Note 5 to Chapter 1 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Throughout this study I assume that Eliot and Lewes thought alike on important questions of aesthetic theory. Gordon S. Haight has challenged Alice R. Kaminsky for making the same assumption, but Bernard J. Paris seems to accept it; see Haight, "George Eliot's Theory of Fiction," The Victorian Newsletter, 10 (1956), 1-3, and Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Quest for Values (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965), pp. 37-38. I have never seen it clearly demonstrated that Eliot and Lewes disagreed on any major issue, and anyone who reads the essays of both cannot help being struck by the many parallels of thought and phrasing.
Last modified 20 September 2000