Less of a committment than Middlemarch, but just as powerful. 

George Eliot outside the novel, where her thinking appears with fewer disguises and sharper edges. Across essays, poems, and critical reflections, Eliot interrogates morality, sympathy, religion, art, and the social obligations of thought itself.

Forget this as a Victorian relic but a ferociously modern mind: rigorous without dogma, ethical without sentimentality, and deeply sceptical of easy moral postures. These writings show how Eliot’s fiction was underwritten by a sustained philosophical seriousness—one concerned less with judgement than with consequence, context, and the limits of human understanding.

An essential companion to the novels, and a reminder that Eliot was not just a storyteller, but a systems thinker of extraordinary range.