Mary Lloyd Red Letter Days A page which recalls the birthday or death day of people who have made a notable contribution to humanity.
Readers are invited to send in nominations for this column. For the next issue please send those with birth or death days between 1 December and 28 February, with a short biography (max. 300 words and, if possible, jpg picture) by post or email to the Editor.
Philip Knight Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, ed. Arnold J.
Pomerans, (Eerdmans 2002) . Abridged version: An Interrupted Life, ed. Eva Hoffmann (new edition, Persephone 1999). 22nd November (birthday): George Eliot Robert Evans recognised the exceptional intelligence of Mary Anne, his youngest daughter, and, unusually for the time, ensured that she received a proper formal education to the age of 16. His role as estate manager at Arbury Hall also allowed her continuous access to the treasures of its library, where she immersed herself in its Greek classics.
As a young adult, struggling with the evangelical faith she was raised in, she developed a strong friendship with the progressive, free-thinking Charles and Cara Bray and, nurtured by their radical circle, anonymously published her translation of the liberal theologian David Strauss in 1846. In London as assistant editor of the left-wing Westminster Review from 1851, she went on to publish Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity in English, endorsing his view that religious belief is ‘an imaginative necessity for man’.
Adopting George Eliot as her pseudonym for the popular early novels which made her name, she withstood the rejection of her beloved brother, Isaac, and moral outrage from the likes of Mrs. Gaskell, when she embarked on her 20-year partnership with the married George Lewes.
Throughout her life, Eliot developed and maintained her view of religion, anticipating Don Cupitt’s insights by more than 100 years. In a personal letter of 1874, she writes: ‘The idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human’.
After her death, Eliot came under repeated and patronising attack by male critics who emphasised the division between her creative powers and supposedly damaging intellect. Although Virginia Woolf in 1919 defended Middlemarch as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’, Eliot's reputation was not established until, in 1948, F.R. Leavis recognised her as ‘not as transcendently great as Tolstoy – but great, and great in the same way’.