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'Many men write well and tell a story well, but few possess the art of giving individually to their characters so happily and easily as you...' Thus wrote the publisher John Blackwood in February 1857 to shy and ambitious new author, whom he had not yet met, George Eliot. Shielded by this psuedonym, Mary Ann Evans made her fictional debut when Scenes of Clerical Life appeared in Blackwood's Magazine the same year. These stories contain Eliot's eariest studies of what became enduring themes in her great novels: the impact of religious controversy and social change in provincial life, and the power of love to transform the loves of individual men and women.
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