Letter from George Eliot to Francois D’Albert Durade

In this letter to artist and friend François D’Albert Durade, George Eliot (who signs off here as Marian Evans Lewes) elucidates the humanist philosophy which underpinned her life and work, and elaborates on the evolution of her own attitude to religion and belief. When she had first stayed with Durade ten years earlier, Eliot writes, she ‘had not yet lost the attitude of antagonism which belongs to the renunciation of any belief.’ She refers in her letter to her ‘argumentative tendencies’ during that period, having lost her faith at 22, and devoting much time and thought to challenging orthodox Christianity. However, Eliot explains, ‘ten years of experience have wrought great changes in that inward self’, and she no longer feels ‘any antagonism towards any faith in which human sorrow & human longing for purity have expressed themselves’. She has never, though, returned to Christianity, and rather than being concerned with ideas of an afterlife, or concepts of the soul, writes of her ‘most rooted conviction’ that ‘the proper sphere of all our highest emotions are our struggling fellow-men and this earthly existence’. Durade, a Swiss painter, had hosted Eliot in Geneva 1849-50, and was responsible for one of her best known likenesses, which hangs today in the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry. Also in this letter, Eliot expresses her deep sympathy with Durade’s wife, who had recently lost a close friend. The empathy for and heartfelt interest in others which characterised her attitudes also underpinned her fiction: a rich humanist legacy.

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