John Blackwood

Dorothea thought up the plot for this book while she was supposed to be saying her morning prayers at her bedside. The sisters drafted it at a length sufficient to fill four volumes. They had...

GE was already at work on her next novel when Adam Bede was published. For the first time, this novel set her at the centre of a kind of bidding war in the book trade....

A family friend, Dr David Macbeth Moir , introduced MO to William Blackwood . She submitted this story trembling . . . scarcely expecting to be admitted to the honours of the Magazine...

At one point John Blackwood objected that an instalment was too short: Oliphant did not insist on her own preference, but agreed to break the narrative in a different place. The novel appeared in...

This departure from her usual publisher, Blackwood , was precipitated by a princely offer from George Smith of the Cornhill of £10,000 (the largest offer ever, although they eventually settled on £7,000 for copyright over...

She began work on it by 6 September 1864, but within a few months (in February 1865) she was so bogged down and anxious that Lewes confiscated her manuscript. She took it up again in...

George Henry Lewes persuaded Blackwood to undertake this unusual mode of publication, because Middlemarch was too long to fit the three-volume format which was by now the staple of the circulating library. They hoped to...

LW 's commentary suggest she was superficial in her judgements, anchoring her opinions time and again on appearance. A prominent example comes in her assessment of George Eliot , with whom she was invited to...

Many friends of GE including Edith J. Simcox , plus biographers such as Gordon S. Haight , believed that readers had reason to be grateful to G. H. Lewes for his tireless protection of GE

GE published The Spanish Gypsy, a poem with some faint resemblance to a verse drama. To Blackwood she wrote that it was not a Romance. It is—prepare your fortitude—a poem.

GE began writing Adam Bede in October 1857. She decided, this time, against serialization. The first person but Lewes to read any of it (the opening thirteen chapters) was John Blackwood on the...

She mentioned to publisher John Blackwood her certainty that she had faculties that might be utilized to the making of beautiful books.

The volume is the source of most biographical information about Walford. It runs from her early life and ends on a high note in her literary career: her appearance in front of Queen Victoria ...