This newer conception is expressed in both the form and content of Adam Bede. Nearly all of these thinkers promoted a humanistic and tolerant, as opposed to a rigidly religious, conception of human nature. In 1854 she also produced a translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. George Eliot’s translation of David Strauss’ controversial work The Life of Jesusappeared in 1846 Strauss had argued that we must reject the literal truth of the gospels and accept them as “myths,” as archetypal constructs of the social imagination. A writer and advocate of realism, Lewes was the first person to bring the positivism of Auguste Comte to the attention of English thinkers. She was exposed to the ideas of Carlyle, Emerson, Mill, and Huxley, and more intimately acquainted with figures such as Herbert Spencer, as well as George Henry Lewes, with whom she entered in 1865 into a lifelong partnership outside of marriage. She contributed to, and eventually became assistant editor of, the Westminster Review, a position that gave her access to much liberal thought. Her intellectual and religious horizons were later expanded through various influences. Her early life was spent in Warwickshire where she fell under the spell of a narrow religious evangelicalism inspired by John Wesley’s Methodist movement. One of the most succinct yet poignant statements of realism was made by the major Victorian novelist George Eliot (1819–1880), the latter being the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans.

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