Eyeing George Eliot's 840-page novel in the classics section of my local library, I was admittedly intimidated and checked it out hesitantly, bracing myself for a dry read. However, the triumph of Middlemarch is its richness—its ability to paint with vivid colors a portrait of ordinary townspeople, bringing them to life through a pioneering form of psychological realism. As Henry James said in his 1873 review: "[Eliot's] novel is a picture—vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression. It is not compact, doubtless; but when was a panorama compact?"
‍
Subtitled "a study of provincial life," Middlemarch examines the interweaving fortunes, foibles and frailties of the inhabitants of Middlemarch, a fictional Midlands town in the 1830s amid a backdrop of social change. The novel's heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is an idealist framed for a larger moral life than her circumstances can afford—compared in the preface to the self-mortifying Saint Theresa of Avila. Yearning to dedicate herself to a worthwhile cause, Dorothea marries Casaubon, a solitary scholar twenty-seven years her senior, believing that she can participate in a minor way to his intellectual project and fulfill her desire to do good in the world. This hope, however, is merely a reflection of Dorothea's naivety—she soon finds herself embittered by matrimonial disappointment. Casaubon is no great thinker; he's a dry and humorless pedant bent on a fruitless academic quest.
‍
Lydgate, a progressive young doctor with idealistic notions around medical reform, is the clear mirror to Dorothea's Saint Thersa. When he marries the beautiful yet spendthrift Rosamond Vincy, Lydgate finds himself, like Dorothea, trapped in an infelicitous union. Lydgate considers it a wife's duty to be lovely, sacrificial, and soothing toward her husband, but Rosamond is not the "feebler species" of Lydgate's charitable imagining.
‍
While Eliot is most fixated on Dorothea and Lydgate, thwarted idealists who serve as studies of disillusionment, she frequently turns the spotlight on a cast of other characters—Rosamond's aimless yet pure-hearted brother Fred and his love interest Mary, the wealthy but disgraced banker Bulstrode, and the romantic outsider Ladislaw, to name a few. As an omniscient narrator, Eliot is a skilled puppeteer, sitting God-like above Middlemarch and deftly manipulating the strings of her marionettes to create a playful dance. And while some of Eliot's characters are deeply flawed (Casaubon, Bulstrode), a mark of Eliot's craftsmanship is her ability to evoke and toy with our sympathy toward these more unattractive individuals in surprising ways. One of my favorite passages in the novel is when the narrator turns and speaks directly to us regrading Casaubon: "For my part, I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never be liberated from a small hungry shivering self." Casaubon might be despicable, but he's also pathetic in the literal sense.
‍
Speaking of her writing, Eliot said: "If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally...The only effect I ardently long to produce in my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring, human creatures." This effect aptly summarizes the experience of reading Middlemarch—her epic study of a diverse web of characters, interlaced with penetrating psychological insights, playful humor, social commentary, and a thesis: "there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life." We learn in the preface that Dorothea is a Saint Theresa, born in the wrong epoch. But Middlemarch's function is to make clear what it means to be born in a particular place, to live at a certain time, and to be seemingly insignificant yet make a powerful contribution to others' happiness or misery through our small acts.
Eyeing George Eliot's 840-page novel in the classics section of my local library, I was admittedly intimidated and checked it out hesitantly, bracing myself for a dry read. However, the triumph of Middlemarch is its richness—its ability to paint with vivid colors a portrait of ordinary townspeople, bringing them to life through a pioneering form of psychological realism. As Henry James said in his 1873 review: "[Eliot's] novel is a picture—vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression. It is not compact, doubtless; but when was a panorama compact?"
