George Eliot

Who published under a male pen name because she knew her philosophy would not be taken seriously from a woman, and whose novels — Middlemarch most of all — constitute the most searching moral philosophy produced in Victorian England.

Before the Work

Mary Ann Evans was born in Warwickshire, England, in 1819, the daughter of a land agent. She was acutely intelligent and received a better-than-typical education for a girl of her class and time, but she was not beautiful, and in a society that assigned women's value primarily through marriage, this mattered. Her mother died when she was seventeen. She ran her father's household until his death in 1849, when she was thirty.

She had been translating German philosophy — Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity — and working as assistant editor of the Westminster Review, one of the leading intellectual journals of the age, all of which required an anonymity that she maintained with difficulty. In 1854 she began living with the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes — who was legally unable to divorce his wife — in a relationship that was considered scandalous and that cost her most of her social connections. She and Lewes remained together until his death in 1878, and the relationship was by all accounts one of complete intellectual partnership and genuine love.

She began publishing fiction in 1857, using the pen name George Eliot. The name was partly protective — male authors were taken more seriously — and partly playful. By the time Middlemarch was published in 1871-72, George Eliot was recognized as the greatest living English novelist, and everyone knew who she was. Henry James called Middlemarch one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. Virginia Woolf called it one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.

The Philosophy

Eliot's moral philosophy is embedded in her fiction rather than stated in philosophical essays, which is why it is sometimes overlooked as philosophy. But her novels are systematic inquiries into how people develop morally, what prevents that development, and what the relationship is between individual character and social circumstance.

Her central insight — explored most fully in Middlemarch — is that the quality of individual moral life depends critically on the quality of the social circumstances in which it is embedded. Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch has the capacity for greatness — an ardor alternating between vague ideals and common yearning — but the circumstances of her world offer her nothing adequate to that capacity. The famous final paragraph of the novel argues that the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

This is her most important philosophical claim: that the vast majority of the moral work that sustains civilization is done by people who are never recognized, never celebrated, and never remembered — who simply lived as well as they could in the circumstances they were given. This is not resignation. It is a precise accounting of where the actual weight of history is located, and it is a vindication of every ordinary life that has been lived with integrity and care.

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

George Eliot — Middlemarch, 1871

Concepts Shaped

Integrity

The unhistoric acts — her account of how most moral work is done, invisibly, by ordinary people.

Compassion

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other — her central moral conviction.

Self-Actualization

It is never too late to become what you might have been — her most famous moral injunction.

The Works

1871

Middlemarch

The greatest Victorian novel — a systematic moral inquiry disguised as a story about provincial English life. Read the whole thing. Begin with the Prelude.

1860

The Mill on the Floss

Her most autobiographical novel — on the conflict between individual nature and social expectation. Equally searching, somewhat shorter.