It's the sort of question that a man and a woman might very well give different answers to, but it seems to me that there are different sorts of things that erm some women tend to notice, different sorts of ideas that tend to assume prominence in the imaginations of some women, and erm to that extent I think that George Eliot's sympathy for other people, including people that she doesn't actually agree with, is perhaps a characteristic that one might tend to find more in a women novelist than in a male novelist, although I'm not sure that one can be absolutely dogmatic and say that one would never find a male novelist who could write the way that George Eliot does.
