Middlemarch

Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. It was published in eight paper-bound instalments from December 1871 to December 1872, with a four-volume book edition appearing in parallel. Set in the fictional English Midlands town of Middlemarch between 1829 and 1832, in the years before the Reform Act of 1832, it grew out of two unfinished pieces Eliot worked on in 1869 and 1870: a novel centred on the doctor Lydgate and a long story, "Miss Brooke", centred on Dorothea. After the death of George Henry Lewes's son Thornie, Eliot abandoned the first and began the second, and by early 1871 she had merged them into a single project. To avoid the conventional three-volume format and the monthly parts used for longer works, Lewes proposed to the publisher John Blackwood that it appear in eight two-monthly instalments, following the method of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.

The novel follows the intertwined lives of several inhabitants of Middlemarch. Its central thread is the search for purpose of Dorothea Brooke, a wealthy young woman of strong religious idealism who marries the scholar Edward Casaubon, hoping to assist his great work on the mythologies of the world. She soon finds the marriage barren and his project doomed. Meanwhile the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate wants to reform medicine through science and sanitation, but his marriage to Rosamond Vincy, whose taste for appearances drives him into debt, costs him his professional independence. A third strand follows Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, whose love depends on Fred's growing up and abandoning his irresponsibility. The banker Nicholas Bulstrode, whose hidden past eventually destroys him, and Mr Brooke, whose failed parliamentary campaign provides comic episodes, complete the picture.

The work combines meticulous realism with digressions in which the narrator steps forward to comment on human conduct. It addresses the status of women, the nature of marriage, the tension between idealism and self-interest, religious hypocrisy, political reform and education, and it satirises a provincial community resisting change. Its eight-book structure, shaped by serial publication, and its prologue and epilogue, which sketch the later lives of the characters, give it a panoramic scope.

Its early reception was mixed, but the novel came to be regarded as Eliot's masterpiece and one of the great English novels. Virginia Woolf praised it as a magnificent book, and later writers such as Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have counted it among the finest novels in English. Feminist critics, notably Kate Millett, have questioned an ending that subordinates Dorothea's aspirations to her attachment to Ladislaw, a debate that continues to shape its reading.