The Mystery Beneath the Real: Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot

Pioneering a postmodern religious stance

“This reading of George Eliot’s fiction . . . is deeply revealing of her as not just one of England’s most brilliant novelists, but also a profound religious thinker. . . .” David Jasper, University of Glasgow

George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans, 1819–80) was not only a prolific and profound English novelist and pioneering feminist. She was also directly engaged in the religious and theological battles of her day. She translated Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1844) and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854). Despite having abandoned orthodox forms of Christian belief, she was a deeply religious thinker, Hodgson maintains, and religious themes and figures appear in all ten of her works of fiction.

Hodgson’s sympathetic reading of her novels traces her religious pilgrimage from a strongly evangelical Christian home, through critical humanism, to an artistic affirmation of “the mystery beneath the real.” Hodgson finds her religious vision directly germane to contemporary theological and religious reconstruction and to “whether and how it is possible to speak meaningfully of the presence and action of God (or of the Divine Mystery) in the world today.”