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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

George Eliot

First published Mon Apr 28, 2025

The work of George Eliot (1819–1880) challenges any strongdisjunction between philosophy and art. Her deepest philosophicalinterests were in ethics, aesthetics, and the relation between them.Indebted above all to Spinozism and Romanticism, she developed herthinking in sustained dialogue with the European philosophicaltradition, both before and after she began to write fiction under thepseudonym “George Eliot” in 1857. She wrote novels,shorter stories, poetry, and review essays, and throughout her careershe experimented with literary form. Through her bestselling novels,her engagements with philosophy and with contemporary questions aboutmorality, art, politics, feminism, religion and science reached widereaderships.

1. Life and Works

George Eliot was born Mary Anne Evans on November 22, 1819. (Despiteseveral changes of name over the course of her life, she will bereferred to as “George Eliot” or “Eliot”throughout this entry.) She grew up in modest circumstances in ruralWarwickshire, England. No one in her family received a universityeducation, but she had access to an extensive library at Arbury Hall,the estate managed by her father. After learning French at school, shetaught herself German, Latin, Greek, and, later in life, Hebrew. Herfamily were conservative Anglicans; in her youth Evans passed througha devout phase, then went on to question and criticizeChristianity.

Eliot’s first scholarly work, a translation of D. F.Strauss’sLife of Jesus Critically Examined, waspublished in 1846. In translating this controversial work, Eliot wasfollowing in the footsteps of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and ThomasCarlyle, who had produced English translations of important Germanworks (by Schiller and Goethe respectively) during the first decadesof the nineteenth century. Eliot was thus positioning herself as amodern woman of letters, within this broadly Romantic and Germanicintellectual movements (Ashton 1980; Newton 1981; Carlisle 2025).

In 1850 Eliot moved to London, adopted the name Marian Evans, andbecamede facto editor ofThe Westminster Review, ahigh-brow radical journal founded in 1824 by Jeremy Bentham and editedby John Stuart Mill from 1836 to 1840. Eliot was not the first femaleeditor of a periodical, but she was the first women to be closelyinvolved with such a prestigious quarterly journal (Dillane 2011). Sheco-editedThe Westminster Review with the publisher JohnChapman, who acquired it in 1851. In their “Prospectus”,printed in their first issue of January 1852, Chapman and Eliothighlighted the journal’s special interest in “SocialPhilosophy”; its commitment to free speech and“Progress”; and its support for gradual reform, including“a progressive extension of the suffrage, in proportion as thepeople become fitted for using it”. On religious questions, theeditors declared their “uncompromising pursuit of truth”and their “conviction that religion has its foundation inman’s nature”, while recognizing religion to be closelyconnected to “moral”, “poetic”, and“emotional” development (Chapman & Eliot 1852). Thisprogressive editorial agenda somewhat softened the radical politicsand secularism of theWestminster Review under Bentham andMill. A more significant difference was its greater emphasis on newand recent literary works (Gray 2000; Dillane 2011). The issuesco-edited by Eliot and Chapman carried substantial articles oncontemporary literature in England, America, Germany, and France,propagating the very concept of a national literature. Eliot alsooversaw innovations in the journal’s design and layout,including the addition of a substantial index.

As editor at theWestminster Review, Eliot entered a networkof influential intellectuals including J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer,Harriet Martineau, James Froude, and George Henry Lewes. Lewes becameher long-term partner and collaborator. In the late 1850s she took onthe name “Marian Lewes”, though Lewes remained legallymarried to his estranged wife Agnes Lewes. Their relationship waswidely regarded as scandalous, and ruined Eliot’s reputation.For years she was socially ostracized. While this changed when shebecame a celebrated author, the reputational damage from herpartnership with Lewes continued to affect her life, work, and publicimage.

During the 1850s Eliot produced the first English translations ofLudwig Feuerbach’sOn the Essence of Christianity(1854) and Spinoza’sEthics (1856, but unpublished inher lifetime). Feuerbach, like Strauss, was a liberal GermanProtestant influenced by the German Idealists, especially Hegel; areviewer of Eliot’s translation ofThe Essence ofChristianity criticized the way it “exhibit[ed] the newHegelian Atheism to English readers” (Anonymous 1854: 559).Eliot admired Feuerbach’s ideas, and planned to publish anoriginal essay titled “On the Idea of a Future Life”,advertised in theWestminster Review as forthcoming by thetranslator of Feuerbach. This lost essay may have resembledTheEssence of Christianity in being a philosophical-theologicaltreatise aimed at a broad cultured readership, and in applyingFeuerbachian insights to the question of human immortality. Framingher professional identity as the translator of Strauss and Feuerbachsuggests a plan to contribute in her own voice to the religious andphilosophical debates carried out by these German thinkers.

In translating Spinoza, Eliot was going back to the most significantsource of her intellectual milieu. Spinoza’s non-dualistmetaphysics was a foundation for German Romanticism and Idealismalike, and thus formative for Strauss and Feuerbach. AlthoughEliot’s translation of theEthics remained unpublishedand therefore did not have the cultural impact it deserved, its effecton her own intellectual formation was both immediate and enduring. Itsinfluence is evident on herWestminster Review essays on thepopular Calvinist preacher John Cumming (Carlisle 2020a: 22–26)and on Wilhelm Riehl’sThe Natural History of GermanLife (Carlisle 2020b: 601–4). These substantial,authoritative, wide-ranging essays, marking the culmination ofEliot’s journalistic career, were both written during herimmersion in Spinoza. Scholars have traced through the novels ofGeorge Eliot Spinozist ideas about freedom and determinism, emotion,human flourishing, and the work of imagination (Atkins 1978; Lynn1996, Armstrong 2013; Gatens 2003, 2007, 2023; Frazer 2018; Anger 2001[2019]). Towards the end of her career, Eliot would examine questionsabout literary labour—scholarship, originality, appropriation,productivity, cultural transmission—and about the nature ofEnglishness that first arose during her generative period as atranslator (Raterman 2013; Carlisle 2025).

The pseudonym “George Eliot” was first adopted in 1857, afew weeks after Eliot published her first work of fiction inBlackwood’s Magazine. This debut was the first of threemagazine stories, subsequently published together asScenes ofClerical Life (1858). Eliot wrote seven novels:AdamBede (1859),The Mill on the Floss (1860),SilasMarner (1861),Romola (1863),Felix Holt: TheRadical (1866),Middlemarch (1871–2), andDaniel Deronda (1876). Her last published work was asemi-fictional, satirical and intensely ironic essay collection titledImpressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), after thePeripatetic philosopher Theophrastus. Eliot’s other worksinclude the novellasThe Lifted Veil (1859) andBrotherJacob (1864); the verse dramasThe Spanish Gypsy (1868)andArmgart (1870);The Legend of Jubal and OtherPoems (1874); and numerous critical essays that were published,mostly anonymously, throughout the 1840s, 50s and 60s.

During the 1850s and 60s Eliot and Lewes travelled quite frequently tothe European continent, especially the major cities of Germany andItaly. The couple did not have children, though Eliot was stepmotherto Lewes’s three sons. Lewes died in 1878, and in the spring of1880 Eliot married her old friend John Cross, a wealthy banker. Shedied in London on December 22, 1880. She was buried under the names“Mary Ann Cross” and “George Eliot” in NorthLondon’s Highgate Cemetery, next to Lewes’s grave. Herwish to be buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey wasdenied by church leaders due to her “notorious antagonism toChristian practice in regard to marriage” (Carlisle 2023:267–8).

