Synopsis
George Eliot's masterpiece, portraying every level of society in a provincial English town, tells the story of the romantic idealist Dorothea Brooke, her misguided marriage to a dessicated scholar incapable of loving her, and the passionate love affair that ultimately brings meaning to her life. A parallel plot involves the plight of Lydgate, the equally idealistic doctor who arrives in Middlemarch hoping to bring advanced medical techniques to the village poor, but becomes ensnared by a spoiled and materialistic young woman. The novel explores the idea that the search for one's true function in life may be warped or frustrated by one's environment--but also that those obstacles may ultimately be overcome or transcended. MIDDLEMARCH, published in 1872 but set 40 years earlier, is a grand Victorian panorama--a fascinating and detailed look at English life, rich in personality types worthy of Dickens. It is also an intensely readable and gripping story, and an unexpectedly witty one, sometimes reminiscent of Jane Austen in its sharp-grained social observations. Like all Eliot's fiction, MIDDLEMARCH has a strong moral center--epitomized in the noble Dorothea--that is unrelated to formal religion and that is closely allied with a healthy skepticism about any belief system that does not include a deep and abiding respect for human frailty.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1977-01-01 |
Industry Reviews
"[George Eliot] was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment. Briefly, it meant that the novel ceased to be solely a love story, an autobiography, or a story of adventure. It became, as it had already become with the Russians, of much wider scope."
Virginia Woolf
"Each [i.e. the stories of Lydgate and Dorothea] is a tale of matrimonial infelicity, but the conditions in each one are so different...that the mind passes from one to the other with that supreme sense of the vastness and variety of human life...which it belongs only to the greatest novels to produce."
"The House of Fiction" - Henry James
"It is a novel, above all, about intelligence and its triumphs, failures, distractions, fallings-short, compromise, and doggedness."
introduction - A. S. Byatt
"...[E]asily the best of the half-dozen best novels in the world."
Pelican Guide to English Literature - Geoffrey Tillotson
"[A] treasure-house of details, but...an indifferent whole."
Pelican Guide to English Literature - Henry James
"Her sense of community, her finely modulated articulation of passion and idea, the clarity and firmness of her characterization--these things alone justify Virginia Woolf's remark that 'Middlemarch' was one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."
"George Eliot in 'Middlemarch'" - Quentin Anderson
"It is not the strangeness and awfulness of life, it is not the joy of life, it is not the misery of life, nor the absurdity of life, that is first with her: all these she understands and feels; but what she most keenly understands and most keenly feels are the lessons which all this strangeness, awfulness, joy, misery, and absurdity bring for those who will read them aright, as well as the obligation that she herself is under to help others to read them aright."
Whipple
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