There is a melancholy philosophy in her books, most of which are tales of failure or frustration. The _Mill on the Floss_ contains a large element of autobiography, and its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is, perhaps, her idealized self. Her aspirations after a fuller and nobler existence are condemned to struggle against the resistance of a narrow, provincial environment, and the pressure of untoward fates. She is tempted to seek an escape even through a desperate throwing off of moral obligations, and is driven back to her duty only to die by a sudden stroke of destiny. "Life is a bad business," wrote George Eliot, in a letter to a friend, "and we must make the most of it." _Adam Bede_ is, in construction, the most perfect of her novels, and _Silas Marner_ of her shorter stories. Her analytic habit gained more and more upon her as she wrote. _Middlemarch_, in some respects her greatest book, lacks the unity of her earlier novels, and the story tends to become subordinate to the working out of character studies and social problems. The philosophic speculations which she shared with her husband were seemingly unfavorable to her artistic growth, a circumstance which becomes apparent in her last novel, _Daniel Deronda_, 1877. Finally in the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, 1879, she abandoned narrative altogether, and recurred to that type of "character" books which we have met as a flourishing department of literature in the 17th century, represented by such works as Earle's _Microcosmographie_ and Fuller's _Holy and Profane State_. The moral of George Eliot's writings is not obtruded. She never made the artistic mistake of writing a novel of purpose, or what the Germans call a _tendenz-roman_; as Dickens did, for example, when he attacked imprisonment for debt, in _Pickwick_; the poor laws, in _Oliver Twist_; the Court of Chancery, in _Bleak House_; and the Circumlocution office, in _Little Dorrit_.