Middlemarch
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
1. Primary Texts: Narrative Prose
George
Eliot. Middlemarch.
Supporting References:
- Birch, Dinah. "Middlemarch." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Middlemarch:
A Study of Provincial Life A novel by George
*Eliot, published 1871–2. The scene is laid
in the provincial town of Middlemarch, in the English Midlands,
during the years of the agitation immediately preceding the first
Reform Bill in 1832. The novel has a multiple plot, with several
interlocking sets of characters. Dorothea, an ardent and idealistic
young woman, under the negligent though affable care of her eccentric
uncle, marries the elderly pedant Mr Casaubon, despite the doubts of
her sister Celia, her neighbour and suitor Sir James Chettam (who
later marries Celia), and Mrs Cadwallader, the rector's outspoken
wife. The marriage proves unhappy. Dorothea realizes during a
disastrous honeymoon in Rome that Casaubon's scholarly plans to write
a great work, a ‘Key to all Mythologies’, are doomed, as are her
own aspirations to share in her husband's intellectual life, and her
respect for him gradually turns to pity. She is sustained by the
friendship of Casaubon's young cousin Will Ladislaw, a lively,
light-hearted young man, detested by Casaubon, who begins to suspect
that Dorothea's feelings for him are questionable; his irritation is
increased by his fear that he has acted justly but ungenerously to
his impoverished kinsman. Shortly before he dies, with characteristic
meanness, he adds a codicil to his will by which Dorothea loses her
fortune if she marries Ladislaw.
“Meanwhile, we follow the fortunes of
Fred and Rosamond Vincy, son and daughter of the mayor of
Middlemarch; the extrovert Fred, unsuitably destined to become a
clergyman, is in love with Mary Garth, an unselfish young woman who
is caring for her disagreeable and aged relative Mr Featherstone.
Mary will not accept Fred unless he rejects his father's ambition
that he should enter the church, and proves himself responsible and
self-sufficient. Rosamond, the town's beauty, sets herself to win the
hand of Tertius Lydgate, the ambitious and high-minded young doctor.
She succeeds, but the marriage is wrecked by her self-centred
materialism. Lydgate, finding himself in debt, reluctantly borrows
money from Mr Bulstrode, a religious hypocrite. Lydgate's career is
ruined when he is implicated in the death of Raffles, an unwelcome
visitor from Bulstrode's shady past. Only Dorothea, now widowed,
continues to believe in him, but she is deeply shocked to find
Ladislaw and Rosamond together in compromising circumstances.
Rosamond reveals that Ladislaw has not betrayed his love for
Dorothea, and Dorothea renounces her inheritance to marry him. Fred
Vincy becomes a steady young man, and marries Mary Garth. Lydgate is
condemned to a lucrative but unfulfilling practice as a fashionable
doctor, and dies with his early ambitions unfulfilled.
“Throughout this wide-ranging and
complex narrative, George Eliot analyses and comments upon the
social, intellectual, and political upheavals of the period,
contrasting the staunch Tory attitudes of Chettam and the
Cadwalladers with the growing demand for Reform, unsatisfactorily
espoused by the hapless Brooke, more effectively by Ladislaw, who
becomes an ‘ardent public man’, and a member of Parliament, with
Dorothea's support. The importance of marital loyalty is also a
consistent theme, movingly reflected in Mrs Bulstrode's support of
her husband after his disgrace.
“George Eliot's reputation reached
its height with Middlemarch, despite some complaints that
the action was slow or the tone didactic. Its status as one of the
greatest works of English fiction remains unquestioned.”
- Birch, Dinah. "Eliot, George." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 19 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Eliot and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Eliot, George (1819–80).
The pen‐name of Mary Ann, later Marian, Evans, novelist, born in
Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, the youngest surviving child of Robert
Evans, agent for the estates of the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall;
educated at Mrs Wallington's school in Nuneaton, and the Misses
Franklin's school in Coventry. In her girlhood she was particularly
close to her brother Isaac, from whom she was later estranged. Her
early evangelicalism did not withstand the influence of Charles Bray,
a freethinking Coventry manufacturer (a development which temporarily
alienated her father), but she remained strongly affected by
religious concepts of love and duty. Her works contain many
affectionate portraits of Dissenters and clergymen. She pursued her
education rigorously, reading widely, and devoted herself to
completing a translation of D.
