Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.
Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury.
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.
Henry James described Middlemarch as a ‘treasure-house of detail’ while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot’s masterpiece as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’.
George Eliot
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Anne Evans (1819-1880), one of the leading writers of Victorian times. Like many of her contemporary female writers, she published her books using a male name in order to be taken seriously. Her novels, including ‘Adam Bede’, ‘The Mill on the Floss’ and ‘Middlemarch’, have remained perennially popular and the subject of numerous television adaptations.
The writer and woman we now think of as George Eliot was born on November 22nd,1819; her given name was Mary Anne Evans, her forename often shortened within the family, and later among her friends, to Mary Ann. Her father Robert Evans was the agent for the Arbury Hall Estate in Warwickshire; her mother was Christiana Pearson, Evans’ second wife, his first having died in 1809. Mary Ann was the third of Christiana’s children, and she also had two half-siblings, Robert and Frances, who were already adolescents when she was born. Early in her life, the family moved to Griff House, a pleasant red-brick house, where she was to spend the formative years of her life. The countryside roundabout formed the basis of the landscape she imaginatively recreates in The Mill on the Floss, where she also draws on her mother’s family as the inspiration for some of the characters. Her close early relationship with her nearest brother, Isaac, is generally thought to have provided the material for the relationship between Maggie and Tom in that novel.
