By far and away the most erudite of nineteenth century English novelists* George Eliot was also the most 'Virian,' as can be seen from this eloquent description of the Bible; "I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life . . . to be most dishonorable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness."
An early proponent of evolution (or the development theory as she would have called it) who considered Darwin's Origin of Species an epoch in our slow march to clear sightedness, Eliot's knowledge of Biblical criticism allowed her to see sooner than most the need for an 'atheist religion' that nurtured the "deeply awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with the difficulty of the human lot." Eliot took the view that religion was deeply invidious to morality, and that the principal consideration of creating a secular morality was the overcoming of egoism likely to suppress natural sympathies towards others. As such, her novels (such as Middlemarch and the Mill on the Floss) see her characters progressing from egotism to empathy through their interactions with others. Without god it is suggested, the need for duty and sympathy can only be stronger. This was a view that saw her come into conflict with Nietzche who described Eliot's school as 'English blockheads' and saw little point in attempting to preserve certain aspects of religion in isolation from others.
Eliot has frequently been considered as bearing more resemblance to Tolstoy than to her coutryman and contemporary Dickens, though the question of her influence on later writers is more straightforward, with Hardy, James, Forster, Woolf and Lawrence known to have admired Eliot. Eliot has been nominated as a Virian saint for insistence on the importance of reason and empathy.