F. *Strauss's Life of Jesus, which
appeared without her name in 1846. In 1850 she met John
*Chapman, and became a contributor to the
Westminster
Review; she moved to 142 Strand, London, in
1851, as a paying guest in the Chapmans' home, where her emotional
attachment to him proved an embarrassment. She became assistant
editor to the Westminster Review in 1851, and in the same
year met Herbert
*Spencer, for whom she also developed strong
feelings which were not reciprocated, though the two remained
friends. In 1854 she published a translation of Ludwig
*Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity;
she endorsed his view that religious belief is an imaginative
necessity for man and a projection of his interest in his own
species, a heterodoxy of which the readers of her novels only
gradually became aware. At about the same time she joined G.
H. *Lewes in a union without marriage (he could
not divorce his wife) that lasted until his death; they travelled to
the Continent in that year and set up house together on their return.
He was to be a constant support throughout her working life and their
relationship, although its irregularity caused her much anxiety, was
gradually accepted by their friends. ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev.
Amos Barton’, the first of the Scenes
of Clerical Life, appeared in Blackwood's
Magazine in 1857, followed by ‘Mr Gilfil's
Love‐Story’ and ‘Janet's Repentance’; these at once attracted
praise for their domestic realism, pathos, and humour, and
speculation about the identity of ‘George Eliot’, who was widely
supposed to be a clergyman or possibly a clergyman's wife. She began
Adam
Bede (1859) in 1858; it was received with great
enthusiasm and at once established her as a leading novelist. The
*Mill on the Floss appeared in 1860 and Silas
Marner in 1861. In 1860 she visited Florence,
where she conceived the idea of Romola,
and returned to do further research in 1861; it was published in the
Cornhill
Magazine in 1862–3. John Blackwood, son of William
*Blackwood, was unable to meet her terms; by
this time she was earning a considerable income from her work. Felix
Holt, the Radical appeared in 1866. She
travelled in Spain in 1867, and her dramatic poem The Spanish
Gypsy (conceived on an earlier visit to Italy, and inspired by
Tintoretto) appeared in 1868. Middlemarch
was published in instalments in 1871–2 and Daniel
Deronda, her last great novel, in the same way
in 1874–6. She was now at the height of her fame, and widely
recognized as the greatest living English novelist, admired by
readers as diverse as Turgenev,
Henry
*James, and Queen *Victoria.
In 1878 Lewes died. Her Impressions
of Theophrastus Such, a collection of moral
essays and character sketches, appeared in 1879, and in 1880 she
married the 40‐year‐old John Walter Cross, whom she had met in
Rome in 1869 and who had become her financial adviser. The marriage
distressed many of her friends, but brought the consolation of a
congratulatory note from her brother Isaac, who had not communicated
with her since 1857. She died seven months later.
After her death her reputation
declined somewhat, and Leslie
*Stephen indicated much of the growing
reaction in an obituary notice (1881) which praised the ‘charm’
and autobiographical elements of the early works, but found the
later novels painful and excessively reflective. Virginia
*Woolf defended her in an essay (1919) which
declared Middlemarch to be ‘one of the few English novels
written for grown‐up people’, but critics like David
*Cecil and Oliver Elton continued to emphasize
the division between her creative powers and supposedly damaging
intellect. In the late 1940s a new generation of critics, led by F.
R. *Leavis (The Great Tradition,
1948), introduced a new respect for and understanding of her mature
works; Leavis praises her ‘traditional moral sensibility’, her
‘luminous intelligence’, and concludes that she ‘is not as
transcendently great as Tolstoy, but she is great, and great
in the same way’.
As well as the novels for which she is
remembered, she wrote various poems, including ‘O may I join the
choir invisible’ (1867), ‘Agatha’ (1869), Brother and
Sister (1869), a sonnet sequence recalling her happy childhood,
‘The Legend of Jubal’ (1870), and ‘Armgart’ (1871); also the
novellas ‘The Lifted Veil’ (1859) and ‘Brother Jacob’
(1864). Her letters and journals were edited by Cross, 3 vols
(1885); her complete letters were edited by G. S. Haight, 9 vols
(1954–78), who also wrote a life (1968). A Writer's Notebook
1854–1879 and Uncollected Writings were edited by
Joseph Wiesenfarth (1981). See also Rosemary Ashton, George
Eliot: A Life (1996).”
- a
- a
- a
Comments