
George Eliot: A genius who scandalised society - hhs
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20191119-george-eliot-radical-writer-novels
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lordleft
Reading Middlemarch was a life-changing experience. Fun fact: George Eliot was
not only a novelist, but also very well read in philosophy and even translated
Spinoza into english.

My favorite quote by her:

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive:
for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and
that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half
owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited
tombs.”

My other favorite passage by George Eliot (the excerpt is a screed written by
a political polemicist in Middlemarch):

"Here is a sharp stroke or two. If we had to describe a man who is
retrogressive in the most evil sense of the word—we should say, he is one who
would dub himself a reformer of our constitution, while every interest for
which he is immediately responsible is going to decay: a philanthropist who
cannot bear one rogue to be hanged, but does not mind five honest tenants
being half-starved: a man who shrieks at corruption, and keeps his farms at
rack-rent: who roars himself red at rotten boroughs, and does not mind if
every field on his farms has a rotten gate: a man very open-hearted to Leeds
and Manchester, no doubt; he would give any number of representatives who will
pay for their seats out of their own pockets: what he objects to giving, is a
little return on rent-days to help a tenant to buy stock, or an outlay on
repairs to keep the weather out at a tenant's barn-door or make his house look
a little less like an Irish cottier's. But we all know the wag's definition of
a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the
distance."

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everybodyknows
Is the philanthropist described Bulstrode, specifically?

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lordleft
I believe it’s actually implied to be Mr. Brooke, Dorothea’s uncle — the
passage is being read to him by another character.

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retsibsi
For me Eliot's genius lay in her attitude to her characters, and so I assume
to real people: she saw through their facades and was happy to drily point out
their flaws and even mock them; but she clearly had a genuine affection for
them, a willingness to understand, and to forgive though not to whitewash or
give up on demanding better.

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itamarst
Eliot's sociological novel, an overarching view of how society works, is part
of the inspiration for my logging library, named Eliot
([https://eliot.readthedocs.io](https://eliot.readthedocs.io)).

The intro docs are inspired by Middlemarch:
[https://eliot.readthedocs.io/en/stable/introduction.html](https://eliot.readthedocs.io/en/stable/introduction.html)

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ncmncm
It is my shame that I have not read George Eliot. I move to correct the
omission, late but not too late.

