“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”― George Eliot, Middlemarch
Many critics regard Beorge Eliot’s Middlemarch to be the greatest British novel ever written. That is high praise indeed and this novel is worthy of it. I first read MIddlemarch when I was college and I became a big fan of George Elion (aka Mary Ann Evans) as a result. Her novels are compelling, well written, and offer much insight and commentary on the human condition. Middlemarch is the name of a fictional English town and the story revolves around many different characters, but two of the principal ones are Dorothea Brooks, a young woman who wants a true marriage of the mind and hopes to find that with Edward Casaubon, a much older man and Tertius Lydgate, a young, idealistic doctor who comes to Middlemarch to set up practice. It doesn’t take long for both Dorothea and Tertius to find themselves in less than ideal circumstances and wondering how they ended so far afield of their dreams.
Eliot employs multiple story lines that follow the love, errors, and politics of Middlemarch residents to illuminate the social unrest of the Industrial Revolution. It reads like a soap opera at times–so much drama!– and choices some characters make will have you shaking your head and thinking, “Don’t do it!”, but Eliot pulls all the individual threads together into an engaging story and a masterful commentary on English life in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a lengthy book, but it is definitely worth your time.
Content Advisory: Death, miscarriage, death of a parent, grief, antisemitism, racial slurs