George Eliot: some quotations

From a letter to John Blackwood, 18 February 1857

"My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy."

From a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 8 May 1869

"I believe that religion too has to be modified--'developed,' according to the dominant phrase--and that a religion more perfect than any yet prevalent, must express less care for personal consolation, and a more deeply-awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with that which of all things is most certainly known to us, the difficulty of the human lot."

Brother and Sister Sonnets, sonnet 9

We had the self-same world enlarged for each

By loving difference of girl and boy:

The fruit that hung on high beyond my reach

He plucked for me, and oft he must employ

A measuring glance to guide my tiny shoe

Where lay firm stepping-stones, or call to mind

'This thing I like my sister may not do,

For she is little, and I must be kind.'

Thus boyish Will the nobler mastery learned

Where inward vision over impulse reigns,

Widening its life with separate life discerned,

A Like unlike, a Self that self restrains.

His years with others must the sweeter be

For those brief days he spent in loving me.

Sonnet 11

School parted us; we never found again

That childish world where our two spirits mingled

Like scents from varying roses that remain

One sweetness, nor can evermore be singled.

Yet that twin habit of that early time

Lingered for long about the heart and tongue:

We had been natives of one happy clime,

And its dear accent to our utterance clung.

Till the dire years whose awful name is Change

Had grasped our souls still yearning in divorce,

And pitiless shaped them in two forms that range

Two elements which sever their life's course.

But were another childhood-world my share,

I would be born a little sister there.

(1869/1874)