Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/310

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302
GEORGE ELIOT.

tions I asked over and over, but it was some years later before I found any reply to them. She was evidently, from her unpopular choice of works to translate into English, a Freethinker herself, as well as a thinker.

I had known and admired the novelist George Eliot for several years, as the author of "Adam Bede,” and “The Mill on the Floss,” before I came to know that George Eliot and Marian Evans, my unknown translator, were one and the same person. Marian Evans had been to me the greater mystery. Why I had never heard more of her than as the translator of these two philosophical German books puzzled me. 1 felt that she must have a strong individuality, from the fact that she had dared to make her public appearance as a translator of heretical and unorthodox works: and it was with a sense of supreme satisfaction that I found her at last—a woman—one of my own sex—and a George Eliot! I gloried in the reality of her literary power, and in her grandeur of genius, as if