Middlemarch

The moral struggle involved in trying to hold fast to personal integrity in a materialistic and mean-spirited society forms the dominant theme of Middlemarch, George Eliot’s most distinguished novel. The main plots of this multilayered work center around two expertly realized characters: Dorothea Brooke, a passionately idealistic woman who traps herself in a loveless marriage; and Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor who is betrayed by his wife’s egoism and his own inner weakness. With remarkable psychological insight, an unfailing grasp of complex social interrelationships, and superb narrative art, this novel explores the whole of provincial Victorian society. Its scope of vision and rich characterization have excited the admiration of such critics as V.S. Pritchett, who has written, “I cannot see any novel of the nineteenth century that surpasses Middlemarch in range or construction….I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot.” Frank Kermode declares:”…one sees the variety of techniques by which George Eliot demonstrates that no man is an island….No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully.”