serialist vanishes: Producing belief in George Eliot, The

Some years ago a lady suggested that 'texts' should be selected from the works to hang up in schoolrooms and railway waiting rooms in view of the banal and often preposterous bible texts, thus hung up and neglected. Your idea is a far more practical one .... [I]twould I think be both a treasure for readers, and a good speculation for the publisher. (Letters 5: 192-93)

The position in the field of literary production to which the Leweses' enterprise of sympathy aspired, it seems, is that previously occupied by the evangelical tract-"undeniable Sunday reading," as Blackwood's wife characterized the Sayings to a theological friend over lunch (Letters 5: 230).7 The profitmaking motive in this enterprise was apparently too much for Marian, who handed over the plans and negotiations to her partner; indeed, Main's and Lewes's scheme was so transparent that even John Blackwood demurred at first. But when Marian again acknowledged Main's talent at maxim selection, Blackwood gave in to the fan he called "the Gusher"-the commodity in question being not oil but morality. Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings, which sold well enough to justify later editions including material from Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, thus unveils the doctrine of sympathy in its most textually concentrated and thoroughly commodified form (Haight 439-40; Letters 5: 185, 192-93, 194, 208, 212, 230; Bodenheimer 244-48; Price).

Main was kept at arms' length after the publication of Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings; others would gain more intimate access. In January 1873, Marian Lewes began a correspondence with and soon sent Main's volume along to another Scottish fan named Elma Stuart, whose first gift of a carved book-slide earned her the assurance that "there is no wealth now so precious to me (always excepting my husband's love) as the possession of a place in other minds through the writings which are the chief result of my life." The gift itself was taken as a fetish of the cult: "My eyes see much more of it, just as they see much more than marble where pious feet and lips have worn a mark of their pressure." It is again Lewes, always looking to shore up his partner's fragile ego, who confirms in a letter of the same day that what gave the author "a thrill of exquisite pleasure" was not mere critical praise, but the more sublime expressions of "sympathy"-which Lewes, like his partner, immediately distinguished as an "acknowledgement of influence such as your letter so sweetly expresses" (Letters 5: 244-45). The relationship would last until George Eliot's death in 1880. Elma contributed ever more personal gifts-a letter case, a purse, a shawl, slippers, belts, shirt patterns-and was rewarded with responses including a lock of hair, "anxious" admonitions from both "spiritual parents" to abandon her experiments with valerian and opium, and a blessing as "an angel of mercy" for taking in an orphaned dog. Only with Elma could Marian Lewes talk about underwear in writing; and only Elma, of all the novelist's "spiritual daughters," would finally lie next to her idol in Highgate Cemetery (Letters 6: 84-86, 327-28; Bodenheimer 249-52; Haight 452).