You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is—I wouldn’t give twopence for him’— here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers— ‘whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.

Female authors were publiGeorge Eliotd under their own names during Eliot's life but George Eliot wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880) better known by her pen name George Eliot was an English novelist journalist and translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels including Adam Bede (1859) The Mill on the Floss (1860) Silas Marner (1861) Middlemarch (1871–72) and Daniel Deronda (1876) most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.