George Eliot and Goethe

Abstract George Eliot’s debt to Goethe has long been established. This chapter argues that Eliot’s affinity with Goethe’s model of art developed through and alongside George Henry Lewes’s biography which, like Goethe’s art and career, held deep personal as well as intellectual, aesthetic, and moral significance for her. Her caveats about Goethe in 1853 gave way by 1855 to Eliot’s Wilhelm Meister essay, which explicitly mentions Lewes’s forthcoming biography and sees Goethe as a towering figure who ‘brings us into the presence of living, generous humanity—mixed and erring’, with patient, tolerant understanding. The chapter also explores Goethe’s new poetic path late in his career with the West-östliche Divan (lauded by Lewes) in relation to Eliot’s turn to poetry and another culture in The Spanish Gypsy, and assesses the relevance of Wilhelm Meister’s Mignon for Eliot’s treatment of gender and sexuality in her own fiction.