Jonathan wrote, "...Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Elliot, was raised in a Christian family before apparently turning toward atheism."
Sadly, as a young woman, Eliot did lose her Christian faith. But I'm not sure that she actually became an atheist. I've read four of her novels, including this one. The Lifted Veil (which is really a novella) doesn't deal much with religion one way or the other, but the other three strike me as the work of someone who takes faith seriously, and does believe there's a God. Both Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch and Dinah Morris in Adam Bede are strong, positive women whose Christian faith is central to who they are. In this novel, Silas turning from embittered atheism to recovered faith in God (as evidenced in his conversation with Dolly Winthrop in chapter 16) is treated as a positive thing.
Admittedly, I don't have any evidence for Eliot's theism beyond my impressions from these novels. Peter C. Hodgson has a book out on the subject of her religious beliefs, The Mystery Beneath the Real: Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot, but I haven't read it. (It's on my "maybe to read" shelf.)
Sadly, as a young woman, Eliot did lose her Christian faith. But I'm not sure that she actually became an atheist. I've read four of her novels, including this one. The Lifted Veil (which is really a novella) doesn't deal much with religion one way or the other, but the other three strike me as the work of someone who takes faith seriously, and does believe there's a God. Both Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch and Dinah Morris in Adam Bede are strong, positive women whose Christian faith is central to who they are. In this novel, Silas turning from embittered atheism to recovered faith in God (as evidenced in his conversation with Dolly Winthrop in chapter 16) is treated as a positive thing.
Admittedly, I don't have any evidence for Eliot's theism beyond my impressions from these novels. Peter C. Hodgson has a book out on the subject of her religious beliefs, The Mystery Beneath the Real: Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot, but I haven't read it. (It's on my "maybe to read" shelf.)