ABSTRACT
George Eliot seems to have thought extensively about her own death as well as the deaths of her characters, and her emphasis throughout her writing on wills and inheritance is one of the ways she uses her art to teach moral lessons, to illustrate the principles of solidarity and continuity, and to demonstrate the integral role played by the idea of providence. In showing the impact of the past on the present and the responsibility to future generations, she thinks of inheritance in both tangible and intangible terms. George Eliot left an impressive financial legacy to the descendants of George Henry Lewes, even though she left a much more meaningful intangible gift to her readers in the moral message she teaches in her poetry and in her novels.
