*SOLD*
 
Scenes of Clerical Life
George Eliot[Mary Ann Evans]
London, 1858
 
First book edition, following its serial publication in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857. One of 1050 copies. Original publisher’s maroon cloth. Some pages lightly discolored at margins, text blocks cracked at center, rear joint of Volume 1 split, spines a bit rubbed, light wear to extremities. A clean set that I’ll call Good due to the binding weakness. Each volume housed in cloth chemise and morocco-backed slipcase with spines lettered in gilt. 
 
A book that’s often readily acquirable despite its fairly modest print run, but rarely with this kind of gravitationally heavy provenance. Ex-Isaac Evans, Mary Ann’s beloved estranged brother. Acquired at the Evans family home by his daughter Edith's husband, the Rev. William Griffith, after Isaac's death in 1890, and then given to Isaac's son Frederick in 1900. Griffith has written names, presumably of Warwickshire locals, in the margins beside the names of six of the characters in the book's first story, The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton. There are also two notes each(in another hand?) in Amos Barton and Mr. Gilfil's Love Story revealing real locations.
 
Ex-libris Robert H. and Donna L. Jackson - their collection of Victorian literature one of the finest ever assembled. My search of the sales records locates only two other copies in the last 70 years with any type of significant provenance. 
 
The iconoclastic Mary Ann and the buttoned-up Isaac’s relationship would be undone by her scandalous union with the married George Henry Lewes in 1854 - he being unable to secure a divorce because he legally claimed his wife’s illegitimate children who were fathered by his colleague(although this long accepted rationale for not acquiring a divorce has come into question. It’s complicated - Google it). There would be radio silence between sister and brother for 30 years – Isaac “unmoved even by the tremendous ending of The Mill on the Floss, in which a puritanical brother who has disowned his sister is united with her in death.” Nor was he moved to reconciliation after her 1869 poem Brother and Sister in which the speaker cites that despite a separation with her brother, their souls are “still yearning” for one another. He would finally thaw after Mary Ann’s marriage to John Cross in 1880 – sending her a letter of congratulations to which she replied, “…long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones.” 
 
An immensely deep family association copy of the literary giant’s first published work of fiction and the first work using her pseudonym.