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Summary
Summary
One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces resistance from the society she inhabits. In this epic in a small landscape, Eliot's large cast of precisely delineated characters and the rich tapestry of their stories result in a wise, compassionate, and astute vision of human nature. As Virginia Woolf declared, George Eliot "was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment."
Author Notes
Mary Ann Evans was born on November 22, 1819, at Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England, the last child of an estate agent. During her girlhood, she went through a phase of evangelical piety, but her strong interest in philosophy and her friendship with religious freethinkers led to a break with orthodox religion. When one of these friends married in 1843, Mary Ann took over from his wife the task of translating D.F. Strauss's The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846), a work that had deep effect on English rationalism. After her father's death she settled in London and from 1851 to 1854 she served as a writer and editor of the Westminster Review , the organ of the Radical party. In London she met she met George Henry Lewes, a journalist and advanced thinker. Lewes was separated from his wife, who had had two sons by another man, but had been unable to obtain a divorce. In a step daring for Victorian times, Mary Ann Evans began living openly with Lewes in 1854, in a union they both considered as sacred as a legal marriage and one that lasted until his death in 1878.
With Lewes's encouragement, Mary Ann Evans wrote her first fictional work, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton," for Blackwood's Magazine in 1857; it was followed by two more stories published under the pseudonym George Elliot-"George" because it was Lewes's name and "Eliot" because, she said, it was good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word." At the age of thirty-nine she used her memories of Warwickshire to write her first long novel, Adam Bede (1859), a book that established her as the foremost woman novelist in her day. Then came The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). Her masterpiece and one of the greatest English novels, Middlemarch , was published in 1871-72. Her last work was Daniel Deronda (1876). After Lewes's death George Eliot married John Walter Cross. He was forty; she was sixty-one. Before her death on December 22, 1880, she had been recognized by her contemporaries as the greatest living writer of English fiction.
Reviews 1
Choice Review
The Clarendon Edition of George Eliot's greatest novel now joins the growing shelf of these superbly edited texts, produced until recently by the late Gordon Haight. David Carroll (University of Lancaster), compiler of George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (1971) and author of other respected Eliot studies, has edited this volume with the meticulous scholarship and critical wisdom characteristic of its predecessors. Carroll has chosen the 1874 text, generally accepted to be the last version carefully revised by Eliot herself, although, of course, Carroll has made such necessary corrections missed in 1874 as well as provided us with a list of variants on each page and such explanatory notes as seem absolutely essential, plus four illustrations including two facsimiles of manuscript pages. This volume is a scholar's treasure, not only for its illumination of the text, but for its 66-page introduction. Carroll first tells us how Middlemarch was created out of two originally distinct stories, then how the decision to publish in seven parts influenced the structure and texture of the novel; then he gives us a suspenseful account of the transformation of Eliot's notes into the final text; and, finally, an informed report of its early publication history including all the financial arrangements. Obviously, this is a text for graduate students, advanced undergraduates, their teachers, and for select members of the reading public.-J.W. Bicknell, emeritus, Drew University