process both to body and mind. "Her beautifully written manuscript," says
her publisher, "free from blur or erasure, and with every letter delicately
and distinctly finished, was only the outward and visible sign of the
inward labor which she had taken to work out her ideas. She never drew any
of her facts or impressions from second hand; and thus, in spite of the
number and variety of her illustrations, she had rarely much to correct in
her proof-sheets. She had all that love of doing her work well for the
work's sake which she makes prominent characteristics of Adam Bede and
Stradivarius."

When a book was completed, so intense had been her application and the
absorption of her life in her work, a period of despondency followed. When
a correspondent praised _Middlemarch_, and expressed a hope that even a
greater work might follow, she replied, "As to the 'great novel' which
remains to be written, I must tell you that I never believe in future
books." Again, she wrote of the depression which succeeded the completion
of each of her works,--

Always after finishing a book I have a period of despair that I
can ever again produce anything worth giving to the world. The
responsibility of writing grows heavier and heavier--does it not?--as
the world grows older and the voices of the dead more numerous. It is
difficult to believe, until the germ of some new work grows into
imperious activity within one, that it is possible to make a really
needed contribution to the poetry of the world--I mean possible to
one's self to do it.

Owing probably somewhat to this tendency to take a despondent view
concerning her own work, and to distrust of the leadings of her own
genius, was her habit of never reading the criticisms made on her books.