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mother-of-pearl. Out came a pair of ornamental china dogs, King Charles spaniels with superior looks on their faces, which were formerly owned by one of George Eliot’s aunts, supposedly the models for the Dodson sisters in
The Mill on the Floss,
Eliot’s second novel, published in 1860. Out came a soup tureen and four matching vegetable dishes in pale, creamy ceramic, which George Eliot and John Walter Cross received as a wedding gift, in 1880. And out came a portable writing desk, decorated on the outside with gilt and mother-of-pearl inlay, and lined inside with purple velvet.
    I, too, was wearing latex gloves, and I gently ran my finger along the desk’s lacquered surface. Nisbet said, “You’d feel you had to write something really good with this.” I thought of a letter George Eliot wrote to Harriet Melusina Fay Peirce, an American activist on behalf of women’s welfare, in 1866, just after the publication of her fifth novel,
Felix Holt, the Radical.
In the letter, she gave a surprisingly unguarded explanation of why she made a latestart in fiction. “I was too proud and ambitious to write: I did not believe that I could do anything fine, and I did not choose to do anything of that mediocre sort which I despised when it was done by others,” she wrote. I imagined her as a stiff, self-conscious, inhibited girl, warily examining herself for signs of greatness, too proud and too fearful to lay paper to desktop and try.
    G EORGE Eliot’s childhood home, Griff House, is on the outskirts of Nuneaton, and seen from the front appears much as it did when Mary Ann Evans lived there, from the age of a few months until she was twenty-two. It has a handsome Georgian facade of red brick, a steep slate roof, and well-proportioned windows that overlook a wide lawn edged with trees. In an engraving that appears in Cross’s
Life,
the house is half obscured by an exuberant growth of ivy, picturesquely if inconveniently creeping into the rain gutters.
    These days the ivy has been removed, and that is the least of the changes that have been made to the home that George Eliot loved. A few years ago Griff House was bought by Whitbread, the hospitality company, which appended a sprawling pseudo-Georgian hotel and surf-and-turf restaurant to the rear of the old farmhouse. In the Evanses’ day Griff was in the countryside, on the edge of the Arbury estate, but now there is an incessant roar of traffic from the highway passing only a few hundred feet away. It could not be further from the sleepier atmosphere of the 1820s, when, as Eliot wrote in the opening pages of
Felix Holt,
“the morning silvered the meadows with their long lines of bushy willows marking the watercourses, or burnished the golden corn-ricks clustered near the long roofs of some midland homestead.”
    Taken out of context, such beautifully rendered passages can appear sentimental: Eliot’s meadows were surely sodden with rain and dampened with mist far more often than they were silvered or burnished by sunshine. But the purpose to which Eliot puts her passages of natural description is anything but sentimental. They convey an authentic nostalgia—a melancholy homesickness of the sort that might be experienced by a journeying epic hero, if on a more modest scale. Eliot describes a landscape that was already vanishing when she was writing. During her childhood, Griff House looked out over fields, but within a few years a colliery was visible from its upper windows.
    I’d gone to Griff with my notebook in hand, hoping, as a reporter does at the outset of a new assignment, to understand something about my subject by surveying the place in which she’d spent so many years. Visiting the former homes of famous writers tends to be a compromised and often unsatisfying endeavor; by contrast with a painter’s studio, the nature of literary creativity is not easily suggested by the site of creation. While shuffling through such places I start thinking about how much has