Like Woolf, who concludes that Mary is ‘alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living’, Eliot detects ‘under the brave bearing of a strong and truthful nature, the beating of a loving woman’s heart, which teaches her not to undervalue the smallest offices of domestic care or kindliness’. Woolf’s Mary is carrying out experiments in living; Eliot’s Mary responds to ordinary kindness because she knows how difficult life can be. They each see themselves in her. Mary is of use to both because she was one of the first of her – their – genus, both origin and accompaniment.