While Eliot usually described herself as an artist, manycontemporaries regarded her as a philosopher. A few months after herdeath, an early volume ofMIND carried a substantial articleon “George Eliot’s Art” (Sully 1881). During thetwentieth century, her exploratory intellectual style, coupled withher decision to work in the medium of fiction, tended to occlude hersignificance for an increasingly professionalized and technicaldiscipline of philosophy. Twenty-first-century scholars have been morekeen to recognize Eliot’s contributions to philosophy,especially in view of the fact that Victorian women had tophilosophize outside the academy. While British universities did notbegin to admit women until the 1860s and restricted their access tohigher qualifications and academic careers well into the twentiethcentury, philosophical thinking can be found in a wide variety ofwomen’s writing, including letters, poems, novels, travelwriting, memoir, and journalism (Stone 2023).

2. Philosophical Method

Eliot’s literary practice was integral to her philosophicalmethod. Her style of thinking is often exploratory and dialectical,reflexive and self-problematizing. When doctrinal statements are madeby a character or a narrator, we cannot assume they articulateEliot’s own position. For these reasons, her philosophicalclaims can be difficult to pin down. Moreover, she argued against theapplication of “general doctrine[s]” (M III: 133) and“general rules” (MF III: 265) to the complexities of humanlife. Eliot aimed less to solve problems, or offer ready-madedoctrines, than to undertake an open-ended enquiry alongside herreaders. In 1875, while writingDaniel Deronda, she statedthat “I don’t consider myself a teacher, but a companionin the struggle for thought” (Eliot to Mary Ponsonby, 11February 1875; LGHL 3: 83).

Language was Eliot’s medium for this intellectual“struggle”, and one highly distinctive feature of herthought is the depth and breadth of her linguistic expertise. She wasnot only an immensely skilled literary writer, but a scholar oflanguages and a translator. Linguistic precision had enduringimportance for Eliot: in an 1865 book review she laments

a fatiguing use of vague or shifting phrases, such as “moderncivilization”, “spirit of theage”,…“habits of religious thought”,unbalanced by any precise definition. (Eliot 1865: 54)

Yet precision, she observes, is always endangered by the subtleties,ambiguities and multivalences inherent in all natural languages. Whilesome of her contemporaries—rather like modern analyticphilosophers—sought to rectify this by constructing “auniversal language on a rational basis…which effects thepurpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraicsigns”, Eliot argues that such a language “will neverexpresslife, which is a great deal more than science”(Eliot 1856b: 69). Furthermore, a purely logical language would lackall “power over the imagination” (Eliot 1856b: 69).Achieving truthfulness in writing therefore requires a literary skillclose to “genius” to employ natural language withsufficient “definiteness and certainty” (Eliot 1856b:69).

Eliot created remarkably sophisticated literary works, and their fullphilosophical value cannot be appreciated separately from theiraesthetic features. An excessive focus on the explicit philosophicalpronouncements made by Eliot’s narrators, by her characters, orby Eliot herself, could give rise to the worry that assertions arebeing made without argument. Considered more holistically, her textschallenge the narrow definition of argument that underpins thisconcern.

3. The Human Condition: Key Concepts

3.1 Character

As a creator of characters, Eliot confronted questions about thenature and significance of character throughout her literary career.In this way she contributed to wider philosophical debates: in 1843John Stuart Mill proposed an “Exact Science of HumanNature” which would be a “science ofcharacter…including the formation of national or collectivecharacter as well as individual” (Mill 1843: bk. VI, ch. V,§4 [1889: 567]). Mill named this new science“Ethology”, thus placing it within an Aristoteliantradition of moral philosophy focused on the cluster ofconcepts—character, custom, habit, and way oflife—signalled by the Greek wordethos. Eliot invokesthis tradition explicitly by naming the narrator of her final workafter Theophrastus, pupil of Aristotle and author ofTheCharacters (Henry 1994; Brilmyer 2014). The working title ofImpressions of Theophrastus Such was “Characters andCharacteristics of Theophrastus Such”.

The concept of character was Eliot’s route into metaphysicalquestions of freedom and determinism (G. Levine 1962; Brilmyer 2015).At stake in nineteenth-century debates about character was a disputebetween biological determinists and defenders of a liberal doctrine ofcollective and individual moral improvement. Though influenced by thestrict determinism she encountered while translating Spinoza’sEthics, Eliot refuses the polarities of this debate andprobes its complexities. Her art emphasizes social over biologicalconstraints, and inter-dependence over both determinism and free will.Its explorations of habit and custom—laws that, to borrowLeibniz’s opportune phrase, “incline withoutnecessitating” (Look 2008 [2022: § 4])—open up amiddle path through these alternatives. In “The Natural Historyof German Life”, an 1856 review of two works by the Germansociologist Wilhelm Riehl, Eliot notes “the generic character ofthe German peasant” for whom “custom” is the“supreme law” (Eliot 1856b: 68; Dillane 2009).

Silas Marner begins with a dismal vision of the mechanizationof human character in an industrial age. Silas, a weaver, hasdegenerated into a biological-mechanical hybrid, “shrunk”and “bent” into “a constant mechanical relation tothe objects of his life”:

The livelong day he sat in his loom, his ear filled with its monotony,his eyes bent close down on the slow growth of sameness in thebrownish web, his muscles moving with such even repetition that theirpause seemed almost as much a constraint as the holding of his breath.(SM 29–31)

Over the course of the novel, Silas is re-humanized by the love of anadopted daughter and new friendships with his neighbours. However,this story’s fable-like literary form strikes a warning that itshero’s happy ending is due to quasi-miraculous good fortune, nota freely-willed programme of self-improvement.

InMiddlemarch, Eliot’s narrator observes thatcharacter is “a process and an unfolding” (M I: 226). Thenovel’s plot and literary form emphasize the dependence of thischaracter “process” on social more than biologicalconditions. Its narrator inclines towards social determinism byclaiming that “There is no creature whose inward being is sostrong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outsideit” (M III: 464; cf. Spinoza,Ethics IVp18s: “wecan never bring ourselves to a state in which we should want nothingexternal in order to preserve our existence”). In keeping withits title, however,Middlemarch steers a middle coursebetween determinism and free will, while drawing on biologicalmetaphors (Brilmyer 2015). In one scene, Reverend Farebrother advisesthe novel’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke, that

character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid andunalterable. It is something living and changing, and may becomediseased as our bodies do;

“then it may be rescued and healed”, replies Dorothea (MIII: 310). Yet any moral healing accomplished over the course of thenovel is, at best, partial.

3.2 The Milieu

Like character, the milieu is a crucial concept in Eliot’s art.In the early decades of the nineteenth century this concept emerged,within the new science of biology, to draw attention to the relationsbetween an organism and its surrounding conditions of existence.Lamarck’sles circonstances and GeoffroySaint-Hilaire’sle milieu ambiant precededAuguste Comte’s use ofle milieu in 1838,evoking “a certain intuition of a centred formation”(Canguilhem 2001: 11). Another new science, “sociology”,stretched the concept to encompass cultural as well as naturalconditions of life. In the early 1850s, Eliot urged Herbert Spencer toread Comte’sCours de philosophie positive;Spencer then developed Comte’s concept of milieu, proposing“environment” as a single term naming biological andsocial circumstances. His thesis that organisms are constantlyadjusting to their environment anticipated the theory of adaptationpresented in Darwin’sOrigin of Species.

