Abstract
O N THE CENTENNIAL OF GEORGE ELIOT'S BIRTH, in November 1919, Virgina Woolf wrote about her for the Times Literary Supplement. Woolf had spent nearly a year in scholarly preparation for her essay, immersing herself in the novels and studying the biography by J. W. Cross: am reading through the whole of Eliot, in order to sum her up, she wrote to a friend in January 1919. So far, I have only made way with her life, which is a book of the greatest fascination, and I can see already that no one else has ever known her as I know her.' This bold claim to intimate understanding was new, and Woolf's essay was to be a watershed in criticism, a significant rehabilitation of a major figure in the female tradition after a generation's scornful neglect. The George Eliot she had inherited from the novelist's late Victorian contemporaries was a figure of colossal and absurd solemnity, a large, thick-set sybil in a silly hat, surrounded by deluded worshippers.2 Victorian women writers, not of this congregation, had regarded from afar with an admiration severely tempered by envy and with a gloomy consciousness of their own inferiority.
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