ABSTRACT
Mary Ann Evans was born November 22, 1819, and began to call herself George Eliot when she wrote Scenes of Clerical Life in 1856. From childhood, Mary Ann Evans was thinking about writing fiction. She begins her Note entitled “How I Came to Write Fiction” by saying, “it had always been a vague dream of mine that some time or other I might write a novel” (Harris, 289). However, her early letters make it clear that while she was still committed to traditional religion, her early literary endeavors produced acute guilt because she felt she was wasting her time and threatening her hope for heaven. She believed that her desire to write fiction was incompatible with her faith. My suggestion is that not only her “loss” of her traditional faith in orthodox Christianity but the purely human moral aesthetic which she crafted for herself are her solutions to this quandary.