For Eliot—unlike Spencer—science provides a model oranalogy rather than a method for the investigation of human life.

In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing petty to themind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every singleobject suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same withthe observation of human life,

declares the urbane narrator ofThe Mill on the Floss (MF II:151). Eliot sees human lives as “interwoven”, andconstrues the novelist’s task as “unravelling” acomplex web of relations to reveal the interconnectedness of allthings (M I: 214). At the same time, her artistic process entailedcreating intricate literary webs; of her last novel,DanielDeronda, she wrote that “I meant everything in the book tobe related to everything else there” (Eliot to Barbara Bodichon,2 October 1876;Letters 6: 290).

In his 1881MIND article on “George Eliot’sArt”, James Sully highlights Eliot’s deployment of theconcept of milieu:

A character divorced from its surroundings is an abstraction. Apersonality is only a concrete living whole when we attach it by anetwork of organic filaments to its particular environment, physicaland social… [Eliot] looks on these [surroundings] as having aliving continuity with the people whom she sets among them. Theirartistic value is but a reflection of all that they mean to those forwhom they have made the nearer and habitually enclosing world. (Sully1881: 382–3)

Both the natural milieu and the social milieu are importantsubject-matter in Eliot’s art. Her attitude towards the social“world” or “medium” (as she sometimestranslatesmilieu) is profoundly ambivalent. A tight-knitprovincial milieu provides a nexus of meaning and belonging—inshort, a home; it can also be overwhelming and constrictive.Ambitious, idealistic Dr Lydgate, for example, finds that “thepetty medium of Middlemarch had been too strong for him” (M I:285). Yet a more cosmopolitan milieu risks dislocating human livesfrom their habitat. “A human life, I think, should be wellrooted in some spot of a native land”, opines the narrator ofDaniel Deronda, and several characters in this novel’smodern setting suffer from the lack of “this blessed persistencein which affection can take root” (DD I: 26–7).

In 1868, while working onMiddlemarch, Eliot condensed herthoughts on the milieu in a short unpublished essay titled“Notes on Form in Art”. Here she defines form as “alimit determined partly by the intrinsic relations or composition ofthe object, and partly by the extrinsic action of other bodies uponit” (Eliot 1868 [1963: 434]). The formation of an artworkmirrors the formation of character insofar as it unfolds within anaesthetic and ethical milieu: “in adjustment with certain givenconditions of sound, language, action, or environment”.Emphasizing relationality and interdependence, she elucidates aSpinozist

conception of wholes composed of parts more and more multiplied andhighly differenced, yet more and more absolutely bound together byvarious conditions of common likeness or mutual dependence. (Eliot1868 [1963: 433])

Following Spinoza, she suggests that complexity corresponds to power;again, she seems to apply this principle to artworks as much as toorganic wholes. When Eliot writes that

the highest Form, then, is the highest organism, [i.e.] the mostvaried group of relations bound together in a wholeness which againhas the most varied relations with all other phenomena. (Eliot 1868[1963: 433])

she articulates the ideal of literary form that guides her maturefiction. Eliot’s novels, above allMiddlemarch andDaniel Deronda, depict the intricate connectedness ofecological, biological, social, political and psychological forces,often by constructing analogical relations between multiple charactersand events (Mansell 1965a; Carlisle 2020b).

3.3 Self-Centredness

Selfishness is the most basic moral problem confronted inEliot’s work. It is closely connected with her concept of themilieu, according to which every organism is, by definition, in themiddle of its environment. On a psychological level, when human beingslocate themselves at the centre of a world, their self-centringinvolves a failure to attend to others’ subjectivity. Thisfailure is epistemic as well as moral;Middlemarch’snarrator declares that “We are all of us born in moralstupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supremeselves” (M I: 323). Eliot illustrates this claim by describinghow Dorothea, a young wife, struggles to “conceive with thatdistinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling” that herhusband has “an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights andshadows must always fall with a certain difference” (M I:323).

In another key passage, the image of “concentric circles”around a “centre” evokes Eliot’s concept of milieu,while functioning more explicitly as a symbol of human egoism:

An eminent philosopher among my friends…has shown me thispregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polishedsteel made to be rubbed by a house maid, will be minutely andmultitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against ita lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratcheswill seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circlesround that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are goingeverywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces theflattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light fallingwith an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. Thescratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person nowabsent — of Miss Vincy, for example. (M I: 403; Albrecht 2020:59–88)

Eliot’s moral critique of egoism always involves self-critique.Interestingly, she saw this ordinary human egoism mirrored in herartistic work: “But what is fiction other than an arrangement ofevents or feigned correspondences according to predominant feeling?…we make what pleases us” (Eliot 1868 [1963: 434];Albrecht 2020: 68–75).

3.4 Triviality and significance

A persistent theme in Eliot’s work is the contrast, within humanlife, between significance and insignificance—and the unsettlingof this distinction. Consider the rather conventional insightexpressed here in a letter to a friend, written when Eliot was in hermid thirties:

When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business—thatthe world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular dramaof our lives… I have done enough of that in my time. But webegin at last to understand that these things are important only toone’s own consciousness, which is but a globule of dew on arose-leaf that at mid-day there will be no trace of. (Eliot to CaraBray, 19 May 1854;Letters 2: 156)

Eliot’s novels frequently dramatize the inflated self-importancedescribed in the first part of this quotation. However, they alsosubvert conventional judgements about relative importance andtriviality.

The “great man” theory of history, prominent amongEliot’s contemporaries, epitomizes those conventionaljudgements. Notable examples (all of whom Eliot read closely) areThomas Carlyle’sOn Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic inHistory (1841); Auguste Comte’s positivist calendar (1849),with its thirteen lunar months named after eminent men such asAristotle and Descartes; and Ralph Waldo Emerson’sRepresentative Men (1850). By contrast, Eliot placed obscure,mediocre lives at the centre of her fictional worlds.Middlemarch in particular directly challenges the“great man” paradigm by invoking a feminine exemplar,Saint Theresa, and by refracting her exemplarity through DorotheaBrooke’s “unhistoric” life (M III: 465).

Eliot achieves these effects through narrative irony. Early inMiddlemarch, the reader is encouraged to laugh atDorothea’s grandiose aspirations.

There would be nothing trivial about our lives. Every-day things withus would mean the greatest things. It would be like marryingPascal… I should see how it was possible to live a grand lifehere—now—in England,

thinks Dorothea, as she contemplates marriage to Edward Casaubon, apetty-minded amateur scholar (M I: 40). Yet Eliot attributes an unseenmoral grandeur to Dorothea’s struggles to live a good life, and(ironically) discloses this to the reader.

