Scenes of Clerical Life

George Eliot’s first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, appeared serially in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1857. It was immediately recognized as, in the words of the Saturday Review, the production of a peculiar and remarkable writer whose style showed little or no family resemblances with that of any living author. Using the first edition of 1858 as copy text, this edition records all substantive variants in the manuscript and subsequent editions of the book over which the author had control. The editor’s introduction gives a detailed history of the writing and publication of the work, as well as a description of the manuscript and lists of emandations and variant spellings.