‍
Subtitled "a study of provincial life," Middlemarch examines the interweaving fortunes, foibles and frailties of the inhabitants of Middlemarch, a fictional Midlands town in the 1830s amid a backdrop of social change. The novel's heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is an idealist framed for a larger moral life than her circumstances can afford—compared in the preface to the self-mortifying Saint Theresa of Avila. Yearning to dedicate herself to a worthwhile cause, Dorothea marries Casaubon, a solitary scholar twenty-seven years her senior, believing that she can participate in a minor way to his intellectual project and fulfill her desire to do good in the world. This hope, however, is merely a reflection of Dorothea's naivety—she soon finds herself embittered by matrimonial disappointment. Casaubon is no great thinker; he's a dry and humorless pedant bent on a fruitless academic quest.
‍
Lydgate, a progressive young doctor with idealistic notions around medical reform, is the clear mirror to Dorothea's Saint Thersa. When he marries the beautiful yet spendthrift Rosamond Vincy, Lydgate finds himself, like Dorothea, trapped in an infelicitous union. Lydgate considers it a wife's duty to be lovely, sacrificial, and soothing toward her husband, but Rosamond is not the "feebler species" of Lydgate's charitable imagining.
‍
While Eliot is most fixated on Dorothea and Lydgate, thwarted idealists who serve as studies of disillusionment, she frequently turns the spotlight on a cast of other characters—Rosamond's aimless yet pure-hearted brother Fred and his love interest Mary, the wealthy but disgraced banker Bulstrode, and the romantic outsider Ladislaw, to name a few. As an omniscient narrator, Eliot is a skilled puppeteer, sitting God-like above Middlemarch and deftly manipulating the strings of her marionettes to create a playful dance. And while some of Eliot's characters are deeply flawed (Casaubon, Bulstrode), a mark of Eliot's craftsmanship is her ability to evoke and toy with our sympathy toward these more unattractive individuals in surprising ways. One of my favorite passages in the novel is when the narrator turns and speaks directly to us regrading Casaubon: "For my part, I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never be liberated from a small hungry shivering self." Casaubon might be despicable, but he's also pathetic in the literal sense.
‍
Speaking of her writing, Eliot said: "If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally...The only effect I ardently long to produce in my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring, human creatures." This effect aptly summarizes the experience of reading Middlemarch—her epic study of a diverse web of characters, interlaced with penetrating psychological insights, playful humor, social commentary, and a thesis: "there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life." We learn in the preface that Dorothea is a Saint Theresa, born in the wrong epoch. But Middlemarch's function is to make clear what it means to be born in a particular place, to live at a certain time, and to be seemingly insignificant yet make a powerful contribution to others' happiness or misery through our small acts.
Eyeing George Eliot's 840-page novel in the classics section of my local library, I was admittedly intimidated and checked it out hesitantly, bracing myself for a dry read. However, the triumph of Middlemarch is its richness—its ability to paint with vivid colors a portrait of ordinary townspeople, bringing them to life through a pioneering form of psychological realism. As Henry James said in his 1873 review: "[Eliot's] novel is a picture—vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression. It is not compact, doubtless; but when was a panorama compact?"
‍
Subtitled "a study of provincial life," Middlemarch examines the interweaving fortunes, foibles and frailties of the inhabitants of Middlemarch, a fictional Midlands town in the 1830s amid a backdrop of social change. The novel's heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is an idealist framed for a larger moral life than her circumstances can afford—compared in the preface to the self-mortifying Saint Theresa of Avila. Yearning to dedicate herself to a worthwhile cause, Dorothea marries Casaubon, a solitary scholar twenty-seven years her senior, believing that she can participate in a minor way to his intellectual project and fulfill her desire to do good in the world. This hope, however, is merely a reflection of Dorothea's naivety—she soon finds herself embittered by matrimonial disappointment. Casaubon is no great thinker; he's a dry and humorless pedant bent on a fruitless academic quest.
‍
Lydgate, a progressive young doctor with idealistic notions around medical reform, is the clear mirror to Dorothea's Saint Thersa. When he marries the beautiful yet spendthrift Rosamond Vincy, Lydgate finds himself, like Dorothea, trapped in an infelicitous union. Lydgate considers it a wife's duty to be lovely, sacrificial, and soothing toward her husband, but Rosamond is not the "feebler species" of Lydgate's charitable imagining.
