See also Middlemarch, New Zealand.

Middlemarch is a novel by George Eliot, a pseudonym for the female author Mary Ann Evans. It was first published in 1871. It is set in the 1830s in Middlemarch, a fictional provincial town in England, based on Coventry. Widely seen as Eliot's greatest work, it is almost unanimously acclaimed as one of the great Victorian era novels.

A BBC dramatisation of the novel, shown in 1994, had a cast including Michael Hordern, Robert Hardy, Rufus Sewell and Patrick Malahide.

In Middlemarch, Eliot interweaves the stories of various friends, acquaintances, and relations in the town of Middlemarch. She demonstrates genuine compassion for each of her characters, yet she seeds her portraits with critical—even cynical—assessments of human hypocrisy and weakness. She is particularly tart on the topic of gender relations and the limited role of women.

The central character, Dorothea Brooke, is a beautiful and serious-minded young woman who yearns for knowledge and the power to help others. She rejects a titled young man in favour of the Reverend Edward Casaubon, a middle-aged clergyman who, she imagines, will teach her and engage her in great works. Her marriage proves a terrible mistake, as Casaubon disdains her efforts to assist him in his research, and Dorothea begins to realize the meanness of his intellectual ambitions. Meanwhile, she makes the acquaintance of his poor relation, Will Ladislaw, who truly admires her and who matches her in passion and ambition.

When Casaubon dies suddenly, Dorothea inherits his large fortune and tries to use it for the good of others, despite her indignation on finding, in the terms of his will, that she is specifically forbidden to marry Will Ladislaw. In the end, she gives up the inheritance in order to find true happiness with Will.

Dorothea's charitable works bring her into contact with Doctor Tertius Lydgate, who plans to build and run a hospital in anticipation of epidemic typhus reaching Middlemarch. Lydgate falls in love with the pretty but impractical Rosamond Vincy; their financial improvidence puts Lydgate in debt to the disreputable attorney Bulstrode, whose attempts to conceal a scandal in his past lead him eventually into real evil. Bulstrode never clears his name but finds true sympathy from his wife; Lydgate becomes a successful-enough London doctor but never achieves happiness at home or scientific greatness.

Meanwhile, Fred Vincy, Rosamond's irresponsible brother, takes a step down socially and economically—but a step up in terms of integrity and hard work—as he allies himself with the Garth family and finally marries plain but kindhearted Mary Garth. Along with Dorothea, whose pursuit of true love is deemed socially unacceptable, Mary is a possible stand-in for Eliot herself. She is sensible and loving, and when she publishes an historical volume for boys, nobody believes that a woman could have written it.

Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as "one of the few English novels written for grown up people".

Literary criticism

External links

• Middlemarch - complete book in HTML one page for each chapter.

Middlemarch