Peter Tyler (“Wild woman with a gentle vision”, 11 October) mentions that George Eliot referred to Teresa of Avila in the preface to Middlemarch – but she also does so in the finale and it’s far more than a passing reference. George Eliot’s library included books by and about St Teresa; she had read Teresa’s Life in its original Spanish long before the publication of Middlemarch, which records the spiritual biography of one Dorothea Brooke, who recognises that “if she had written a book she must have done it as Saint Theresa did under the command of an authority that constrained her conscience”; as a fictional character, Brooke bears witness to George Eliot’s admiration for the unconventional and rebellious saint who struggled with her