ABSTRACT
George Eliot counters the Darwinian idea that selfishness leads to success with the benevolent concept of moral evolution, which both revised and relied on Victorian evolutionary thought. Eliot’s engagement with William Wordsworth, however sympathetic, is of course not without competition, as seen in Eliot’s correction of Wordsworthian egotism. Eliot considered the female imagination as more sympathetic and thus more powerful than its male counterpart because of “that exquisite type of gentleness, tenderness, possible maternity suffusing a woman’s being with affectionateness”. In light of Eliot’s engagement with Wordsworth’s self-focus, this quotation suggests a recognition that his emphasis on his own mind was more broadly a study of “human nature” motivated by “love”—that his song was more than an egotistical solo performance, but “the music of humanity”. Eliot had long considered stern Wordsworthian duty to be an essential antidote to natural self-interest.
