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Article: George Eliot: A Great Novelist and a Great Humanist.(Review)
- Article from:
- Free Inquiry
- Article date:
- December 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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by Rosemary Ashton (London: Hamish Hamilton, #25, 1997, ISBN 0-241-13473-0) 465 pp. Cloth $40.00 Canadian.
George Eliot, a major British novelist of the nineteenth century, wrote on the scale of Tolstoy and with the sensitivity of Henry James (an admirer). Her humanist beliefs affected her life and work, in which she incessantly tried to capture the truly human in all its contradictions and complications. She became a critic of Christianity and all religion, although not a militant freethinker, saying she recognized some people's need for ritual and pastoral support.
Mary Anne Evans (as she was first named) was born in a village near Nuneaton in rural, ...