals — the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, Reade — had died off before she began to publish. "Hence the field was left free for George Eliot, who, without haste or hesitation, built up slowly such a reputation as no one in her own time approached." Gosse's statements are almost always inaccurate, and this is no exception. Of the novelists he lists, only the Brontës had died before her first novel appeared. Her reputation was not "built up slowly," but established overnight by Adam Bede, which The Times called "a first-rate novel," adding that "its author takes rank at once among the masters of the art" — high praise from The Thunderer. The long review filling three whole columns ended with some speculation of who the unknown Mr. George Eliot might be. "Is all this mature thought, finished portraiture, and crowd of characters the product of a 'prentice hand and of callow genius? If it is, the hand must have an extraordinary cunning, and the genius must be of the highest order."