George Eliot 's death from a sore throat caught at a performance of Agamemnon brought to an end one of the glittering literary careers of the century. She had become a renowned international celebrity, fêted by royalty, and esteemed by intellectuals and artists from across the world. Turgenev had deemed her ‘the greatest living novelist’, and Henry James wrote that he had ‘fall[en] in love with her’ when they met in 1869. After the publication of her novels, appreciative readers had sent gifts of books, flowers, even game. In an essay published in 1885, the historian Lord Acton recorded her position in the public estimation as ‘the greatest genius among women known to history’.

Eliot's career as a novelist, on which this fame was based, had begun only twenty-four years before then, when she was thirty-seven. Indeed it was then that ‘George Eliot’, the pseudonym invented for the publication of her fiction, came into existence. In 1857 Blackwood's Magazine published her first substantial work of fiction, ‘The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton’, one of the three stories that make up Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). Seven weighty novels followed: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–2), and Daniel Deronda (1876). But although her reputation was made as a novelist, she was in fact a more wide-ranging writer than this. Her œuvre contains other kinds of work: novellas (‘The Lifted Veil’ (1859) and ‘Brother Jacob’ (1864)), a series of essays entitled The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), and poetry (The Spanish Gypsy (1861), ‘Armgart’ (1871), and The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874)).