Christian Evaluation and Moral Action in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

eorge Eliot’s legacy for modernism is worth considering on multiple grounds but especially in the context of religious belief and its influence on social morality. The comments of two early twentieth-century writers are suggestive of the mixed nature of her legacy. On the one hand, novelist Virginia Woolf (among the most strident critics of Victorian culture) famously said of Middle-march (1872) that it was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” i.e., modernists (657), while, on the other hand, sociologist L. T. Hobhouse, writing in 1915, decried the amorality of modernist aesthetics and praised Middlemarch for “uphold[ing] the traditional virtues” and providing “a justification for all that was then usual to sum up in the word altruism” (qtd. in Collini Liberalism 246). Problems are immediately apparent when dealing with a figure who, in the modernist mind, simultaneously stands in for the whole of Victorian literature and culture and stands out as exceptional, even anomalous, to that tradition. These strikingly contradictory endorsements highlight the fact that British modernism found itself an ambivalent legatee when it came to Eliot’s work in general and her representation of belief in particular. Part of this, of course, is due to the ambiguity of Eliot’s own position. Christian Evaluation and Moral Action in George Eliot’s Middlemarch