‍
While Eliot is most fixated on Dorothea and Lydgate, thwarted idealists who serve as studies of disillusionment, she frequently turns the spotlight on a cast of other characters—Rosamond's aimless yet pure-hearted brother Fred and his love interest Mary, the wealthy but disgraced banker Bulstrode, and the romantic outsider Ladislaw, to name a few. As an omniscient narrator, Eliot is a skilled puppeteer, sitting God-like above Middlemarch and deftly manipulating the strings of her marionettes to create a playful dance. And while some of Eliot's characters are deeply flawed (Casaubon, Bulstrode), a mark of Eliot's craftsmanship is her ability to evoke and toy with our sympathy toward these more unattractive individuals in surprising ways. One of my favorite passages in the novel is when the narrator turns and speaks directly to us regrading Casaubon: "For my part, I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never be liberated from a small hungry shivering self." Casaubon might be despicable, but he's also pathetic in the literal sense.
‍
Speaking of her writing, Eliot said: "If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally...The only effect I ardently long to produce in my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring, human creatures." This effect aptly summarizes the experience of reading Middlemarch—her epic study of a diverse web of characters, interlaced with penetrating psychological insights, playful humor, social commentary, and a thesis: "there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life." We learn in the preface that Dorothea is a Saint Theresa, born in the wrong epoch. But Middlemarch's function is to make clear what it means to be born in a particular place, to live at a certain time, and to be seemingly insignificant yet make a powerful contribution to others' happiness or misery through our small acts.
Eyeing George Eliot's 840-page novel in the classics section of my local library, I was admittedly intimidated and checked it out hesitantly, bracing myself for a dry read. However, the triumph of Middlemarch is its richness—its ability to paint with vivid colors a portrait of ordinary townspeople, bringing them to life through a pioneering form of psychological realism. As Henry James said in his 1873 review: "[Eliot's] novel is a picture—vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression. It is not compact, doubtless; but when was a panorama compact?"
‍
Subtitled "a study of provincial life," Middlemarch examines the interweaving fortunes, foibles and frailties of the inhabitants of Middlemarch, a fictional Midlands town in the 1830s amid a backdrop of social change. The novel's heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is an idealist framed for a larger moral life than her circumstances can afford—compared in the preface to the self-mortifying Saint Theresa of Avila. Yearning to dedicate herself to a worthwhile cause, Dorothea marries Casaubon, a solitary scholar twenty-seven years her senior, believing that she can participate in a minor way to his intellectual project and fulfill her desire to do good in the world. This hope, however, is merely a reflection of Dorothea's naivety—she soon finds herself embittered by matrimonial disappointment. Casaubon is no great thinker; he's a dry and humorless pedant bent on a fruitless academic quest.
‍
Lydgate, a progressive young doctor with idealistic notions around medical reform, is the clear mirror to Dorothea's Saint Thersa. When he marries the beautiful yet spendthrift Rosamond Vincy, Lydgate finds himself, like Dorothea, trapped in an infelicitous union. Lydgate considers it a wife's duty to be lovely, sacrificial, and soothing toward her husband, but Rosamond is not the "feebler species" of Lydgate's charitable imagining.
‍
While Eliot is most fixated on Dorothea and Lydgate, thwarted idealists who serve as studies of disillusionment, she frequently turns the spotlight on a cast of other characters—Rosamond's aimless yet pure-hearted brother Fred and his love interest Mary, the wealthy but disgraced banker Bulstrode, and the romantic outsider Ladislaw, to name a few. As an omniscient narrator, Eliot is a skilled puppeteer, sitting God-like above Middlemarch and deftly manipulating the strings of her marionettes to create a playful dance. And while some of Eliot's characters are deeply flawed (Casaubon, Bulstrode), a mark of Eliot's craftsmanship is her ability to evoke and toy with our sympathy toward these more unattractive individuals in surprising ways. One of my favorite passages in the novel is when the narrator turns and speaks directly to us regrading Casaubon: "For my part, I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never be liberated from a small hungry shivering self." Casaubon might be despicable, but he's also pathetic in the literal sense.