Eliot is not only concerned with rethinking the question ofwho might count as significant, and morally exemplary. She isalso occupied by the tension between the intense significance weaccord to our own lives and the lives of those close to us, and theircomic insignificancesub specie aeternitatis. Thistheme is prominent inMiddlemarch and is further intensifiedinDaniel Deronda, which features a quintessentially trivialheroine, Gwendolen Harleth, who is preoccupied with her “smallinferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant”(DD I: 181). Gwendolen cuts a tiny figure in a novel set on the grandstage of world history, and at the enlarged scales of modern astronomyand ancient cosmology.

What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blindvisions? Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread inhuman history than this consciousness of a girl…?

asks the narrator (DD I: 181). This proves to be an ironic question,as Eliot uses Gwendolen’s marriage plot to stage a cosmicstruggle between good and evil, drawing on the Kabbalistic myth of ahuman soul’s arduous journey to its divine source (Baker 1973;Carlisle 2023: 217–19, 340–42).

3.5 Thought and feeling

The words “thought” and “feeling”,“think and feel”, frequently appear conjoined inEliot’s writing. Her novels treat the integration of thought andfeeling as an intellectual-affective ideal constitutive of humanflourishing (which she tends to construe in terms of psychic and moralgrowth).

This element of Eliot’s thought is influenced by her close studyof both Spinoza and Comte during the 1850s (Gatens 2019).Spinoza’sEthics devotes one of its five parts to ananalysis of human emotions that treats them as universal and fullyintelligible, comparable to the objects of geometry (EthicsIII, Preface). Spinoza argues that both the imagination and theaffects can be trained, though not eliminated, by the power ofunderstanding. He regards the highest kind of knowing as intuitive,and distinguished by the immediacy of feeling:

we feel [sentimus], we experience, that we areeternal. For the mind no less feels [sentit] thosethings which it conceives by the understanding, than those which ithas in the memory. (Ethics Vp23s)

According to Eliot’s interpretation of theEthics, suchintellectual feeling is continuous with emotional feeling: sheconsistently introduces the verb “to feel” into hertranslations of Spinoza’s discussions of the emotions. In hislate workThe System of Positive Polity (1855) Comtepostulates a “unity” and “harmony” of humanbeing comprising “a complete convergence both of the Feelingsand of the Thoughts”; “the continuous union of the twoprincipal elements, affective and speculative” (Comte 1875:16–17). For Comte, these elements are gendered female and malerespectively, and their balance within society turns out to requirewomen to devote themselves to domesticity and “surrender allclaim to temporal authority”, even within the home (Comte 1875:302). In 1875, when the English translation ofThe System ofPositive Polity was published, Eliot took detailed notes onComte’s account of the relationship between emotion andknowledge (Wright 1986: 173–201; Anger 2001 [2019: 223]).

Eliot suggests that knowledge pertaining to human life, particularlyin its experiential and moral dimensions, is deficient if it lacksfeeling. She went so far as to claim that her friend HerbertSpencer’s philosophical work—“his theorising, &his mode of pursuing arguments”—was “injuriouslyaffected” by his “inadequate endowment of emotion”(Eliot to Mary Ponsonby, 11 February 1875; LGHL 3: 83). By contrast,the artist (see§4.3) can be a conduit or medium between thought and feeling. InMiddlemarch, Will Ladislaw defines “the poet” assomeone possessing “a soul in which knowledge passesinstantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organof knowledge” (M I: 341–2).

Since feeling is essentially first-personal, its importance for Eliotis a cause for scepticism about knowledge of other human minds, whichdiffer in their character as well as in their experiential contents.Eliot regards this as a practical difficulty that is not easilysolved. Theoretically, her solution is the concept of sympathy (see§5.2), literally “feeling-with”. Sympathy extends affectiveknowing from the first-person singular to the first-person plural. Inone ofMiddlemarch’s closing scenes, the heroineDorothea tells her sister Celia that “You would have to feelwith me, else you would never know” (M III: 442). Thisproposition can be read in a doubled semantic context:Dorothea’s communication with her sister on a particularquestion (how she got together with Will Ladislaw); and Eliot’scommunication with her reader on a much broader philosophical questionabout the possibility of an adequate interpersonal knowledge that canunderpin ethics.

4. Philosophy of Art

Eliot developed her philosophy of art first as a critic and then as apractitioner. She construed her turn to fiction writing in the 1850sas the discovery of her artistic vocation, and consistently describedherself as an artist. Taking a self-problematizing view of the moralpurposes of literature, Eliot reflected critically on the ethics ofsympathy dramatized in her fiction and exemplified in her narrativevoice.

4.1 Realism

Eliot diagnosed and criticized other-worldliness in art, as inreligion: an aversion to life as it is (Eliot 1857). But what does itmean for art to be true to life? Eliot’s answer to this questiondraws on John Ruskin’s analysis of visual art to defend“realism”, defined as

the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humbleand faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms,bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite,substantial reality. (Eliot 1856a: 626; Henry & Levine 2019)

This realism is qualified in two important respects. First, whileEliot here uses “imagination” and “feeling”pejoratively, she elsewhere uses these terms much more positively anddoes not usually oppose them to reality or truth. Explaining her ownartistic purpose in 1859, she wrote that

If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothingmorally… the only effect I ardently long to produce by mywritings, is that those who read them should be better able toimagine and tofeel the pains and the joys of thosewho differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of beingstruggling erring human creatures. (Letters 3: 111; emphasisin original)

Second, realism for Eliot (as for Ruskin) always entailsinterpretation. She regards art as “inevitably subjective”even when it attempts to be “purely imitative”: “themost active perception gives us rather a reflex of what we think andfeel, than the real sum of the objects before us” (Eliot 1855a:703). She suggests, via the narrator ofAdam Bede, that inorder to “avoid any…arbitrary picture” of life, theartist should give a “faithful…account of men and thingsas they have mirrored themselves in [his] mind” (AB I: 265;Mansell 1965b).

So Eliot holds that truth in art is necessarily mediated by theartist’s subjectivity. She characterizes that subjectivity bythe self-complicating metaphor of a mirror that is“defective”, possibly distorting. On this view, the artistmay be unable to perceive accurately things as they are, yet muststrive for honesty about what theydo see. Thus Eliot castsdoubt on epistemic truth while urging moral truthfulness:

the mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes bedisturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much boundto tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if Iwere in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath. (AB I:265–6; Albrecht 2020: 30–58)

The courtroom simile here accentuates realism’s moralseriousness. This passage also indicates that realism’scommitment to truthfulness entails careful attention to linguisticprecision (see§2).

4.2 The purposes of art

Eliot wrote in hope of literary communion with her readers. Sheconstrues this communion as both affective and intellectual.“What one’s soul thirsts for”, she wrote in1873,

is…that what one meant has been perfectly seized, that theemotion which stirred one in writing is repeated in the mind of thereader. (Letters 5: 374)

The narrator of her very first story hopes that the reader will“learn with me to see” the wide range of affectiveexperience that normally remains concealed within an ordinary“human soul” (SCL 67).

