Without Jane Austen, No George Eliot: The New Yorker In honor of the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of "Pride and Prejudice" this week, we're running a series of pieces on Jane Austen and her legacy. In 1852, George Henry Lewes, the literary critic, sometime novelist, amateur scientist, and all-round man of letters, contributed an essay to the Westminster Review titled "The Lady Novelists." In it, Lewes gave a survey of what he called "the field of female literature," touching down upon the works of George Sand, Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë - and Jane Austen, whose novels he had been championing for years. Austen, Lewes argued, was "the greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end." There were spheres of life that Austen did not attempt to depict, Lewes went on to say: she was always an English countrywoman describing the lives of other English countrywomen. But "her world is a perfect orb and vital," he wrote. To read one of her books is like an actual experience of life. As well as praising the veracity of her work, Lewes admired its "special quality of womanliness," which, he suggested, no male pseudonym could have disguised. She is not doctrinaire; there is "not a trace of woman's "mission"" about her. In sum, Lewes wrote, "as the most truthful, charming, humorous, pure-minded, quick-witted and unexaggerated of writers, female literature has reason to be proud of her." Lewes's essay, which echoes Austen's own famous characterization of her art - as social miniatures, produced on two inches of ivory - would be notable as an early and perceptive analysis of Austen's contribution to literature, with or without the qualification of gender. But what makes it particularly piquant is the name of the editor who commissioned him to write it: Marian Evans, the formidable literary critic and translator who within a few years would herself become a writer of fiction under the pseudonym of George Eliot. Even more suggestive is the fact that not long after writing this essay, Lewes and Evans were to embark upon one of the most notorious and productive literary love affairs of the nineteenth century - eloping to Germany in the fall of 1854, and living together as husband and wife for a quarter of a century, even though Lewes already had a wife, Agnes, from whom divorce was impossible. Talking about Jane Austen was one of the ways in which this high-strung, bohemian, and dauntingly intelligent couple fell in love. And reading Jane Austen was part of the process by which Marian Evans left essay writing behind. In the spring of 1857, she reread Austen's novels in the evenings, while during the day she worked on the stories that would become her first published work of fiction, "Scenes of Clerical Life." In her fiction, of course, Eliot would go on to do all the things that Lewes praised Austen for not doing. She often wrote about worlds of which she had no first-hand experience, with lesser and greater success. "Romola," her novel about Renaissance Italy, is little loved by readers beyond those in English literature departments; "Daniel Deronda," which depicts both British aristocrats and European Jews, is riveting. Until her true identity was revealed, she fooled just about everyone with her male pseudonym (though Charles Dickens figured her out early). And in contrast with Austen's light touch, Eliot occasionally ran the risk of being doctrinaire - a worthwhile danger when one believes as earnestly as she did in the improving powers of literature, and the way in which a novel might change a reader's life. So without Austen, no Eliot - and even if the debt is sometimes obscured, it continues to resonate through Eliot's own evolution. Could there be a more Austenesque scenario than the beginning of "Middlemarch," which presents two young, well-born, unmarried women recently arrived in a country neighborhood, one of them filled with sense and the other brimming with sensibility? It's fun to speculate about what Austen would have done with the premise: in her hands, I suspect, Casaubon would have been consigned to Mr. Collins-like irrelevance, Ladislaw would have turned out to be a Wickham-like scoundrel, while Lydgate would have emerged as a Darcy-like dark horse. Writing within her perfect orb, Austen gave Eliot the space to imagine what might be accomplished beyond that limitation - and gave the same to generations of women writers that have followed her, novelists and otherwise. There can be few writers of long-form journalism who have not sought to emulate Austen's perfect, ironic snap. Eventually, we might even hope, unexamined prejudice about what women can or cannot achieve will finally be displaced by something closer to universally-acknowledged pride. Read the previous post in this series: William Deresiewicz on Austen and emotion. Illustration by Pierre Mornet.