Mr. John Morley says that "no woman has ever impressed him so profoundly as George Eliot; there is something almost apostolic in her moral character, while her intellect is of the first order.”
Richard Grant White finishes a critique of “Middlemarch” thus: "Of George Eliot herself our final and summary judgment is that in her the introspective spirit of the age has become incarnate, and attained its completest development.”
How much of passionate pain her life has held; what disappointments, what sorrows, what baulked aims, what unsatisfied desires, what hopeless loves, what terrible struggles— we do not know, and may not even guess. But that these things have been in her life her writings bear ample witness. However sympathetic her nature may be, and however observing her mind, no sympathy, nor any power of observation, can supply, without bitter personal experience, the keen, sympathetic knowledge she displays in her portrayal of all these. She has been taught