Her aesthetic realism has a clear moral purpose. It means endeavouringto depict human beings not as they ought to be, but as they are, sincereal human beings are the objects of our moral concern. In “TheNatural History of German Life”, her programmatic 1856 reviewessay, Eliot asserts that

A picture of human life such that a great artist can give, surpriseseven the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apartfrom themselves, which may be called the raw material of moralsentiment. [Art] is a mode of amplifying experience and extending ourcontact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.(Eliot 1856b: 54; see alsoLetters 3: 111; 4: 472)

This commitment is sharply inflected by class consciousness: Eliotseeks to rectify how working-class people, such as labourers andshopkeepers, are customarily judged by readers implicitly assumed tobelong to a higher social class. She argues that

the thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives andinfluences which the moralist thinksought to act on thelaborer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences whichdo act on him. We want to be taught to feel, not for theheroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in allhis coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness.(Eliot 1856b: 54–5)

Eliot claims that artists offer new knowledge, insofar as art extendsthe range of our perceptions—not least by channelling attentionto phenomena that have been veiled by habit, or by self-centredpreoccupations. In “The Natural History of German Life”,this aesthetic cognitivism is underpinned by an account ofimaginative, associative thinking drawn from Part 2 of Spinoza’sEthics (Ethics IIp18). Eliot observes how a certainword (her example is “railways”) evokes in the mind of anordinary person a limited “range of images” representingthat person’s particular experiential history, whereas in themind of an expert the same word will evoke a much fuller knowledge,comprising “all the essential facts in the existence andrelations of the thing” (Eliot 1856b: 51–2). She arguesthat such a complete knowledge of the working classes can be gained bystudying “their natural history”, and can be articulatedby artists as well as by theorists. The distinction between“narrow” and “wide” mental capacities recurscontinually in Eliot’s novels, marking a moral as well as acognitive divide. The “Natural History” essay qualifiesthis distinction by suggesting that wide views must be matched by wide“observation” that yields “concrete knowledge”of particulars (Eliot 1856b: 51–2, 56). Wide views alone are notjust insufficient, but potentially pernicious. They may produce acharacter such asMiddlemarch’s Mr Brooke, whose mentalopenness is mere vacuity, just as his tolerance amounts to little morethan neglect of his moral responsibilities, not least for his poortenants who live in squalid conditions (Carlisle 2020b).

Like her realism, Eliot’s view of the purpose of art isself-complicating. Despite the strong cognitivist strand theorized inher critical writings and pursued in her fiction, Eliot also valuedepistemic humility. She expressed the hope that her own art mightinstil this epistemic virtue.

I only wish I could write something that would contribute to heightenmen’s reverence before the secrets of each other’s souls,that there might be less assumption of entire knowingness, as a datumfrom which inferences are to be drawn

she wrote to a friend in 1859 (Letters 3: 164).

4.3 The artist

The influence of Romanticism meant that the figure of the artistloomed large for Eliot. Her treatment of this figure exemplifies herdialectical, self-critical mode of thinking. She depicts the artist asproductively hyper-sensitive, while exploring the pitfalls of thissensitivity.

[E]very great artist is a teacher..., by giving us his highersensibility as a medium, a delicate acoustic or optical instrument,bringing home to our coarser senses what would otherwise beunperceived,

she declares in an essay on Goethe (1855d: 289). However,Eliot’s melodramatic story “The Lifted Veil” (1859)probes the darker side of this hyper-perceptive artist, parodied byits clairvoyant and “morbidly sensitive” (1859 [1878:297]) protagonist, Latimer, who is depressed, misanthropic, anddestined to a lonely death. This is partly a self-portrait: Eliotrefers to “my morbid sensibility” in a letter written inthe same year as “The Lifted Veil” (Letters 3:164). InMiddlemarch, Eliot’s narrator appears todefend a kind of saving ignorance as a counterpoint to the perils ofhypersensitivity:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, itwould be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side ofsilence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded withstupidity. (M I: 297–8)

Eliot treats the artist’s creative egoism with similarambivalence. We have seen (4.1) how Eliot’s artist mediatesreality in the mirror of their own subjectivity and experience. Thisis depicted as an act of generosity or of narcissism—or possiblyboth at once. When the narrator ofAdam Bede expounds histheory of literary realism, he rejects the idealizing alternative,which would “refashion life and character entirely after my ownliking”, thereby creating an “arbitrary picture” (ABI: 265). Eliot uses similar phrasing to describe young MaggieTulliver, the partially autobiographical heroine ofThe Mill onthe Floss, “refashioning her little world into just whatshe should like it to be” (MF I: 69). Maggie, an avid reader,feels that “the world outside books was not a happy one”(MF II: 80). Perhaps Eliot’s implicit comment here is thatMaggie’s imagination is shaped by idealizing, romanticizingliterature of the type she criticizes. Yet the characterization mayalso involve a self-critique. Despite her realist commitment totruthfully depicting averagely flawed human beings, the distinctivecompassionate tone of Eliot’s narrative voice neverthelessrefashions the world as she would like it to be. The literary world ofEliot’s fiction is infused with sympathy and acceptance; it is,in other words, a world as it appears in the eyes of an attentive,loving mother. James Sully aptly described Eliot’s trademark“attitude of a large maternal charity” and “mood ofcompassionate tenderness touched with playful indulgence” (Sully1881: 391). In this respect Eliot’s fictive world is markedlydifferent from the real world that its author herselfexperienced—a world formed both by narrowly moralistic humanjudgements, and by the doctrines of divine judgement espoused bypatriarchal religion.

5. Moral Philosophy

Eliot’s fiction explores situations of moral conflict anddilemma. For example, should a wife leave an abusive and/or adulterousmarriage (see “Janet’s Repentance” andRomola)? Eliot also depicts protagonists struggling to choosean overall ethical orientation: between passion and duty (The Millon the Floss), or between conformity and rebellion(Romola again). Her treatment of these cases consistentlyemphasizes their complexity, resists formulaic solutions, and rejectsthe view that absolute and general moral principles can reliably guidemoral judgements. “There is no master key that will fit allcases”, states the narrator ofThe Mill on the Floss.Moral judgements must therefore be “checked and enlightened by aperpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark theindividual lot” (MF III: 264).

The ethical outlook dramatized in Eliot’s fiction is resolutelyhumanist and secular. In an early essay she echoes Spinoza andFeuerbach in rejecting the supernaturalist doctrinal frameworkunderpinning Christian ethics:

I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world,but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty towardsmyself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer thesame pain if I were unjust or dishonest towards them… I have atender love for my wife, and children, and friends, and through thatlove I sympathize with like affections in other men. It is a pang tome to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel hissuffering the more acutely because he ismortal—becausehis life is so short. (Eliot 1857: 18)

Eliot believed that Jesus’s teachings, documented in the NewTestament, included “false views and expectations”, andshe argued that Christianity’s “dualistic theory—theantithesis of God and the world”—fostered “anegotistic seeking for ‘salvation’” (Letters8: 26–7).

Eliot also criticizes moralism, both in life and in art. Shefrequently draws a normative contrast between “narrow” and“wide” views, signifying, respectively, excessivelymoralistic judgement and sympathetic tolerance. In a review ofGoethe’s novelWilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,she argues that “the line between the virtuous and vicious, sofar from being a necessary safeguard to morality, is itself an immoralfiction” (Eliot 1855b: 703).

