Partly as the result of her studies and partly as the result of contact with other minds, Marian began to grow sceptical about the religious beliefs she had entertained.  This took place probably during her twenty-third year, but the growth of the new ideas was slow at first.  As one of her friends has suggested, it was her eagerness for positive knowledge which made her an unbeliever.  She had no love of mere doubt, no desire to disagree with accepted doctrines, but she was not content unless she could get at the facts and reach what was just and reasonable.  “It is seldom,” says this person, “that a mind of so much power is so free from the impulse to dissent, and that not from too ready credulousness, but rather because the consideration of doubtful points was habitually crowded out, one may say, by the more ready and delighted acceptance of whatever accredited facts and doctrines might be received unquestioningly.  We can imagine George Eliot in youth, burning to master all the wisdom and learning of the world; we cannot imagine her failing to acquire any kind of knowledge on the pretext that her teacher was in error about something else than the matter in hand; and it is undoubtedly to this natural preference for the positive side of things that we are indebted for the singular breadth and completeness of her knowledge and culture.  A mind like hers must have preyed disastrously upon itself during the years of comparative solitude in which she lived at Foleshill, had it not been for that inexhaustible source of delight in every kind of intellectual acquisition.  Languages, music, literature, science and philosophy interested her alike; it was early in this period that in the course of a walk with a friend she paused and clasped her hands with a wild aspiration that she might live ’to reconcile the philosophy of Locke and Kant!’ Years afterward she remembered the very turn of the road where she had spoken it.”

The spiritual struggles of Maggie Tulliver give a good picture of Marian Evans’ mental and spiritual experiences at this time.  Her friends and relatives were scandalized by her scepticism.  Her father could not at all sympathize with her changed religious attitude, and treated her harshly.  She refused to attend church, and this made the separation so wide that it was proposed to break up the home.  By the advice of friends she at last consented to outwardly conform to her father’s wishes, and a partial reconciliation was effected.  This alienation, however, had a profound effect upon her mind.  She slowly grew away from the intellectual basis of her old beliefs, but, with Maggie, she found peace and strength in self-renunciation, and in the cultivation of that inward trust which makes the chief anchorage of strong natures.  She bore this experience patiently, and without any diminution of her affection; but she also found various friends among the more cultivated people of Coventry, who could sympathize with her in her studies and with her radical views in religion.