George Eliot and religion

Abstract

And so the poor child, with her soul’s hunger and her illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge . . . For a week or two she went on resolutely enough, though with an occasional sinking of heart, as if she had set out towards the Promised Land alone, and found it a thirsty, trackless, uncertain journey. The Mill on the Floss , 1860 Pray, don’t ever ask me again not to rob a man of his religious belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with No-faith, to have any negative propagandism in me. George Eliot, 1862 What is George Eliot’s New Providence . . . ? Towards what in earth and heaven does she beckon us on? Robert Laing, Quarterly Review , 1873 “She is the first great godless writer of fiction that has appeared in England . . . the first legitimate fruit of our modern atheistic pietism,” declared W. H. Mallock in 1879 as he reviewed Impressions of Theophrastus Such ( CH , 453-54). In a century of so many doubters, Mallock exaggerates; but he also sees George Eliot's crucial place - even more than Thomas Carlyle's - as (in Lord Acton's words about her) “the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief” ( CH , 463). Her Maggie Tulliver and Esther Lyon and Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth are women in search of a vision, of a faith that might sustain and give their lives purpose. But the words that sustained the Bible's Hebrews and Bunyan's pilgrim, that mapped their journeys towards the Promised Land, offer no sure guides. Silas Marner finds his belief in the Bible's truth destroyed by a drawing of lots in the name of what Bunyan called that “book that cannot lie”; Maggie Tulliver, not even reading the Bible, finds no aid - and finally drowns because of it. Silas lives; the hand of a little child leads him “towards a calm and bright land” - in “merry England” (14:130; 1:5).

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