Editing George Eliot (section)

==Literary assessment==
[[File:George Eliot 7.jpg|thumb|Portrait by [[Frederick William Burton]], 1864]]

Throughout her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute pen. From ''[[Adam Bede]]'' to ''[[The Mill on the Floss]]'' and ''[[Silas Marner]]'', Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small-town persecution. ''[[Felix Holt, the Radical]]'' and ''The Legend of Jubal'' were overtly political, and political crisis is at the heart of ''[[Middlemarch]]'', in which she presents the stories of a number of inhabitants of a small English town on the eve of the [[Reform Act 1832|Reform Bill of 1832]]; the novel is notable for its deep psychological insight and sophisticated character portraits. The roots of her realist philosophy can be found in her review of [[John Ruskin]]'s ''[[Modern Painters]]'' in ''[[Westminster Review]]'' in 1856. Eliot also expresses [[Proto-Zionism|proto-Zionist]] ideas in [[Daniel Deronda]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Stanislawski |first=Michael |title=Zionism: a very short introduction |date=2017 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-062520-7 |series=Very short introductions |location=New York}}</ref>

Readers in the Victorian era praised her novels for their depictions of rural society. Much of the material for her prose was drawn from her own experience. She shared with [[William Wordsworth|Wordsworth]] the belief that there was much value and beauty to be found in the mundane details of ordinary country life. Eliot did not, however, confine herself to stories of the English countryside. ''[[Romola]]'', an historical novel set in late fifteenth century [[Florence]], was based on the life of the Italian priest [[Girolamo Savonarola]]. In ''The Spanish Gypsy'', Eliot made a foray into verse, but her poetry's initial popularity has not endured.

Working as a translator, Eliot was exposed to German texts of religious, social, and moral philosophy such as David Friedrich Strauss's ''Life of Jesus'' and Feuerbach's ''The Essence of Christianity''; also important was her translation from Latin of Jewish-Dutch philosopher [[Baruch Spinoza|Spinoza's]] ''Ethics''. Elements from these works show up in her fiction, much of which is written with her trademark sense of [[agnostic]] [[humanism]]. According to [[Clare Carlisle]], who published a [[The Marriage Question|new biography on George Eliot]] in 2023,<ref>{{cite book |title=The Marriage Question. George Eliot's Double Life |last=Carlisle |first=Clare |publisher=Allen Lane |date=2023 |isbn=978-0241447178}}</ref> the overdue publication of Spinoza's ''Ethics'' was a real shame, because it could have provided some illuminating cues for understanding the more mature works of the writer.<ref name="carlisle" />  She had taken particular notice of Feuerbach's conception of Christianity, positing that our understanding of the nature of the divine was to be found ultimately in the nature of humanity projected onto a divine figure. An example of this philosophy appeared in her novel ''Romola'', in which Eliot's protagonist displayed a "surprisingly modern readiness to interpret religious language in humanist or secular ethical terms."<ref>{{cite book|title = A Companion to the Victorian Novel|last = Bidney|first = Martin|publisher = Greenwood Press|year = 2002|location = Westport|pages = 100–101|editor-last = Baker|editor-first = William|chapter = Philosophy and the Victorian Literary Aesthetic|editor2-last = Womack|editor2-first = Kenneth}}</ref> Though Eliot herself was not religious, she had respect for religious tradition and its ability to maintain a sense of social order and morality. 
The religious elements in her fiction also owe much to her upbringing, with the experiences of Maggie Tulliver from ''The Mill on the Floss'' sharing many similarities with the young Mary Ann Evans. Eliot also faced a quandary similar to that of Silas Marner, whose alienation from the church simultaneously meant his alienation from society. Because Eliot retained a vestigial respect for religion, German philosopher [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] excoriated her system of morality for figuring sin as a debt that can be expiated through suffering, which he demeaned as characteristic of "little moralistic females à la Eliot."<ref>Thomas J. Joudrey. "The Defects of Perfectionism: Nietzsche, Eliot, and the Irrevocability of Wrong." ''Philological Quarterly'' 96.1 (2017): 77–104.</ref>

She was at her most autobiographical in ''Looking Backwards'', part of her final published work ''[[Impressions of Theophrastus Such]]''. By the time of ''[[Daniel Deronda]]'', Eliot's sales were falling off, and she had faded from public view to some degree. This was not helped by the posthumous biography written by her husband, which portrayed a wonderful, almost saintly woman totally at odds with the scandalous life people knew she had led. In the 20th century she was championed by a new breed of critics, most notably by [[Virginia Woolf]], who called ''Middlemarch'' "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".<ref name="Woolf, Virginia 1925. pp. 166"/> In 1994, literary critic [[Harold Bloom]] placed Eliot among [[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages|the most important Western writers of all time]].<ref>[[Harold Bloom|Bloom, Harold]]. 1994. ''[[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages]]''. p. 226. New York: Harcourt Brace.</ref> In a 2007 authors' poll by ''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]'', ''Middlemarch'' was voted the tenth greatest literary work ever written.<ref>{{cite magazine|url=http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1578073,00.html|title=The 10 Greatest Books of All Time|last=Grossman|first=Lev|magazine=Time|date=15 January 2007|access-date=9 February 2017}}</ref> In 2015, writers from outside the UK voted it first among all British novels "by a landslide".<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/dec/08/best-british-novel-of-all-time-international-critics-top-100-middlemarch|title=The best British novel of all time: have international critics found it?|last=Flood|first=Alison|newspaper=The Guardian|date=8 December 2015|access-date=9 February 2017}}</ref> The various film and television adaptations of Eliot's books have reintroduced her to the wider reading public.