Her earliest and perhaps, in adjusted and "reduced" judgments, her best work--_Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1857-1858), _Adam Bede_ (1859), _The Mill on the Floss_ (1860), _Silas Marner_ (1861)--consists of very carefully observed and skilfully rendered studies of country life and character, tinged, especially in _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill on the Floss_, with very intense and ambitious colours of passion.

The great popularity of this tempted her into still more elaborate efforts of different kinds.

Her attempt in quasi-historical romance, _Romola_ (1865), was an enormous _tour de force_ in which the writer struggled to get historical and local colour, accurate and irreproachable, with all the desperation of the most conscientious relater of actual history.

_Felix Holt the Radical_ (1866), _Middle March_ (1872), and _Daniel Deronda_ (1876) were equally elaborate sketches of modern English society, planned and engineered with the same provision of carefully laboured plot, character, and phrase.
Although received with enthusiasm by the partisans whom she had created for herself, these books have seemed to some _over_-laboured, and if not exactly unreal, yet to a certain extent unnatural.

But the point for us is their example of the way in which the novel--once a light and almost frivolous thing--had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness--had in fact ceased to be light literature at all, and begun to require rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in the writer, perhaps even something of the athlete's processes in the reader.