''the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him''George Eliot''s first published work consisted of three short novellas: ''The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton'', ''Mr Gilfil''s Love-Story'', and ''Janet''s Repentance''. Their depiction of the lives of ordinary men and women in a provincial Midlands town initiated a new era of nineteenth-century literary realism. The tales concern rural members of the clergy and the gossip and factions that a small town generates around them. Amos Barton only realizes how much he depends upon his wife''sselfless love when she dies prematurely; Mr Gilfil''s devotion to a girl who loves another is only fleetingly rewarded; and Janet Dempster suffers years of domestic abuse before the influence of an Evangelical minister turns her life around. These stories are remarkable for the tenderness with which Eliot portrays a bygone time of religious belief in a newly secular age, giving literary fiction an alternativ
