The diffidence from which George Eliot suffered happily took the form of prompting to conscientious workmanship. As Lewes said, she was “ambitious” as well as “shy.” That she aimed at so high a mark showed a consciousness of great powers, but not an equal confidence that they could be brought to bear upon the task. A genuine success could only be reached by a strenuous application on a well-considered scheme. The little discouragement of Blackwood's inadequate appreciation of Janet's Repentance only induced her to take a larger canvas, which would give room for a fuller manifestation of her genius. She finished Janet's Repentance on 9th October 1857, and began Adam Bede on 22nd October. She completed the first volume by the following March; wrote the second during a following tour in Germany; and after returning to England at the beginning of September, completed the third volume on 16th November. It was published in the beginning of 1858. When recording these dates in her journal she gives also an interesting account of the genesis of the book. It was suggested by an anecdote which she had heard from an aunt, the Methodist preacher, Mrs. Samuel Evans. Mrs. Evans, she says, was a “very small, black-eyed woman, who in the days of her strength could not rest without exhorting and remonstrating in season and out of season.” She had become much gentler when, at the age of about sixty, she visited Griff and made the acquaintance of her niece. She was very “loving and kind”; and the niece, then under twenty, given to strict reticence about her “inward life,” was encouraged to confide in her aunt.