1. For brief summaries of Eliot’s secular outlook, see N. Henry (2012) The Life of George Eliot, A Critical Biography (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 51–59; D. Hempton (2008) Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 19–40; N. Vance (2013) Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 93–114; S. During (2013) ‘George Eliot and Secularism’, in A. Anderson and H. E. Shaw (eds) A Companion to George Eliot (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc.), pp. 428–41; and M. Rectenwald (2013) ‘Secularism’, in M. Harris (ed.) George Eliot in Context (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 271–78.
2. G. Eliot and G. S. Haight (1954) The George Eliot Letters, 7 vols, Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 282. Eliot and Newman had become friends through the Westminster Review in the early 1850s, but she had been introduced to his work before meeting him. In particular, she read and was impressed by The Soul (1849).
3. F. W. Newman (1854) Catholic Union: Essays toward a Church of the Future as the Organization of Philanthropy (London: Chapman); and J. H. Allen (1891) Positive Religion: Essays, Fragments, and Hints (Boston: Roberts Bros).
4. For Comte’s attempts at cooperation with religious groups, especially Catholics, see M. Pickering (1993) Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 417–23.
5. S. During (2013) ‘George Eliot and Secularism’, p. 428.