George Eliot believed that reading imaginative fiction brought real moral benefits, because of the way it enlarged the circle of our sympathy, or what we would now call “empathy.” In an essay, she wrote, “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. . . . A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.”
