In a brief memoir, “How I Came to Write Fiction,” George Eliot puts forward a familiar writerly topos, the notion that the writer was always disposed to become one, i.e., that the vocation is somehow part of his character or destiny: “It had always been a vague dream of mine that some time or other I might write a novel …” (p. 289). She grants that the idea showed stages of growth: “my shadowy conception of what the novel was to be, varied, of course, from one epoch of my life to another” (p. 289). Other indications of a subtle process at work are given in the account of Lewes's encouragement, approving of an earlier exercise and saying, “‘You must try and write a story’” (p. 289). This encouragement has led to his reputation as the “onlie begetter” of Eliot's fiction, but I venture the supposition that his stimulus, equally laudable and potent, was of another kind. They needed the money.

Returning from Germany in March, 1856, the Leweses (to give them a fictional but convenient name) found themselves without steady jobs: she had long before resigned her editorship at the Westminster Review and his relation to the Leader had fallen into abeyance. Both still had work to do on current projects, he to polish and publish his Life of Goethe, she to finish her translation of Spinoza's Ethics.