There are no easy resolutions in a great novel. In a larger sense, Dorothea's fate (and also the torments self-inflicted by Rosamond Vincy) dramatise another of the novel's major themes, the place of women in a changing but still patriarchal society. Lydgate, in particular, sees this and understands to his great sorrow what sort of woman he should have married and how different his life could have been. Dorothea becomes a true heroine because – despite all she suffers, her humiliations and heartache – she still tries to be a good person, and to do the right thing. In the middle of this web we find the character whom all readers of Middlemarch will argue about and identify with, the fascinating figure of Dorothea, wife of the cold-hearted monster Rev Edward Casaubon.

Here, the organising metaphor of Middlemarch becomes 'the web', Eliot's representation of English society in all its airy complexity and resilience. As well as making allusions to the death of George IV, outbreaks of cholera and the passing of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, its characters discuss the coming of the railway and the impact of industrialisation on a settled Midland English world. The action takes place some 40 years before the moment of composition. Dr Lydgate is especially emblematic of Middlemarch: dying young, a bitter and disappointed man who knew he had married the wrong woman and could do nothing about it. And others still realise their mistakes but are trapped by a wrong decision and never escape. Others refuse or are incapable of learning, and spend their lives resenting their situation, and blaming others. Some learn the lessons and achieve a temporary happiness. Indeed, Middlemarch looms above the mid-Victorian literary landscape like a cathedral of words in whose shadowy vastness its readers can find every kind of addictive discomfort, a sequence of raw truths: the loneliness of the disappointed failure, Dr Lydgate the frustrations of his discontented wife the humiliation of a good woman, Dorothea the corrosive bitterness of Casaubon, and so on.įew of Eliot's characters achieve what they really want, and all have to learn to compromise. Subtitled 'a study of provincial life', the novel has a didactic realism that's a world away from Vanity Fair or Great Expectations. George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, appeared after the deaths of Thackeray (1863) and Dickens (1870).

Instal Middlemarch