My favorite writers write about ordinary life: George Eliot, Thomas Wolfe, Willa Cather. Here is an exerpt from today’s writer’s almanac.
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she always had doubts about her abilities as a writer. Her husband had to hide the reviews of her work so that she wouldn’t read them and become depressed. When she was working on her novel Middlemarch, she often reread her previous books and agonized over the idea that she would never be able to write that well again and all her best work was behind her.
Middlemarch made Eliot rich and famous. In the last years of her life, thousands of women wrote letters to her saying that she had described their lives, and asking for her advice in their marriages and careers. George Eliot wrote, “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”