Virgina Woolf declared Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. Henry James said that some of its scenes were the most intelligent in English fiction. Even Martin Amis, over 100 years later, called it “a novel without weaknesses”. Now this 900-page portrait of 19th-century provincial life has been voted the best novel of all time in a Guardian poll of writers, academics and critics.
George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) was already a highly successful novelist by the time Middlemarch was published in instalments in 1871 and 1872. Beginning with a marriage, and a deeply unhappy one, it upends “the marriage plot” established by Jane Austen. Nineteen-year-old Dorothea Brooke has “a passionate desire to know and to think”, and a longing “to lead a grand life here – now – in England”. Unfortunately, that England didn’t afford many opportunities for women, and she misguidedly hitches her idealism to the desiccated scholar Casaubon. This is not the novel’s only disastrous marriage. The ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate makes an ill-suited match to the vain and shallow Rosamond Vincy.
