ABSTRACT
George Eliot, the nineteenth-century British novelist, has often been described as a philosopher-novelist; indeed Mary Ellen Waithe in A History of Women Philosophers states that Eliot is sometimes described as “a philosopher whose genre was fiction”. Eliot’s intellectual career began by writing for the Westminster Review and translating works of philosophy. The more consistent Eliot’s views are with Comte’s, the stronger the claim that her novels contain a systematized philosophy and that this philosophy is a reproduction of Comtist Positivism. Eliot explains how art is to produce morality in the reader by comparing the good writer with the good teacher. The cases of Romola and Maggie indicate that, for Eliot, true resignation is not trying to make the lack of a full life bearable by compensation with religion, the ascetic pleasures of sacrifice, or by the comfort of feeling that one has chosen one’s own fate.