‍
Speaking of her writing, Eliot said: "If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally...The only effect I ardently long to produce in my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring, human creatures." This effect aptly summarizes the experience of reading Middlemarch—her epic study of a diverse web of characters, interlaced with penetrating psychological insights, playful humor, social commentary, and a thesis: "there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life." We learn in the preface that Dorothea is a Saint Theresa, born in the wrong epoch. But Middlemarch's function is to make clear what it means to be born in a particular place, to live at a certain time, and to be seemingly insignificant yet make a powerful contribution to others' happiness or misery through our small acts.
Eyeing George Eliot's 840-page novel in the classics section of my local library, I was admittedly intimidated and checked it out hesitantly, bracing myself for a dry read. However, the triumph of Middlemarch is its richness—its ability to paint with vivid colors a portrait of ordinary townspeople, bringing them to life through a pioneering form of psychological realism. As Henry James said in his 1873 review: "[Eliot's] novel is a picture—vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression. It is not compact, doubtless; but when was a panorama compact?"
‍
Subtitled "a study of provincial life," Middlemarch examines the interweaving fortunes, foibles and frailties of the inhabitants of Middlemarch, a fictional Midlands town in the 1830s amid a backdrop of social change. The novel's heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is an idealist framed for a larger moral life than her circumstances can afford—compared in the preface to the self-mortifying Saint Theresa of Avila. Yearning to dedicate herself to a worthwhile cause, Dorothea marries Casaubon, a solitary scholar twenty-seven years her senior, believing that she can participate in a minor way to his intellectual project and fulfill her desire to do good in the world. This hope, however, is merely a reflection of Dorothea's naivety—she soon finds herself embittered by matrimonial disappointment. Casaubon is no great thinker; he's a dry and humorless pedant bent on a fruitless academic quest.
‍
Lydgate, a progressive young doctor with idealistic notions around medical reform, is the clear mirror to Dorothea's Saint Thersa. When he marries the beautiful yet spendthrift Rosamond Vincy, Lydgate finds himself, like Dorothea, trapped in an infelicitous union. Lydgate considers it a wife's duty to be lovely, sacrificial, and soothing toward her husband, but Rosamond is not the "feebler species" of Lydgate's charitable imagining.
‍
While Eliot is most fixated on Dorothea and Lydgate, thwarted idealists who serve as studies of disillusionment, she frequently turns the spotlight on a cast of other characters—Rosamond's aimless yet pure-hearted brother Fred and his love interest Mary, the wealthy but disgraced banker Bulstrode, and the romantic outsider Ladislaw, to name a few. As an omniscient narrator, Eliot is a skilled puppeteer, sitting God-like above Middlemarch and deftly manipulating the strings of her marionettes to create a playful dance. And while some of Eliot's characters are deeply flawed (Casaubon, Bulstrode), a mark of Eliot's craftsmanship is her ability to evoke and toy with our sympathy toward these more unattractive individuals in surprising ways. One of my favorite passages in the novel is when the narrator turns and speaks directly to us regrading Casaubon: "For my part, I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never be liberated from a small hungry shivering self." Casaubon might be despicable, but he's also pathetic in the literal sense.
‍
Speaking of her writing, Eliot said: "If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally...The only effect I ardently long to produce in my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring, human creatures." This effect aptly summarizes the experience of reading Middlemarch—her epic study of a diverse web of characters, interlaced with penetrating psychological insights, playful humor, social commentary, and a thesis: "there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life." We learn in the preface that Dorothea is a Saint Theresa, born in the wrong epoch. But Middlemarch's function is to make clear what it means to be born in a particular place, to live at a certain time, and to be seemingly insignificant yet make a powerful contribution to others' happiness or misery through our small acts.
