ABSTRACT
Ostensibly a notice of The Antigone of Sophocles: Text with Short English Notes for the Use of Schools (Oxford, 1855), 'The Antigone and Its Moral' was begun, according to George Eliot's Journal, on 25 March 1856. In her high estimate of the tragedy and her analysis of it as the 'antagonism of valid claims' she follows the lead of the German critics of the play, but there is an intense personal note in her argument for the universality of the conflict: 'Wherever the strength of a man's intellect, or moral sense, or affection brings him into opposition with the rules which society has sanctioned, there is renewed the conflict between Antigone and Creon'. Her own life, before the days of success as a novelist, could be resolved into a series of such conflicts, and if they were not strictly tragic, they were at least intensely painful to a mind like hers, in which the principles of intellectual independence and of piety were equally strong.
