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". This chapter shows, through an interpretation of Eliot's work that a different approach to investigating the philosophy in Eliot's novels, one generated by a different conception of moral philosophy, can produce an account of her moral philosophy that is both fruitful and no less rational or evident. An examination of Eliot's work shows the reader the type of account of moral philosophy that—unlike that of the dominant moral view—would be able to accommodate the type of understanding. Mary Wollstonecraft's work also showed the reader the narrowness and rigidity of the boundaries of the "philosophical" on the dominant model of moral philosophy.
