Gordon Haight’s speech in Westminster Abbey on 21 June, when a memorial stone to George Eliot was unveiled
Gordon Haight, 17 July 1980
When George Eliot died in December 1880 no one doubted that England had lost its greatest novelist. It was a reasonable expectation that she would find her place in Poets’ Corner, near the grave of Charles Dickens and the bust of Thackeray. Why has it taken a century to bring this about?