Identifying the Remains: George Eliot's Death in the London Religious Press (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

Conventional wisdom holds that the great Victorian novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) lost her religious faith in her twenties, remained an agnostic (if not an atheist) for the rest of her life, and embodied in her fiction a secular humanism roughly equivalzent to Christian ethics cleansed of Christian belief. In Identifying the Remains, K. K. Collins challenges this commonly accepted view by exploring what the London religious press said about George Eliot when she died. With the entire secular coverage as background, Collins surveys over seventy-five obituaries, commemorative essays, critical articles, letters and notes from forty-eight religious papers and journals — Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Nonconformist, non-sectarian, Presbyterian, Primitive Methodist, Swedenborgian, Unitarian, and Wesleyan. He argues that the absence of a known “personality” for George Eliot, who carefully guarded her private life from public scrutiny, forced even hostile religious journalists to try to come to terms with the essential mystery of her beliefs, a process suggesting that her heterodoxy was not nearly so definable in her own time as we have come to suppose it is in ours.