In her private life, as in her fiction, George Eliot was much concerned with the idea of the family. Her own experience of families was a markedly unusual one: her mother had died when she was only 16; she had split dramatically from her father at the age of 23, and, on her liaison with Lewes, she was disowned by her brother, Isaac. Moreover, Lewes, with whom she cohabited, had a family by his first wife in which the children were not in every case fathered by him. Latterly Eliot married John Cross, a man whom she was accustomed to call ‘Nephew’. Despite all this, or possibly because of it, her correspondence reveals a particular desire to cast other relationships into a familial mould. She assumed a motherly role in relation to Lewes's sons and their wives, and ‘adopted’ a stream of admiring younger women whom she called her ‘spiritual daughters’ – Emilia Pattison, Edith Simcox, and Elma Stuart, whose grave, next to Eliot 's in Highgate Cemetery, bears the inscription: ‘one who for 8½ blessed years George Eliot called by the sweet name of “Daughter”’. A self-styled mother, she signed her letters ‘Mutter ’, ‘Madre’, ‘Mother’, ‘Your loving mother (in the spirit)’.

As a woman who had no children of her own, this invention of herself in the maternal role is particularly striking. Around the time of the fatal illness of one of Lewes's sons, she wrote a letter to Emilia Pattison saying that she ‘profoundly rejoice[d] that [she] never brought a child into the world’, but, she went on to say, she was ‘conscious of having an unused stock of motherly tenderness, which sometimes overflows, but not without discrimination’ (L. v. 52–3). This Wordsworthian construction – an ‘overflow’ of powerful feeling, which, in his ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’, the poet had held to be the provocation to poetry – has led some critics to assume that Eliot 's excess of ‘motherly tenderness’ lay behind the production of her fiction. In this account, her novels take the place of her babies, putting to good use her ‘unused stock’ of maternal feeling. Such a reading is backed up by Eliot 's own estimation of the importance that her relationship with Lewes held in the production of her work: it is as though her novels are the babies that the couple never had.