"The significant writers to whom Spinoza has significantly mattered range across genres and sensibilities, and their reasons for considering him artistically relevant vary as widely as their methods of making him so. Some writers declared themselves devotees of his thought and were strengthened in their art by their interpretations of his views. Others were deeply bothered by some aspect of his system—his determinism, for example, or his insistence on the supremacy of reason over the passions—and made art out of their resistance. George Eliot (1819–1890), arguably the most philosophically inspired of the great nineteenth-century British novelists, falls into the first category. She decided to write fiction seven months after completing her translation of the Ethics, the first in English, and her view of her writing as a “set of experiments” is imprinted with certain Spinozist positions. The robust determinism to which she subjects her characters, as well as the conception of freedom and virtue that moves her plots along to their ethically resounding dénouements, bears the impressions of her close relationship with Spinoza's works."
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Rebecca Goldstein, in her article 'Literary Spinoza,'. In: The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, edited by Michael Della Rocca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza
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Baruch Spinoza
philosopher, Bible translator, grinder of lenses
1632 – 1677 · Dutch Republic
Benedictus de Spinoza (24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a social and metaphysical philosopher known for the elaborate development of his monist philosophy, which has become known as Spinozism. Controversy regarding his ideas led to his excommunication from the Jewish community of his native Amsterdam. He was named Baruch ("blessed" in Hebrew) Spinoza by his synagogue elders and known as Bento de Spinoza or Bento d'Espiñoza, but afterwards used the name Benedictus ("blessed" in Latin) de
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