Richard Simpson, unsigned article, ‘George Eliot’s Novels’, Home and Foreign Review, 3 (1863), 522–49, reprinted in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage edited by David Carroll (London, 1971), pp. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. 3 My concern is not to judge George Eliot’s position (though I do give a clear indication of my own estimate of its emotional appeal) but to explore it more carefully. 2 Middlemarch has been called a ‘novel of religious yearning without religious object’, in which traditional religious language is applied to ordinary human experience as part of a ‘pseudo-religious philosophy’ which mistakes the profane for the sacred. 1 More recently there have been quite savage attacks on her empty ‘Rhetoric of Enthusiasm’ and her ‘Ersatz Christianity’. Christians in her own time, such as the liberal Catholic Richard Simpson, marvelled that ‘the godless humanitarianism of Strauss and Feuerbach can be made to appear the living centre of all the popular religions’.

How the pious provincial girl refused one day to go to church, made herself Strauss-sick by translating over two agonised years his dissection of the beautiful Gospel stories into their compound of myth and legend, how she made matters worse by turning next to the rabidly anti-theological Feuerbach, and how she spent the rest of her life seeking for a replacement for the God she had come to find inconceivable: this has been the subject of much scholarship and reflection. How George Eliot lost her belief in God and lived unhappily ever after is a well-worn tale but one which never ceases to comfort the faithful.

Middle march author