PERSON
George Eliot
The supreme Victorian realist who made sympathy—the disciplined imaginative inhabitation of another's interior—the moral center of fiction, and whose lifelong argument that the particular singular life is irreducible now stands as the sharpest available critique of machines that speak in statistical averages.
George Eliot—pen name of Mary Ann Evans, born 1819 in Warwickshire and dead in 1880 at sixty-one—is the novelist who made a single conviction the spine of an entire body of work: that the inner life of an ordinary person is real, dense, and morally consequential, and that art's supreme task is to make us feel its reality. She arrived at this not as sentiment but through a long passage out of orthodox Christianity, through her translations of Strauss and Feuerbach, into a hard-won humanism that placed the relation between persons where God had been. When she turned to fiction she turned to it as a vehicle for that humanism, insisting that art is the nearest thing to life, a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. That sentence is now under quiet, enormous pressure, because we have built systems that produce the
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