SOURCE: "Death and Immortality: George Eliot's Solution," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 2, September, 1969, pp. 222-6.

In the following essay, Hurley contends that George Eliot's characters seek immortality through the family rather than through religion.

If the novelist seeks to explain life, one of the things he must also explain is death. The question of life is, how am I to satisfy my desire to live? Given a historical realization of death, the desire to live must somehow accommodate the challenge that apparently ends that life and frustrates the desire. Thus each change in man's explanation of life has been accompanied by a change in his explanation of death, and each literature has its distinctive approach to death as well as to life.¹ No literary period since the Elizabethan had its inherited explanation of life challenged so profoundly as the Victorian, and it is natural that its later and...