Who Was George Eliot?
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, born in 1819 near Coventry, England, into a family of strong evangelical piety. As a young woman she underwent what she and her contemporaries described as a loss of faith – precipitated, by her own account, by her reading of works of German higher criticism that treated the Bible as a historical document to be analyzed rather than a uniquely inspired text. By her early twenties she had stopped attending church and had come to regard the doctrines of orthodox Christianity as, in her words, no longer something she could affirm as a creed.
What did not disappear, in Eliot's case, was the moral seriousness her evangelical upbringing had instilled. Her novels – Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876) – are saturated with concepts of sin, guilt, redemption, sacrifice, and the moral weight of ordinary choices, even as their explicit theological framework has shifted toward what scholars have called a “religion of humanity”: a vision in which sympathy for other people, rather than relationship with God, becomes the center of the moral life.
Eliot is significant for TLA because her work is one of the clearest cases of an author who explicitly rejected the doctrinal content of Christianity while retaining, apparently without strain, its moral vocabulary and its sense of what counts as a serious ethical claim. Middlemarch's closing meditation on “unhistoric acts” and “hidden lives” that nonetheless matter to “the growing good of the world” is, on its own terms, a humanist claim. Whether it is a claim humanism can actually ground is a separate question – one Eliot's fiction raises more sharply than most secular fiction because she was, by her own account, working without the framework that had originally supplied the vocabulary. She died in 1880.
In Their Own Words
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”
– Middlemarch, 1871–72“I have not returned to dogmatic Christianity…to the acceptance of any set of doctrines as a creed.”
– letter, 1859“I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl.”
– Dorothea Brooke, MiddlemarchSelected Bibliography
- Adam Bede – 1859
- The Mill on the Floss – 1860
- Silas Marner – 1861
- Middlemarch – 1871–72
- Daniel Deronda – 1876