Novel
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871
Opening lines
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Dorothea Brooke, a rich and pious young woman of the Midlands, wants to devote her life to something great. Against everyone's advice, she marries the clergyman Casaubon, a scholar twenty-seven years her senior who has long been preparing a key to all mythologies, and believes she will help him with it. At the same time there arrives in town a young doctor full of plans, Lydgate, who wants to reform his science and run the new hospital financed by a banker. He falls in love with Rosamond Vincy, the prettiest girl in the place, who has other ideas about what a successful life is.
Context
The book grew out of two separate, unfinished texts. Its author had begun in 1869 a novel about a young provincial doctor; in November 1870 she undertook a long short story about an exalted young girl, and it was the following spring that she decided to join the two. Her partner proposed to the publisher that it be issued in eight parts at five shillings, on the model of a great French novel. The eight instalments appeared from December 1871 to December 1872, at first every two months, then monthly for the last three, and the first reviews were divided.
Who it is for
A very long novel with several parallel plots set in a single town. Virginia Woolf called it one of the few English novels written for adults.
Prizes and reception
Ranked in 2015 the first of the British novels in a BBC survey of foreign critics.
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