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Before she was George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans translated Spinoza’s magnum opus, Ethics, while she was living in Berlin. For the first time in more than a century, a new edition of her translation will be made available, and for the Guardian, Alison Flood and Lindesay Irvine take a look at how the translation sheds new light on Eliot’s life. “She was basically immersed in this project for a couple of years just before she began writing fiction,” says Clare Carlisle, a reader in philosophy and theology at King’s College London. “It was the last thing she did before she wrote her stories and became George Eliot. A large part of Spinoza’s Ethics gives this insightful analysis of human emotion, and I think that’s something she obviously learned from, because she has this really amazing understanding of human emotions and how they work.”
Image credit: Alexandre-Louis-François d’Albert-Durade
