George Eliot's first known publication, the poem 'Knowing That Shortly I Must Put Off This Tabernacle,' appeared in the January 1840 Christian Observer.
In January 1840, the religious periodical the Christian Observer published a devotional poem titled "Knowing That Shortly I Must Put Off This Tabernacle", marking the first known appearance in print of writing by Mary Ann Evans, who would later become famous as George Eliot.
At this stage of her life, Evans was still deeply immersed in the evangelical Christian faith of her youth, and the poem reflects the earnest religious sensibility that characterized her early intellectual development in Coventry and Warwickshire. It predates by nearly two decades her emergence as a major novelist and shows the trajectory of a mind that would eventually move from orthodox faith toward the humanist and skeptical philosophical positions that inform her mature fiction.
Though modest in scope and anonymous in the way typical of the period for women writers, this early publication is historically significant as the very first documented step in a literary career that would culminate in some of the most important novels in the English language. It demonstrates that her ambition to write and publish began well before she adopted her famous pseudonym, rooted instead in the literary and religious culture of provincial England.