The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Anne Evans (1819-1880), English novelist and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She used a male pen name because she wanted to be taken seriously and avoid being stereotyped as female writer of lighthearted romances.