Middlemarch

About the book

Published in eight parts in 1871 and 1872, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is set in a Midlands town in the years around the Reform Act of 1832. Dorothea Brooke, idealistic and eager to do some great good, marries the elderly scholar Edward Casaubon, while the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate arrives intent on reforming medicine. George Eliot weaves their stories together with those of the Vincy and Garth families, the banker Bulstrode and many more, tracing how marriage, money, reputation and chance shape each life. Wise, ironic and deeply humane, the novel follows the gap between people’s hopes and what circumstances allow them, and is often counted among the finest novels in English.

Characters

• Dorothea Brooke — Protagonist

  An idealistic young woman seeking a life of intellectual and moral usefulness.

• Tertius Lydgate — Doctor

  An ambitious physician whose hopes for medical reform collide with provincial expectations and debt.

• Edward Casaubon — Scholar

  Dorothea's older husband, devoted to a vast scholarly project and anxious about his authority.

• Will Ladislaw — Casaubon's cousin

  A young man of artistic and political interests whose independence attracts Dorothea.

• Rosamond Vincy — Lydgate's wife

  A cultivated young woman whose expectations of marriage differ sharply from Lydgate's.

• Fred Vincy — Rosamond's brother

  A good-hearted but improvident young man who must find a vocation and earn trust.

• Mary Garth — Fred's childhood friend

  A practical, clear-sighted young woman unwilling to flatter Fred's weaknesses.

• Nicholas Bulstrode — Banker

  An influential religious businessman whose public respectability rests on a troubled past.

About the author

GE

George Eliot

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), an English novelist born on an estate in Warwickshire, where her father was the land agent. As a young woman she lost her evangelical faith, and she made her name in London as a translator of German theology and as the working editor of the Westminster Review. From 1854 she lived openly with the writer George Henry Lewes, who was married and unable to divorce, a choice that cut her off from much of respectable society. She began writing fiction under a male pseudonym with Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), followed by Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Her novels combine close observation of ordinary lives with a broad moral and intellectual range. After Lewes’s death she married John Cross in 1880, and died the same year.