5.1 Meta-ethical theory

Eliot’s moral particularism led James Sully to claim that“George Eliot gives us a life-like picture of the moralstruggle, and not a theory of it” (Sully 1881: 391). However,this claim is too hasty: it is possible to reconstruct severalmeta-ethical claims from Eliot’s fiction. To begin with, theinsistence on “circumstances” in the passage quoted abovefromThe Mill on the Floss highlights the moral significanceof the concept of the milieu deployed in Eliot’s novels (see§3.2). Duty is another moral concept that structures her thinking,accompanied by the claim that particular duties must be determinedwith reference to each individual’s situation. Eliot’ssustained interest in the concepts of character and habit situates hermoral thinking within the virtue ethics tradition (see§3.1). At times she espouses an exemplarist moral theory that foregroundsthe concept of imitation; here we may detect the influence ofSpinoza’sEthics as well as more contemporary workssuch as Carlyle’sHeroes and Emerson’sRepresentative Men (see§3.4). Her interest in the concept of a character “type”, goingback to Theophrastus’sCharacters, suggests ameta-ethical view that fuses virtue theory and exemplarism.

Eliot is explicitly critical of utilitarianism, particularly insofaras this approach depends on the calculation of consequences. One lineof argument appeals to the nature of moral agents. Eliot suggests thatmoral motivation is largely emotional, and that the emotions arefundamentally unsuited to calculative thinking. As the narrator of“Janet’s Repentance” puts it, “emotion isobstinately irrational: it insists on caring for individuals; itabsolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of humananguish” (SCL 253). A second line of argument, also advanced inthis text, focuses on the nature of suffering. This, Eliot claims,cannot be quantified: “human pain refuses to be settled byequations” (SCL 254). Such direct statements are only part ofEliot’s argumentative strategy, which is also dramatic orperformative. The statements just quoted, for example, are made in thecourse of a narrative that has already engaged readers’ emotionsto make them care intensely about an individual character and herparticular life story.

A third line of argument against utilitarianism targetsconsequentialism as such. While Eliot’s novels tend to insistthat people cannot escape the consequences of their own actions, theyalso emphasize the difficulty of predicting consequences in advance.This idea is developed but also qualified inImpression ofTheophrastus Such, where Eliot’s narrator voices scepticismabout a consequentialist ethical theory based on concepts of rationaldeliberation and free choice:

Few lives are shaped, few characters formed, by the contemplation ofdefinite consequences seen from a distance and made the goal ofcontinuous effort or the beacon of a constantly avoided danger: suchcontrol by foresight, such vivid picturing and practical logic are thedistinction of exceptionally strong natures; but society is chieflymade up of human beings whose daily acts are all performed either inunreflecting obedience to custom and routine or from immediatepromptings of thought or feeling to execute an immediate purpose. (ITS90–91)

Here Eliot’s use of terms such as “few” and“chiefly” illustrates her principled resistance touniversalist statements.

InMiddlemarch Eliot offers a somewhat different epistemiccritique of consequentialism, by claiming that consequences aredifficult or impossible to know not only in advance, but also inretrospect.Middlemarch’s narrator concludes the novelby observing, of its heroine, that “the effect of[Dorothea’s] being on those around her was incalculablydiffusive” (M III: 465). This claim is not restricted toDorothea; it is itself diffused over an indefinite range of“acts” which contribute to the overall “good of theworld”. The meta-ethical proposal here is that since the“effects” of actions cannot be calculated, they cannotprovide a basis for moral judgement.

5.2 Sympathy

The concept of sympathy at the heart of Eliot’s moral philosophyis indebted to Feuerbach, whoseEssence ofChristianity—which Eliot translated in the early1850s—made “suffering in common” a foundation forethical life (Feuerbach 1854: 53; see Griffin 2017; Anger 2001[2019]). In Eliot’s novels, sympathy is a cognitive andemotional achievement, rooted in natural human feelings that are inneed of cultivation and correction. Sympathy provides an antidote toanother prevailing human tendency: harsh moral judgements of others.The narrator of “Janet’s Repentance” praises“deep-sighted sympathy which is wiser than all blame, morepotent than all reproof” (SCL 203). InMiddlemarch,sympathy’s cognitive power is accentuated through a key scene ofemotional crisis, where Dorothea finds that all her “vividsympathetic experience returned to her now as a power”,illuminating her practical reason “as acquired knowledge assertsitself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of ourignorance” (M II: 321).

Like Spinoza and Hegel, Feuerbach set out an account of humanrelations that emphasizes both interdependence and difference:

we two cannot be without each other…only community constituteshumanity… between me and another human being there is anessential, qualitative distinction. (Feuerbach 1850: 158–9)

For Eliot, similarly, sympathy involves both commonality and otherness(Ermarth 1985). Scholars have debated whether Eliot shifted heremphasis from commonality to difference over the course of herliterary career, or maintained a more dialectical view of these twoconcepts throughout her work (Hollander 2013: 62–87; Albrecht2020). Either way, Eliot is certainly attentive to the limits ofsympathy, and to its limited efficacy.Middlemarch’sDorothea Brooke naively “expected to walk in fullcommunion” with her husband (M II: 3), and finds herself unableto do so. InThe Mill on the Floss Maggie Tulliver tells herbrother Tom that

You can’t quite judge for me—our natures are verydifferent. You don’t know how differently things affect me fromwhat they do you. (MF III: 59)

Eliot, a famously consoling writer, can be sceptical aboutconsolation.

We are all islands…and this seclusion is sometimes the mostintensely felt at the very moment your friend is caressing you orconsoling you,

she wrote to a friend in 1854, a few weeks after completing hertranslation of Feuerbach (Eliot to Cara Bray, 19 May 1854;Letters 2: 156).

The obstacles to sympathy are the obstacles to moral growth. Chiefamong them is egotism (see§3.3). Yet there are other, more aesthetic obstacles, such as snobbery andxenophobia. In an early essay Eliot denounces “the vulgarity ofexclusiveness” (Eliot 1856b: 54) and her novels depict bothsocial and aesthetic snobbery; she is not above exploring thedifficulty of feeling common humanity with someone who isunattractive, overweight, or poorly dressed. “It is needful thatI should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgarcitizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely-assorted cravat andwaistcoat” remarks the narrator ofAdam Bede (AB I:271). Insofar as the moral problem is aesthetic, so the remedy isaesthetic: Eliot’s novels dramatize a sympathetic way of“seeing”, or of paying attention.Adam Bede, forexample, depicts unattractive people who are indeed loved, andtherefore lovable.

Yes! thank God [exclaims the narrator], human feeling [i.e., love] islike the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait forbeauty—it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.(AB I: 269)

This is precisely what the compassionate gaze of Eliot’snarrators attempts to do for her widely assorted characters, whopossess various mixtures of physical and moral flaws.

The ideals of feeling-with, thinking-with, and seeing-with embedded inEliot’s concept of sympathy are integral to the practice ofintellectual companionship she undertakes as a philosopher and artist(see§2). Rational argument is considered a reliable philosophical tool insofaras reason is communicable and universal (or, more modestly, commandsbroad regional consensus). The affects have an equivalent claim tocommunicability and commonality (see§3.5) only if the “feeling” element within emotionalintelligence and intuitive understanding carries a comparablycompelling force. The communicative success of Eliot’s novelsconstitutes her primary argument in favour of this view.

