5 - George Eliot and philosophy

Summary

James Sully, founder of the first English philosophical journal Mind, wrote a study of “George Eliot's Art” for an early number of the journal. This piece stands out, in a periodical devoted to academic and professional philosophy, as the single article in the journal's history (published since 1876) to treat a novelist or poet. But this fact is not surprising, given how seriously Eliot's contemporaries took her status as a philosopher and a moral teacher. Sully observes of George Eliot that people “are apt to think and speak of her as a discoverer and enforcer of moral truth rather than an artist,” while George Cooke, in his 1884 study of her work writes, “she was an ethical prophet.” Such comments were standard among George Eliot's Victorian readers. Henry James, in fact, saw her work as too philosophical and intellectual, complaining that “the philosophical door is always open on her stage, and we are aware that the somewhat cooling draught of ethical purpose draws across.”