'the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to
feel with him'
George Eliot's first published work consisted of three short novellas:
'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton', 'Mr Gilfil's
Love-Story', and 'Janet's Repentance'. Their depiction of the lives of
ordinary men and women in a provincial Midlands town initiated a new era
of nineteenth-century literary realism. The tales concern rural members
of the clergy and the gossip and factions that a small town generates
around them. Amos Barton only realizes how much he depends upon his
wife's selfless love when she dies prematurely; Mr Gilfil's devotion to
a girl who loves another is only fleetingly rewarded; and Janet Dempster
suffers years of domestic abuse before the influence of an Evangelical
minister turns her life around.
These stories are remarkable for the tenderness with which Eliot
portrays a bygone time of religious belief in a newly secular age,
giving literary fiction an alternative language to religion and
philosophy for the observation and understanding of human experience.
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