ELIOT, George - CROSS, John Walter (ed.).

£1,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals. First edition, presentation copy, sent by the editor, Eliot's widower John Walter Cross, to a collaborator of Eliot's, her letters to whom are printed in Volume Three. The front free endpaper in Volume One has a mounted card inscribed by Cross in the publication month, "To Professor James Sully, in memory of his kind helpfulness to George Eliot in 1879 & with grateful thanks from J. W. Cross, London, 29 Jan. 1885".Professor Sully (1842-1923) assisted Eliot in 1879 by penning a 20-page biography of her late partner George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) in New Quarterly Magazine and by proofreading, as an expert in psychology, the final volume of Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind (1874-9). Sully paid frequent visits to Eliot and Lewes from 1874 until Lewes's death in 1878, meeting during these occasions Tennyson and Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf. Sully was later a member of Stephen's walking group the Sunday Tramps. Sully's ownership inscription, dated 1885, is on the front free endpapers verso and his neat pencil annotations occasionally feature in the margins.Volume Three prints five letters from Eliot to Sully. Four of these are dated 1879 and discuss the legacy of Lewes. In one letter, Eliot thanks Sully "for the help you have given me in my sad and anxious task. Your eyes have been a most precious aid" (p. 380). In another, she states of his biography of Lewes, "I think that he would himself have regarded

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