Novelist’s work on the philosopher’s landmark Ethics helped develop her astute grasp of human emotion
Having languished in obscurity for more than a century, a new edition of George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics will be published next year, shedding new light on the creator of Middlemarch.
The author, born Mary Ann Evans, completed her translation of this central text of western philosophy in 1856, before she had taken on her pen name and while she was living in Berlin with George Lewes. If a publisher had taken it up, it would have been the first translation of the Ethics into English. But Lewes fell out with publisher Henry Bohn over £25, and the work fell by the wayside while Evans moved on to fiction and her nom de plume with the publication of Scenes from Clerical Life in 1857 and Adam Bede in 1859.
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