‘In her art, [Eliot] found room for a many-layered, tension-infused conception of it that can feel at once capacious and stifling, daring and intimidating—marriage as a suspenseful adventure and an arduous endeavour. She has a way of leaving her characters, her women especially, with their souls expanded, yet seeming somehow chastened. You would not, in other words, mistake them for Jane Austen characters.’ The Atlantic
Middlemarch is a portrait of life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 and illuminates the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century. In it, George Eliot weaves a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love.
Populating its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past.
George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a masterly evocation of connected lives, changing fortunes and human frailties in a provincial community.
Life is the Thing
Recently I decided to reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). Half a lifetime had passed since my first reading. I remembered how satisfying I had found the book then; now I wondered how I...
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