Admirers of the novelist George Eliot were yesterday given two months to start to raise nearly £18,000 to keep some of her most illuminating letters in Britain.
In one of these, the author writes: "The influence of one woman's life on the lot of other women is getting greater and greater, with the quickening spread of all influences".
Alan Howarth, the arts minister, said the letters expressed views central to her work and were of extensive literary significance.
As a "last chance" to keep them in the UK, he imposed a temporary bar on their export until May 26.
If a serious intention to buy them emerged he would extend the bar for a further two months, until July 26.
The 26 letters, dating from 1867 to 1879, cover the period when Eliot was finishing her masterpiece, Middlemarch. The culture department said the novel - televised in the 1990s - was acclaimed as possible the greatest work of realism in the English language.
Nearly all the letters were addressed to Jane Senior, a favourite on Eliot's "choice list of beloved 'Sisters'" in the movement for social reform.
Mrs Senior, noted also for her singing and beauty, appears to have been a dramatically more effective version of Dorothea, the idealistic heroine of Middlemarch.
A leading philanthropist, she was one of the first women appointed to a senior government position, as inspector of workhouses and pauper houses. One of Eliot's letters congratulates her on this post.
Others discuss their aspirations and ideas. Eliot writes: "One lives by faith in human goodness - the only guarantee that there could be any other source of Goodness in the universe."
Only three of the batch have been published before.
When Sotheby's of London sold them in December last year, it called them "the most important series of letters by George Eliot to appear at auction for many years".
They were then expected to fetch up to £34,600. The name of their overseas owner was not disclosed yesterday.
Mr Howarth's department said their "rich pattern of language, theme and tone reveals the development of a significant relationship over a sustained period of time".
