Growing Up Like Romola: The Spiritual Evolutions of George Eliot and Bernard Shaw

abstract:Bernard Shaw and George Eliot both criticized traditional religious doctrines and institutions, yet also recognized the strength and sense of purpose religion could offer and sought in their writings to identify some new religion that they could accept as intellectually honest. This article examines Eliot's efforts to articulate such a principle in her novel Romola (1862–63) and Shaw's echoes and critiques of her ideas in Major Barbara (1905). While Eliot's ending calls for a humanistic faith rooted in compassion and fellowship, Shaw dismissed individual compassion as an ineffective substitute for socialist reform. Moreover, whereas Eliot's novel ultimately rejects the idea of religious institutions, Shaw left the issue unsettled in Major Barbara and returned to it in later writings in an effort to formulate an idea of a widely shared religion grounded in economic equity and cooperation with the Life Force.