“In those times, as now”: with this characteristic phrase George Eliot writes of past and present and of the absence of those spiritual symbols thatwould confirm belief and lead characters toward the promised land – somewhere. Maggie Tulliver's journey in The Mill on the Floss toward the metaphorical “Promised Land” is, the narrator notes, “thirsty, trackless, uncertain” (251). The endings of all of George Eliot's novels leave one, if not dissatisfied, then certain that promised lands are at most imagined ideas about moral sympathy and, sometimes, belief; they are not Dickensian communities grouped around the hearth. Dickens's endings have no part of George Eliot's commitment to realism.

Born in 1819 into a world of vast change – “Since yesterday, a century has passed away,” we hear in Middlemarch (1872) (378) – George Eliot more than all Victorian novelists encompasses the movements of mind that characterize Queen Victoria's England. Beginning her life as an intensely Evangelical Christian, she became the translator of David Friedrich Strauss's Leben Jesu (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1854), an editor at the radical Westminster Review, and “the first great godless writer of fiction that has appeared in England … the first legitimate fruit of our modern atheistic pietism,” “the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief.” George Eliot brings to the writing of fiction an unparalleled understanding of the philosophical and epistemological issues and challenges of modernity, and a sense of the novel as anything but entertainment.