DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

A New George Eliot Holograph Letter

Authors

Jonathan Ouvry

Date of this Version

2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 40 (2009)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

The letter reproduced above was written by George Eliot, then Mary Ann Evans, to Martha lackson and has been made available to The George Eliot Review by its present owner, Matthew Wilson, who inherited it from his mother, Shirley Wilson, who worked in publishing. Amongst her collection of autographs, letters and rare books were letters originally in the possession of the collector Henry Cunliffe, including this one. Large extracts from it were first printed in The Bookman, 3 (January 1893), and reprinted by Gordon Haight in the Yale edition of the George Eliot Letters, 1954 (I, 188-9)

Martha (or Patty) Jackson, who eventually married Henry Barclay and went to live in South Africa, was one of Mary Ann Evans's first correspondents and oldest friends, studying with her for two years at the Misses Franklins' school in Coventry. As a correspondent she is important for several reasons, put forward in Haight's detailed prefatory note on correspondents in the George Eliot Letters (I, xlix ).

At first Mary Ann found Martha's piety, studiousness and sentimentality congenial, and for a while they and their old teacher Maria Lewis used the flower names Ivy, Clematis and Veronica, because of Martha's enthusiasm for a book called The Language of Flowers. After Mary Ann's defection from Christianity in 1842, the correspondence was discouraged - though it did not quite stop - by Martha's mother.