George Eliot

George Eliot (1819-1880), pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, was an English novelist and intellectual whose work profoundly engaged with religious questions and the loss of faith in Victorian society. Raised in evangelical Anglicanism, she underwent a crisis of belief in the 1840s, influenced by German biblical criticism and the works of David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, whose "Essence of Christianity" she translated into English (1854). Her novels, particularly "Middlemarch" (1871-1872) and "Daniel Deronda" (1876), explore moral responsibility and human sympathy in a world without divine certainty. Eliot advocated for a humanistic ethics grounded in compassion rather than religious dogma, arguing that moral action required no supernatural foundation. Her intellectual journey from faith to agnosticism and her articulation of secular morality significantly influenced Victorian debates about religion, ethics, and the possibility of meaning without God.