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Middlemarch Reading Order
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-72) by George Eliot is a novel published in eight installments and set in the fictional English Midlands town of Middlemarch during the period 1829-32, before the Reform Act of 1832. It has four loosely interwoven narrative strands: the story of Dorothea Brooke, a young woman of great intellectual ambition and moral earnestness who makes a disastrous marriage to the elderly scholar Edward Casaubon; the story of Tertius Lydgate, a brilliant young doctor whose medical ambitions are compromised by his marriage to the beautiful and shallow Rosamond Vincy; the story of the banker Nicholas Bulstrode, whose public piety conceals a criminal past; and the story of Fred Vincy, Rosamond's brother, who struggles with debt and eventually finds his vocation. The four strands are connected by the town of Middlemarch itself, which Eliot treats as a social organism — a web of interdependence in which each character's fate is shaped by the community's judgments, gossip, and economic relationships. The novel is consistently ranked among the two or three greatest novels in the English language; Virginia Woolf called it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.'
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Middlemarch (1871-72)
Complete Middlemarch Book List
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Middlemarch
George Eliot·1872
Middlemarch — Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the main character in Middlemarch?
Middlemarch has several central characters, but Dorothea Brooke is generally considered the primary protagonist. She is a young woman of great intelligence and moral seriousness who lives in early Victorian England, where the available outlets for such qualities in women are severely limited. Her tragic error is her first marriage to Edward Casaubon, an elderly scholar whose great work — a Key to All Mythologies — she hopes to contribute to, but who proves to be emotionally cold and intellectually more limited than she believed. After Casaubon's death, Dorothea falls in love with Will Ladislaw, a young idealist who has none of Casaubon's social standing or wealth. The novel's final paragraph — one of the most discussed endings in English fiction — meditates on how Dorothea's 'unhistoric acts' have shaped the world: 'the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.'
How long is Middlemarch and is it worth reading?
Middlemarch is approximately 800-900 pages depending on the edition, making it one of the longer novels in the Victorian canon (though shorter than Dickens's longest). The consensus among those who have read it is that it is worth reading with unusual intensity — the novelist Martin Amis has called it 'the greatest English novel,' Zadie Smith has described it as the book that most changed her, and it regularly tops polls of the greatest novels in the language. The difficulty for modern readers is often the first hundred pages, which require patience with the social world of early Victorian England and with Dorothea's somewhat baffling decision to marry Casaubon. The novel opens out dramatically as it proceeds, and by the novel's midpoint most readers find it entirely absorbing.
What is the relationship between Middlemarch and the Reform Act of 1832?
Eliot sets the novel in 1829-32, the years immediately before the Reform Act, and the political debates about Parliamentary reform form a background to all four of the novel's narrative strands. Lydgate's medical reforms in the hospital parallel the broader debates about institutional reform; Bulstrode's influence over Middlemarch institutions anticipates what will change when the established order is reorganized; Will Ladislaw's journalism and political enthusiasm reflects the reforming spirit of the age. Eliot is careful to show the limits of reform — the Reform Act is coming, but Middlemarch will remain Middlemarch, with all its web of social constraint and gossip — and the novel is partly a meditation on the gap between what political change promises and what it delivers in the lives of ordinary people.
What is the 'Key to All Mythologies' and why is it important?
The Key to All Mythologies is the great scholarly work that Edward Casaubon has been working on for years — a systematic account of the mythological traditions of all human cultures that will reveal their common origin and structure. It is Dorothea's belief in this project that leads her to marry Casaubon: she imagines herself contributing to a great intellectual achievement, serving as the eyes and hands of a great scholar. As the marriage progresses, however, Dorothea comes to understand that the Key to All Mythologies is a futile project: Casaubon has not kept up with contemporary German scholarship, which has already done much of what he is attempting, and his temperament is too anxious and defensive to allow him to complete anything. The Key to All Mythologies is Eliot's satirical emblem of a certain kind of male intellectual vanity — the scholar who mistakes his ambition for his achievement.
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