In the following excerpt from an article that originally appeared in The Leader on March 29, 1856, Eliot interprets Antigone as the conflict between "the strength of man's intellect, or moral sense, or affection" and "the rules which society has sanctioned."
Eliot was an English novelist, essayist, poet, editor, short story writer, and translator. She is regarded as one of the greatest English novelists of the nineteenth century, and is best known for her novels The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-72).
The Antigone has every quality of a fine tragedy, and fine tragedies can never become mere mummies for [critics] to dispute about: they must appeal to perennial human nature, and even the ingenious dullness of translators cannot exhaust them of their passion and their poetry.
E'en in.....
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