George Eliot: The Letters
The George Eliot Letters at Nuneaton Library
The original letters are stored at Warwickshire County Record Office. High quality facsimiles are available for study at Nuneaton Library. The County Record Office number for the collection is CR 3989.
The letters fall into two groups:
- contemporary letters by or to George Eliot and George Henry Lewes;
- letters from and to members of Isaac Evans’s family, extending well into the 20th century, placed with the Library by the George Eliot Fellowship.
The Kirby Letters are 12 relating to the Sibree family whom Mary Ann Evans got to know whilst living in Coventry after 1841. She maintained contact with Mary Sibree (later Mrs John Cash) for the rest of her life.
 View the Kirby Letters
The Gojnic Letters all date from the 1870s; 14 are to George Henry Lewes from his son Herbert in Africa and are often about money or health (Herbert died of TB in 1875), or from Herbert’s widow. Others in the collection are to George Eliot at the time of Herbert’s death.
View the Gojnic Letters
The Helps Letters. Arthur Helps was a writer and friend of George Henry Lewes. There are six letters from Lewes to Helps, four of them from 1873 and relating to discussions on vivisection, and six from George Eliot to Alice Helps, dating from 1874 onwards.
View the Helps Letters
The Wedgwood, Bastian and Stebbing Letters consist of 13 in all, including three from George Henry Lewes to H C Bastian about his scientific work, and nine in the early 1900s from J W Cross to Mr and Mrs Stebbing, generally avoiding involvement in literary society matters.
The Wedgwood, Bastian and Stebbing Letters
The George Eliot Fellowship Letters. This large collection relates very largely to Isaac Evans and his family, particularly his son Frederic. The letters are of considerable interest to local historians and those interested in the family responses to George Eliot in the 30 years or so after her death.
Four letters relate to George Eliot’s father, Robert Evans; 57 relate to Isaac Evans and include business matters with Lord Aylesford and Charles Newdigate; 33 relate to his son, Revd Frederic Evans and his wife Charlotte; six relate to Walter Evans; two to Eleanor Evans and 1 to George Eliot's sister, Chrissey.
View Letters Relating to Robert Evans
View Letters Relating to Isaac Evans
There are four other miscellaneous letters and two other items in the Fellowship letters.
View the Miscellaneous Letters
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| "Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." George Eliot
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