If Dorothea, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, doesn’t win you over with her profound and subtle range of human qualities, surely her respectful empathy towards canine feelings is a vote-winner. I love her careful attention to them, and the delicacy with which she rejects their friendliness if she has to.

‘She was always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and very polite if she had to decline their advances.’

Source: George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 418

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