Ms. Eliot created, with this book, an entire community in England in the mid-1800s and called it Middlemarch. She populated this provincial town with people of every station, local squires and their families, tradespeople, the rising middle class, (Middlemarch, right?), & the poor and destitute, ruthless and honest. She crowded them together, with all their ambitions, dreams and foibles, in this magnificent literary soap opera, and wove a wonderful web of plots and subplots. Ms. Eliot also wrote scathing social commentary and used great wit.

The fortunes of Middlemarch are rising in this new era when machines and trains - fast, available transportation - are changing the world, the economy, the politics. Rigid social codes, the British class system, is in danger of being breached. Folks are out to make a quick buck, or a shilling - anything to acquire wealth and enhance social position.

Dorothea Brooks lives in Middlemarch. She is an intelligent, sensitive young woman, who wants to dedicate her life to important endeavors. She does not want to settle for a typical marriage and family, but looks toward a more noble cause. As a woman, a professional life is not open to her, nor is the pursuit of intellect, outside of marriage. She weds the elderly Rev. Casaubon, a cold, narcissistic man, thinking that by assisting him with his scholarly research and writing, she will find happiness.

Dr. Lydgate comes to Middlemarch to begin his medical practice there. He is an idealist, who has dreams of finding a cure for cholera and opening a free clinic. He meets blonde and beautiful Rosamund Vincie, who fancies him for a spouse...along with a new house, new furniture, an extensive wardrobe, etc.

A dashing, romantic Will Ladislaw, nephew of Rev. Casaubon, enters the story, as does Rosie's brother Fred, who wants desperately to marry his Mary, but is out of work and in debt. This cast of richly drawn characters continues to grow with the introduction of Mary's family, the Garths, the banker Bulstrode, friends, relations, and an evil villain or two.

This complex novel and portrait of the times, is one of the best reading experiences I have had in a long while. And it didn't hurt at all! :))


Amazingly funny and penetrating!   January 10, 2000
 41 out of 42 found this review helpful

I have had a copy of this book on my shelf for years without reading it. It was so very thick, the print so small, the pages so thin! It looked dauntingly long and dull.

But when I finally picked it up out of a sense of obligation (after all, I majored in English, and it is a highly acclaimed classic) I was amazed to find myself laughing out loud on the very first page!

Dorothea, Eliot's heroine, is SO very earnest, SO idealistic and ardent! She would never be so tawdry as to fuss with her hair and dress, or wear (gasp!) jewelry in public! She is interested only in bettering the lives of the poor in their neighborhood (you could visualize her at the fore of a modern anti-war protest). But when her sister draws her into trying on their mother's old jewelry, the pure beauty of an emerald ring inspires her to decisively choose it as her own. And she stubbbornly ignores any inconsistency between that decision and her ideals.

But her idealism traps her into marriage with a man who is not at all what she believes. She sees him as a paragon of learning, questing the seas of knowledge with fearless curiousity. In actuality, he turns out to be a cautious and small-minded scholar, drily obsessed with minor points of criticism on others works. Poor Dorothea strives to find ways to hold constant in her love in the face of ugly truth. And when she meets young Will Ladislaw, a man of similar idealism and energy, she fights to stay on her moral high ground. Thank goodness the dry old scholar dies! But even after death, he manages to poison the possibility of Dorothea and Will ever making a life together.

Around this couple swarm their relatives and acquaintances, and others quests for their best lives. Each couple and each character is amusing and absorbing in their own way.

Eliot's characters are introduced and drawn so very well that each personality is fully believable and real. But beyond that, Eliot looks at all of them, the best and the worst, from a viewpoint of loving and gentle amusement. Her pithy comments are hilarious, but never malicious. She draws the reader into her own frame of mind, and invites us to look at the variety of our fellow humans with compassion and laughter.

In spite of its length, and several dizzy plunges into despair, this is a light and lively story, very readable and heartwarming.


