Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Summary
Dorothea Brooke, idealistic and hungry for a life of real purpose, marries the dry, aging scholar Edward Casaubon expecting to assist some great intellectual work, only to find his research a hollow, unfinishable project and the marriage itself airless. Casaubon dies partway through the novel, attaching to his will a punitive codicil that strips Dorothea of her inheritance should she ever marry his younger cousin, Will Ladislaw, whom Casaubon suspected, correctly as it turns out, of loving her. Eliot runs a second, parallel disaster alongside Dorothea's: the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch hoping to advance real medical research, marries the beautiful, socially anxious Rosamond Vincy, and watches his ambitions collapse under her extravagant spending and her total indifference to his work, until Lydgate abandons his research entirely and settles into a conventional, unhappy practice, dying at fifty a smaller man than he set out to be. Around these two failed unions, Eliot builds out the whole town, tradesmen, clergy, and landowners caught in the slow social change of the years just before the 1832 Reform Act, including the more hopeful match between the once feckless Fred Vincy and the plain spoken Mary Garth, who refuses him outright until he actually earns her regard. Dorothea, in the end, forfeits the Casaubon fortune without hesitation and marries Ladislaw, choosing a smaller, freer life over the grand one she once imagined for herself.
Eliot's real subject across all this is how ordinary, well meaning people misjudge their own lives, and she narrates with a psychological patience that rarely leaves a character, even a foolish or a cruel one, without some claim on the reader's understanding. The pace is unhurried and the cast wide, closer to a study of an entire community than a single plot, and a reader willing to sit with Eliot's long, exact sentences will find the book's moral intelligence has few equals in the language.
Eliot began the novel as two separate, unrelated projects before combining them partway through composition.
Historical Context & Significance
William Blackwood and Sons published Middlemarch in eight parts between December 1871 and December 1872, a serial format George Henry Lewes, Eliot's partner, proposed to the publisher after Victor Hugo had used a similar scheme for Les Miserables. Initial reviews split: the Spectator's R. H. Hutton complained of a melancholic quality, the Athenaeum called it overwrought, while the critic Edith Simcox, in the Academy, called it a landmark in fiction owing to the originality of its form. Henry James, reviewing it in 1873, called it a treasure house of details assembled into an indifferent whole, counting it among both the strongest and the weakest of English novels.
Virginia Woolf reversed that verdict decisively in 1919, calling Middlemarch the magnificent book, one of the very few English novels written for grown up people, and F. R. Leavis's 1948 study The Great Tradition helped cement its rediscovery as a masterpiece. Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have both called it probably the greatest novel in the English language, and a 2015 BBC poll ranked it first among the hundred greatest British novels.