5.3 Social ethics

While Eliot’s writings frequently reference political events andissues, her approach to such matters is more moral than political.Broadly speaking, she maintained a hope for both individual andcollective moral progress. Politically, she favoured gradual andmoderate reform, rather than revolution, because she believed thatcontinuity with the past is the essence of culture. FromFelixHolt: The Radical onwards, her thinking about the role of artwithin the national political arena engaged closely with Mill’s“On Representative Government” and Matthew Arnold’sCulture and Anarchy (Gallagher 1985: 217–267). Herconsideration of these questions is characteristically attuned toambiguity.

Eliot’s art engages in intensive yet subtle ways with whatVictorians called “the Woman Question”. She returnsrepeatedly to the question of female vocation; several of her femalecharacters struggle to find intellectual or artistic fulfilment.Marriage is explored in all her novels, especially but not exclusivelyfrom a female point of view. In keeping with her moral particularism,Eliot considers broadly moral benefits and harms within a series ofparticular marriages. She gives close attention to marital violenceand coercive control: variations on this theme appear in“Janet’s Repentance”, “The Lifted Veil”,Romola,Middlemarch, andDaniel Deronda.Her analysis of two unhappy marriages inMiddlemarch mirrorsHegel’s account of the master-slave dialectic inThePhenomenology of Spirit, which Eliot studied while writing thenovel. Drawing on the Hegelian theme of recognition, Eliot’sdepiction of the Casaubons and the Lydgates explores how a partnershipcan be mutually destructive: all these partners misrecognize oneanother, because they imagine their prospective spouse according totheir own desires (Armstrong 2020; Carlisle 2023: 190–98).Eliot’s most radically feminist critique of marriage occurs inDaniel Deronda, where the heroine, feeling compelled to marryfor money, enters an abusive marriage portrayed asde factoprostitution, with disastrous psychological consequences.

Eliot was cautiously supportive of widening women’s access tohigher education. In 1869 her friends Barbara Bodichon and EmilyDavies founded Cambridge’s first women’s college, to whichEliot—who was by then wealthy as a consequence of herbestselling novels—donated a relatively modest £50. Herwriting is more emphatic in highlighting the paucity of women’seducation and considering its diverse effects on different femalecharacters.Middlemarch’s Rosamond Vincy, whose shalloweducation does nothing to reform her vain, self-centred character,exemplifies Mary Wollstonecraft’s ingenious argument that givingwomen equal access to education will be beneficial to men. In a briefessay on Wollstonecraft’sThe Vindication of the Rights ofWomen (1792), Eliot endorses the view that “so far asobstinacy is concerned, your unreasoning animal is the mostunmanageable of creatures”: in other words, an“unreasoning” wife will be troublesome to her husband(Eliot 1855c: 988–9; Carlisle 2023: 196–7). The plot ofMiddlemarch exposes Dr Lydgate’s error in fearingintellectual women, since Rosamond, his wife, turns out to be a farmore formidable adversary.

In her late worksDaniel Deronda andImpressions ofTheophrastus Such, Eliot gives sustained attention to race andnationality. Both texts examine antisemitism, and advocate for aJewish state (Anderson 1997). Less overtly,Daniel Derondaputs forward a moral critique of the British Empire, personified bythe coercive cruelty of “white-handed” aristocrat HenleighGrandcourt, and highlights the Church of England’s complicity incolonial and patriarchal violence via its depiction of a hypocriticalclergyman, Henry Gascoigne (DD III: 74; Henry 2001 [2019]; Carlisle2023: 221). In a letter to the American abolitionist Harriet BeecherStowe, written shortly after the publication ofDanielDeronda, Eliot extends its critique of antisemitism to otherforms of racism:

not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples with whomwe English come into contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuousdictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace.There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, thanto rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claimsin those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in theircustoms and beliefs. (Letters 6: 301)

Theophrastus Such, an Englishman, states directly that “we are acolonizing people, and it is we who have punished others” (ITS264; Henry 2001 [2019]).

6. Influence

At the end ofMiddlemarch, Eliot’s narrator remarksthat its heroine’s influence on others has been“incalculably diffusive”. Although George Eliot, alreadyduring her lifetime a celebrated novelist whose works inspiredreverence as well as critical acclaim, was very different from theobscure, “unhistoric” Dorothea Brooke, this remark doesapply in one sense to Eliot herself. Her novels, in English and intranslation, have been and continue to be very widely read (andre-read) by ordinary people, including schoolchildren. Few otherphilosophers are so diffusively influential as George Eliot.

It perhaps goes without saying that a nineteenth-century woman whopursued her philosophical work in the medium of fiction was taken lessseriously, as a philosopher, than contemporaries such as J. S. Milland Herbert Spencer. Nevertheless, Nietzsche took George Eliotseriously enough to deem her worthy of insult. InTwilight of theIdols he treats Eliot (a “little moral female”) asthe prime example of English “moralists” who rejectChristian belief only to cling more tightly to Christian morality(Nietzsche 1889:Streifzüge einesUnzeitgemässen §5 [2005: 193]). Here Nietzsche displayshis ignorance of the sophistication and complexity of Eliot’smoral thinking; his own naturalistic, physiological ethics wereindebted to an English philosophical tradition that Eliot, along withSpencer and Lewes, helped to shape (see Staten 2014: 1–9). Inthe 1870s and 80s Sigmund Freud read and admiredMiddlemarchandDaniel Deronda, and may have been influenced byEliot’s study of the effects of “suppressedexperience” (DD II: 120) on psychological and emotionaldevelopment, as well as by her subtle explorations of femaleexperience in particular (see Jones 1953: 131, 168, 174; Rotenberg1999). As a consequence of her abusive marriage, the heroine ofDaniel Deronda displays symptoms of nervous disorders, suchas hysteria and anorexia nervosa, that were receiving scientificattention at that time (Vrettos 1990; Matus 2008; Carlisle 2023:221–2, 342–3).

While philosophers throughout history, at least since Plato, haveexperimented with literary form in ways that are not philosophicallytrivial, Eliot exerted a decisive influence on new convergencesbetween philosophy and literature during the twentieth century. Assome contemporary critics recognized,Middlemarch“marks an epoch in the history of fiction” insofar as itsinterest in subjectivity and inter-subjectivity determines “theform in which the conception is placed before us” (Simcox 1873).Eliot exerted a profound influence on Anglophone modernism, with itsdistinctive attention to the relation between truth and literary form.Virginia Woolf and Henry James, for example, were direct heirs to herliterary innovations. Eliot’s novels, not least hersemi-autobiographicalThe Mill on the Floss, were alsoformative for Proust and Simone de Beauvoir, whose own experiments inlife-writing were the medium for their philosophical work (see Fraser1994: 87–113; Gobeil 1965). In light of such influence—andarguably because of, as well as despite, its diffusiveness—Eliotcan justly be regarded as the progenitor of the modern philosophicalnovel.

In the second half of the twentieth century, literary formalism shapedscholarly and critical practices in the humanities. This disciplinarydevelopment produced techniques of close reading that have beenapplied, in return, to Eliot’s novels—above allMiddlemarch—to reveal their power, intricacy andoriginality as works of both art and philosophy.

Bibliography

A. Primary works

A.1 Fiction by George Eliot

All references to George Eliot’s fictional works are to theCabinet Edition of her works. These volumes were all published in 1878by John Blackwood in Edinburgh, with the exception ofImpressionsof Theophrastus Such which was published in 1879.

