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Jessica Gildersleeve, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland

'Unhappy, unfaithful women': middle-aged growth replaces self-absorption in Alex Miller's A Brief Affair

Alex Miller George Eliot
Dara Litvinova/Unsplash, CC BY

One of the most famous meditations in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) is on the symbol of the pier-glass:

Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun.

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