Middlemarch: A Stacked Deck   August 22, 2006
 25 out of 27 found this review helpful

For those who come to MIDDLEMARCH for the first time and wonder what to make up the more than 900 pages of text, they might look at the clue that George Eliot provides both in the subtitle "A Study of Provincial Life" and in her Prelude. The former suggests indeed a study of life within the narrow confines of middle class life in England before the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, yet the massive weight of the text implies that it will be a telescoped examination of that life. It is almost as if Eliot wished to place Middlemarch on a microscopic slide and then blow up the image to fit an IMAX screen, from which the reader could see, hear, and feel the images jump off the pages in unforgettably realistic power. In her Prelude, Eliot writes of a hypothetical woman that prefigures Dorothea Brooke: "Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity." Such a "life of mistakes" of the book's major and minor characters when combined with the epic sweep vision of a small slice of English society produce the book's essential theme: no one in the book is meant to be seen as heroic or even tragic because Eliot's deterministic philosophy does not allow them to overcome the stifling hand of a vision of life that hints at only the wispy illusion of success but delivers only the inevitability of failure. In such a climate, neither heroes nor tragic figures can thrive.

Part of the reason that readers have trouble keeping straight the huge cast of characters is due to Eliot's original means of publishing. MIDDLEMARCH did not start out as a fully-conceived nor finished product. Eliot had planned to write a series of connected novels, beginning with Dorothea Brooke, but after simultaneously writing two of them, she saw that their tightly interlocking themes would complement one another if they were presented as a continuous whole, so she began to publish them as a serial. She was quite successful, so much so that her publisher reminded her that in order not to let her panting public forget who was who, she had to include--or at least mention--each character on a regular basis.

Eliot divides the book into four storylines. The first deals with the aspirations of Dorothea Brooke and her disastrous marriage to Edward Casaubon. The second relates the attempt by Dr. Lydgate to establish a successful medical career that also is demolished by an unwise marriage. The third tells of the many travails of Mary Garth. And the final explains the rise and fall of the banker Bulstrode. Each of these main characters represents types of the middle class that made up the social strata with which George Eliot was so familiar. As they interact with each other, Eliot depicts their respective struggles to achieve success or happiness. These attempts usually begin with marriage or high hopes. Dorothea Brooke suffers disillusion with her husband after only a few months. Casaubon, for his part, endures the agony of knowing that his Great Book is truly the piece of trash that Dorothea rightfully suspects it to be. What emerges in the reader after completing the book is a sense of knowledge of the inner lives of the book's characters and of accrued impressions of life on a vast scale, but what is lacking is the realization that no one in MIDDLEMARCH has learned anything of value except perhaps that fate is a game of chance with the deck stacked against humanity. The reader further acknowledges that God has pulled a disappearing act, leaving the residents of Eliot's world to fend for themselves. And since the characters of MIDDLEMARCH do not change, then neither does its readers. The final judgment on MIDDLEMARCH is that it shows in a universe of detail and character delineation the interlocking lives of characters who suffer mightily, but in whose suffering fall short either of heroism or tragedy.





The greatest English novel yet written.....   April 5, 2000
 20 out of 24 found this review helpful

I was extremely hesitant about reviewing George Eliot'sMiddlemarch, as it's been ten years or so since I've read it, but inthe end I couldn't resist adding my comments to those of others. Quite simply, it is the greatest novel yet written by an English author: Middlemarch is the fullest realisation of George Eliot's ideas on social philosophy combined with her utterly convincing characterisation and remarkable moral insight.

The novel's 'heroine' is Dorothea Brooke, a young woman of excellent virtue who is passionately idealistic about the good that can be achieved in life. The provincial setting of Middlemarch is the environment in which Dorothea's struggle to fulfil her ideals takes place, and the novel's central theme is how the petty politics of provincial 19th century England are largely accountable for her failure. In parallel with Dorothea's story is the story of Lydgate, an intelligent and ambitious doctor who also runs up against the obstructive forces of provincial life and finds them severely restrictive of his goals.

Eliot is supremely compassionate, yet never blind to the faults of her characters. Dorothea's ideas of social reform are naive, while her high opinion of Casaubon's work proves to be a major mistake. But Eliot is never cynical when the motives of her characters are pure, and does not censure them for failure. What she is critical of is the narrow minded self-seeking attitude which forces Dorothea and Lydgate to come to terms with the fact that often good does not win out over circumstance. The subtext to this is the fact that the high ideals and sense of responsibility intrinsic in both Dorothea and Lydgate means that there is no question of them ever finding love together. In essence, Middlemarch is simply about life and how things don't always work out, despite our best intentions, but are often the product of negative forces. In other novels Eliot's didacticism can sometimes jar, but it is impossible to ignore the depth of her wisdom in Middlemarch.

Middlemarch is the best novel of our greatest novelist - of the major Victorian writers only Tolstoy can really compare with her - and I cannot recommend it highly enough.