Abbreviations to cited texts are as follows; where applicable theabbreviation is followed by the volume number:

  • [SCL] 1858,Scenes of Clerical Life (two volumes), London/Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons. Collectsthree previously published stories including:
    • 1857, “Janet’s Repentance”,Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 82: 55–76,189–206, 329–344, 457–473, 519–541. Cabinetedition SCL 2: 39–317
  • 1859 [1878], “The Lifted Veil”,Blackwood’sEdinburgh Magazine, 86: 24–47. Reprinted, 1878, Cabinetedition 2: 275–342. [“The Lifted Veil” available online]
  • [AB] 1859,Adam Bede (two volumes), London/Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.
  • [MF] 1860,The Mill on the Floss (three volumes), London/Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.
  • [SM] 1861,Silas Marner, London/Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.
  • 1863,Romola (three volumes), London/Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.
  • 1866,Felix Holt: The Radical (three volumes), London/Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.
  • [M] 1871–72,Middlemarch (four volumes [three volumes in the Cabinet edition]),London/Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.
  • [DD] 1876,Daniel Deronda (four volumes [three volumes in the Cabinet edition]),London/Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.
  • [ITS] 1879,Impressions of Theophrastus Such, London/Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.

A.2 Essays, articles and reviews by George Eliot

A.3 Correspondence

  • The George Eliot Letters. Nine volumes, edited by GordonS. Haight, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–1978. (CitedasLetters followed by volume number).
  • The Letters of George Henry Lewes. Three volumes, editedby William Baker, Victoria BC: University of Victoria,1995–1998. (Cited asLGHL followed by volumenumber).

A.4 Translations by Eliot

  • Feuerbach, Ludwig, 1854,The Essence of Christianity,translated by Marian Evans from the second German edition ofDasWesen des Christentums, London: Edward Chapman and William Hall.The original German version was published in 1841. [Evans translation of Feuerbach 1854 available online]
  • [Ethics] de Spinoza, Benedict,The Ethics of Benedictde Spinoza, translated by George Eliot in 1856 but not publishedin her lifetime. Her translation was later published asSpinoza’s Ethics, translated by George Eliot, ClareCarlisle (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.

A.5 Primary works by other authors

  • Mill, John Stuart, 1843 [1889],A System of Logic,Ratiocinative and Inductive, 2 volumes, London: J. W. Parker.People’s edition, London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1889.
  • Comte, Auguste, 1875,System of Positive Polity, SecondVolume, containing Social Statics, or the Abstract Theory of HumanOrder, Frederic Harrison (trans.), London: Longmans, Green andCo. Originally published asSystème de politiquepositive, ou traité de sociologie instituant la religion del’Humanité, 4 volumes, Paris, Carilian-Goeury,1851–1854. [Comte 1875 available online]
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1889 [2005],Götzen-Dämmerung,oder, Wie man mit dem Hammerphilosophiert, Leipzig: C. G. Neumann. Translated as“Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with aHammer”, inThe Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of theIdols, and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History ofPhilosophy), Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (eds), Judith Norman(trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005,153–230.

B. Secondary works

  • Anonymous, 1854, Review of Eliot’s translation (1854) ofFeuerbach in “Theology and Philosophy”,WestminsterReview, 62: 559–560.
  • Albrecht, Thomas, 2020,The Ethical Vision of GeorgeEliot (Among the Victorians and Modernists), New York: Routledge.doi:10.4324/9780429343667
  • –––, 2023, “Sympathy and Alterity: TheEthical Sublime in Romola”, inHarris and Sussman 2023: ch. 6.
  • Anderson, Amanda, 1997, “George Eliot and the JewishQuestion”,The Yale Journal of Criticism, 10(1):39–61. doi:10.1353/yale.1997.0001
  • Anderson, Amanda and Harry E. Shaw (eds), 2013,A Companion to George Eliot (Blackwell Companions toLiterature and Culture 82), Chichester, UK/Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley& Sons. doi:10.1002/9781118542347
  • Anger, Suzy, 2001 [2019], “George Eliot andPhilosophy”, inLevine 2001: 76–97 (ch. 8). Reprinted inLevine and Henry 2019: 215–235 (ch. 12). doi:10.1017/9781108147743.013
  • Armstrong, Isobel, 2013, “George Eliot, Spinoza, and theEmotions”, inAnderson and Shaw 2013: 294–308 (ch. 21). doi:10.1002/9781118542347.ch21
  • –––, 2020, “George Eliot, Hegel, andMiddlemarch”,19: Interdisciplinary Studies in theLong Nineteenth Century, 29. doi:10.16995/ntn.1992
  • Ashton, Rosemary, 1980,The German Idea: Four English Writersand the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860,Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Atkins, Dorothy, 1978,George Eliot and Spinoza,Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur,Universität Salzburg.
  • Baker, William, 1973, “The Kabbalah, Mordecai, and GeorgeEliot’s Religion of Humanity”,The Yearbook of EnglishStudies, 3: 216–221. doi:10.2307/3506871
  • Brilmyer, S. Pearl, 2014, “‘The Natural History of MyInward Self’: Sensing Character in George Eliot’sImpressions of Theophrastus Such”,PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association ofAmerica, 129(1): 35–51. doi:10.1632/pmla.2014.129.1.35
  • –––, 2015, “Plasticity, Form, and theMatter of Character inMiddlemarch”,Representations, 130(1): 60–83.doi:10.1525/rep.2015.130.1.60
  • Canguilhem, Georges, 2001, “The Living and ItsMilieu”, John Savage (trans.),Grey Room, 3:7–31. doi:10.1162/152638101300138521
  • Carlisle, Clare, 2020a, “George Eliot’s Spinoza: AnIntroduction”, inSpinoza’s Ethics, translated byGeorge Eliot, Clare Carlisle (ed.), Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1–60.
  • –––, 2020b, “George Eliot and Spinoza:Philosophical Formations”,Victorian Studies, 62(4):590–615. doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.62.4.02
  • –––, 2023,The Marriage Question: GeorgeEliot’s Double Life, London: Allen Lane.
  • –––, 2025, “George Eliot’sTranslations”, inThe Oxford Handbook of George Eliot,Juliette Atkinson and Elisha Cohn (eds), Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 371–385. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192856593.013.22
  • Dillane, Fionnuala, 2009, “Re-Reading George Eliot’s‘Natural History’: Marian Evans, ‘the People,’and the Periodical”,Victorian Periodicals Review,42(3): 244–266. doi:10.1353/vpr.0.0082
  • –––, 2011, “‘The Character ofEditress’: Marian Evans at the Westminster Review ,1851–54”,Tulsa Studies in Women’sLiterature, 30(2): 269–290.doi:10.1353/tsw.2011.a498330
  • Dolin, Tim, 2023, “The Grounds of Exception: LiberalSympathy and Its Limits inDaniel Deronda and C.H.Pearson’sNational Life and Character”, inHarris and Sussman 2023: ch. 9.
  • Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, 1985, “George Eliot’sConception of Sympathy”,Nineteenth-Century Fiction,40(1): 23–42. doi:10.2307/3044834
  • Fleishman, Avrom, 2010,George Eliot’s IntellectualLife, Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University Press.doi:10.1017/CBO9780511691706
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