Motherhood Quote by George Eliot

Childhood memory gets cast here as a private creation myth: not God, not history, not even the self, but a face. George Eliot’s line compresses an entire philosophy of moral formation into a scene so small it could fit inside a nursery. “Life began” is deliberately absolute, yet what follows isn’t an event you’d engrave on a monument. It’s “waking up” - consciousness arriving in increments - and “loving” something before you can argue with it. Eliot, the great anatomist of sympathy, makes affection the first way of knowing.

The sentence works because it treats love as pre-verbal cognition. The mother’s face is both literal and symbolic: a source of food, safety, recognition, and the first mirror in which the child learns that the world can answer back. Eliot chooses “face” rather than “mother” to emphasize perception over biography. A face is read, not possessed; it changes, it expresses, it can be lost. That subtle fragility foreshadows Eliot’s broader project: ethics built from attention, from noticing another person’s inner weather.

Context sharpens the intent. Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) lived in a century that sentimentalized motherhood while restricting women’s agency; she also defied Victorian norms in her own domestic life. The line borrows the era’s reverence for maternal influence but redirects it from ideology to intimacy. It’s not “my mother’s virtue” or “my mother’s teaching.” It’s the raw, formative fact of attachment - a radical claim that our deepest beliefs start not in doctrine, but in the earliest experiences of being seen.