Abstract
IREAT writers are not necessarily good letter writers; George Eliot is one of the dullest. Thus V. S. Pritchett greeted the first published volumes of Gordon Haight's edition of The George Eliot Letters.' Not long after Eliot's death in 1880 John Cross had woven a tapestry of her letters and offered them to the public in the three volumes of George Eliot's Life, as related in Her Letters andJournals, Arranged and Edited by Her Husband. Cross asserted that his materials formed an autobiography, a life [that] has been allowed to write itself, but his deletions, scramblings, and omissions created a text which was immediately recognized as an official version of an idealized public figure.2 In 1954, after twenty years of collecting, restoring, and annotating, Haight had undone Cross's reticences, the meticulously edited letters lay readably open, and the George Eliot revival had begun. Yet Haight's Letters were wel-
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