Pride and Power Selections From George Eliot's Letters Edited by Gordon S. Haight Yale University; 567 pages; $25

By Patricia Blake

Ralph Waldo Emerson, upon meeting Mary Ann Evans in 1848, said she possessed "a calm, serious soul." Twenty years later a young American visitor to London encountered Mary Ann, now famous as George Eliot. "Behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking," Henry James wrote to his father. "A mingled sagacity and sweetness--a broad hint of a great underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride and power." Two years before her death in 1880, Ivan Turgenev raised his glass at a party in an English country house and proposed a toast to Eliot: "The greatest living novelist!"

Through much of her career, the author of Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch commanded great critical and public esteem. But her reputation began to decline with the new century until the epochal year 1933. It was then that a young American instructor named Gordon Haight came across a cache of Eliot letters in the Yale University Library. For the next 50 years Haight devoted himself to the correspondence. He became the general editor of the definitive Clarendon Edition of Eliot's novels and, in 1968, produced a fine, now standard biography. Haight's crowning achievement was an edited and annotated edition of her letters. Largely as a result of these efforts, Eliot has re-emerged whole from the Victorian era, as a novelist and as a woman of uncommon fascination.

The letters in Haight's Selections have been judiciously culled from his ninevolume magnum opus. Furnished with explanatory notes, the correspondence may be read as an unselfconscious autobiography recounted in the voice Henry James found as "soft and rich as that of a counselling angel." Eliot also delights in playing the devil with Victorian cant and hypocrisy.

In 1842, at the age of 22, the self-taught country girl from Warwickshire writes to her father declaring that she will no longer attend church. Speaking of the Scriptures, she pronounces, "I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction." There is no arguing with her; Eliot knows as much about theology as the clergymen affronted by her heresy. Even the Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson is impressed when she informs him that Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions is the first book to "awaken her to deep reflection."

She espouses a variety of radical causes. She denounces slavery in America and anti-Semitism in England, and demands better education for women. After the fall of France's King Louis Philippe in 1848, she confides to a friend that she sympathizes with the revolutionaries. To her, Victoria Regina is "our little humbug of a queen," and she suggests that the world's monarchs should be put into "a sort of Zoological Garden, where these wornout humbugs may be preserved."

As the unpaid and unacknowledged editor of the celebrated Westminster Review, she enters into fierce arguments about political and religious subjects. Her article "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" excoriates authors who mistake "vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality." Even after it becomes known in 1859 that George Eliot is actually a woman, she is never accused of similar foolishness. For the rest of her life she is regarded as the formidable equal of such eminent Victorians as Charles Dickens and Herbert Spencer.

Though Eliot corresponds with a network of women friends, her governing passion is for men. In her boldest act, she chooses to live with the science writer George Henry Lewes, even though he can never legally free himself from his conspicuously unfaithful wife. Eliot's scandalous but happy liaison with Lewes produces few letters, because for 24 years the couple are hardly ever out of each other's sight. Still, Eliot's correspondence is full of references to the man who insists that she write fiction and who encourages his self- doubting and often depressed companion, novel after novel. In gratitude she chooses his first name for her pseudonym, and her last because "Eliot was a good mouth-filling, easily-pronounced word."

Among Eliot's most revealing letters are those she sent to her publisher, John Blackwood, over a period of 22 years. Her replies to his unwelcome suggestions for changes in her manuscripts amount to a literary credo. When he proposes that she make one of her characters less "abjectly devoted" to an unworthy girl, she answers, "My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy." Indignantly, she adds, "And I cannot stir a step aside from what I feel to be true in character . . . Alas! inconsistencies and weaknesses are not untrue."

It is at moments like this that her world of "knowledge, pride and power" stands fully revealed. George Eliot was indeed a woman of letters, in every sense of the term.