"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?'
George Eliot's "Middlemarch" is a sprawling exploration of English society in a period of tumultuous change. Set in the fictional town of Middlemarch in the early 1830s, the novel explores, through the lives of the inhabitants, ambition, idealism, the status of women, and the intricate web of social relations in a community on the cusp of modernity.
Before she was the revered George Eliot, she was Mary Anne Evans – a fiercely intelligent woman born in 1819 in Warwickshire, England. Her father, Robert Evans, was a land agent, and provided her with a stable, middle-class background. Evans recognized his daughter’s intellect and supported her education, uncommon for girls at the time. Mary Anne’s curiosity was insatiable, driving her to self-study in philosophy, theology, and multiple languages.
In 1857, she adopted the pen name George Eliot, a choice that stemmed from pragmatism and defiance. It allowed her to escape the 'silly novels' label unfairly attached to female authors of the time.
Her unconventional relationships, including a long-term partnership with the married George Henry Lewes, challenged Victorian social norms and shaped her perspective on marriage and women's roles. Lewes championed Eliot's writing, managed her career and pushed her to take risks. Their bond, while unconventional, provided the emotional and creative support that fuelled much of her success.
Eliot's own experiences infuse the world of Middlemarch. Its two central protagonists – Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate – both embody the struggle between aspiration and the constraints of reality. Dorothea is an idealistic, intelligent young woman who is keen to make a meaningful difference in the world. Her well-meaning desire for a purposeful life leads her to make a catastrophic choice in marrying the much older, pedantic scholar Edward Casaubon. The marriage stifles her, as she realizes that Casaubon's life's work – work she had hoped to contribute to - is empty, and that he resents her intellect. Similarly, the promising young doctor Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch with progressive ideas about medicine and reform. However, he is gradually suffocated by financial burdens and the demands of a shallow and materialistic wife.
Dorothea and Lydgate's stories parallel one another as they navigate societal limitations and the disappointments of their respective marriages.
Other key characters include:
Rosamond Vincy: Lydgate’s wife. A beautiful but shallow young woman from a once-prosperous family, Rosamond aspires to social status and material comfort. Her determination to marry Lydgate leads to a mutually draining and unhappy relationship.
Will Ladislaw, Casaubon’s passionate young cousin, with ambitions to be an artist, who is drawn to his cousin’s wife (Dorothea) who also comes to rely on him.
Fred Vincy: Rosamond's amiable but ambitionless and financially irresponsible brother. He has long been in love with Mary Garth who is beneath his social station.
Mary Garth: A practical and morally upright young woman, deeply devoted to Fred Vincy.
Nicholas Bulstrode: A wealthy banker and pillar of Middlemarch society, Bulstrode hides a dark past that jeopardizes his reputation and threatens to expose the hypocrisy beneath the town's respectable façade.
With interwoven narratives, where choices and actions have rippling consequences, we read about the machinations of local politics, the clash between old ideologies and emerging science, as well as the quiet dramas unfolding in ordinary households.
Middlemarch has endured after all this time because while it is firmly rooted in its era, it speaks to timeless human experiences: the struggle for fulfilment, the complexities of our relationships, the tension between personal desire and societal expectation, and the question of what constitutes a meaningful life.
Virginia Woolf believed that Middlemarch was one of the greatest novels in the English language. Her famous quote that Middlemarch is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” is not unqualified praise. In her essay in the Times Literary Supplement, Woolf writes about some of the imperfections in the novel – Eliot’s unwillingness to let one word stand for many, her relatively loose grip on dialogue…and yet despite this, Woolf writes that Eliot’s ability to tell a tale of limitation and thwarted ambition makes it a suitable read for adults, who can appreciate this representation of failure, rather than success.