claim: claims that George Eliot said, "It's never too late to be what you might have been."
evidence: "I’ve always assumed it was apocryphal," she wrote. "It shows up nowhere in full text searches of G.E.’s work. What’s strange is not that the attribution is so persistent but that it starts very early." She sent me a link to an article in a New York periodical called The Literary News, published in 1881, less than a year after George Eliot’s death. There, the quotation—"It is never too late to be what you might have been"—is one of seventy-one winning entries in a readers’ competition to nominate "Gems from George Eliot." The terms of the competition were outlined in an issue of the journal from a couple of months earlier: readers were asked to "quote the most striking passage known to you from George Eliot’s writings: not to exceed thirty words." The quotation is No. 23 on the list, between a line from "Middlemarch" ("A woman’s choice usually means taking the only man she can get") and one from "Adam Bede" ("I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish: God Almighty made ’em to match the men"). But there was no reference to the source. Had the competition entrant come across the quotation in a review? Misremembered it?