Born Marian (or Mary Ann) Evans, George Eliot was the assumed name of the English novelist, poet, essayist, and translator. She was reared near Coventry and in her early years attended a school run by a fervent evangelical mistress. From this woman she acquired intense religious beliefs, but she gradually lost her faith. In 1842 she wrote that she thought Christian dogmas "dishonorable to God" and pernicious to human happiness. Within a few months, however, she had come to regard the dogmas in themselves as of little importance. "Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union," she wrote in a letter in October 1843; a belief in the importance of feeling remained central to her life and work.

In Coventry she had a...