Like other George Eliot scholars, I am indebted to earlier generations of scholars who have published editions of material essential to our study of her works. Pre-eminent amongst these is Gordon S. Haight's indispensable edition of her letters, which set for later editors the highest standards of accuracy and usefulness. Thomas Pinney's edition of selected essays made many of her periodical articles more readily accessible. The Clarendon edition of the novels now provides critical texts ‘based on collation of the manuscripts with all the relevant editions published in George Eliot's lifetime’. It remains to complete the work of publishing critical editions of

1. The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–1978), henceforth referred to as GEL.

2. Essays of George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). This selection has since been supplemented by Pinney's ‘More Leaves from George Eliot's Notebook’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly 29 (1966): 353–76; Joseph Wiesenfarth's inclusion of uncollected essays in his edition of A Writer's Notebook, 1854–1879, and Uncollected Writings (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981); Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, edited by A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990); and Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ash ton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

3. Gordon S. Haight, ‘Preface by the General Editor’ in George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, edited by Graham Handley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. v. All quotations from Daniel Deronda, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Clarendon edition. Page references are preceded by chapter numbers, which are provided for reference to other editions.