Middlemarch is a 900-page portrait of 19th-century provincial life set just before the Reform Act of 1832 and the arrival of railways. The novel centers on nineteen-year-old Dorothea Brooke, whose desire to know, think, and lead a grand life leads her into a deeply unhappy marriage with the desiccated scholar Casaubon. Other marriages also fail, including the ill-suited match between the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate and the vain, shallow Rosamond Vincy. England stands on the brink of change as middle-class enfranchisement ends an old order. Reform in the novel extends beyond politics, as characters try to change the world but are changed by reality, reshaping English-language fiction through female interiority.
"Beginning with a marriage, and a deeply unhappy one, it upends the marriage plot established by Jane Austen. Nineteen-year-old Dorothea Brooke has a passionate desire to know and to think, and a longing to lead a grand life here now in England. Unfortunately, that England didn't afford many opportunities for women, and she misguidedly hitches her idealism to the desiccated scholar Casaubon. This is not the novel's only disastrous marriage."
"The ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate makes an ill-suited match to the vain and shallow Rosamond Vincy. The novel is set 40 years before it was written, just before the Reform Act of 1832 and the arrival of railways. England is on the brink of change: the enfranchisement of the middle classes and the end of an old order. But reform in the novel is about more than politics."
"Eliot's characters want to change the world. Instead, the world changes them, as their ideals are confronted by reality. In placing an intelligent, high-minded young woman at the centre of her novel, Eliot reshaped English-language fiction. Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre may have paved the way, but without Dorothea we wouldn't have James's Isabel Archer or Woolf's older Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay."
"There is a clear path from Middlemarch to the female interiority of Sally Rooney's novels today. Eliot herself is a wise and gracious voice in the novel, breaking the fourth wall to remind us to look"
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