“I have been reading Newman's Apologia pro Vita Suâ,” wrote George Eliot in 1868, “with such absorbing interest that I found it impossible to forsake the book until I had finished it. ... I have been made so indignant by Kingsley's mixture of arrogance, coarse impertinence and unscrupulousness with real intellectual incompetence, that my first interest in Newman's answer arose from a wish to see what I consider thoroughly vicious writing thoroughly castigated. But the Apology now mainly affects me as the revelation of a life—how different in form from one's own, yet with how close a fellowship in its needs and burthens—I mean spiritual needs and burthens.”