George Eliot (post 9): She told her husband that her best writing was done by an entity “not herself,” an alternate personality that took possession of her.

“On 16 May 1880 Eliot courted controversy once more by marrying John Cross, a man twenty years her junior, and again changing her name, this time to Mary Anne Cross…They moved to a new house in Chelsea, but Eliot fell ill with a throat infection. This, coupled with the kidney disease she had been afflicted with for several years, led to her death on 22 December 1880 at the age of 61” (1).

“During our short married life,” says John Cross, “our time was so much divided between travelling and illness that George Eliot wrote very little, so that I have but slight personal experience of how the creative effort affected her. But she told me that, in all that she considered her best writing, there was a ‘not herself’ which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting” (2, p. 343).

1. Wikipedia.

2. J. W. Cross (Editor). George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, Vol. III. New York and London, Harper & Brothers, 1885.