But George Eliot, famously, didn’t submit to the 19th century marriage plot so why does Dorothea Brooke? I am encouraging myself to continue after this unpromising beginning, though if it develops along gothic lines, well then that’s another thing. Fortunately she didn’t describe his breath, but it hangs miasmatically in the book’s atmosphere.

He has hair growing from moles on his face. He is about thirty years older than she is, near 50, and his physical repulsiveness and decrepitude is described by her younger sister Celia who struggles to hide her revulsion. She has an admirable desire to live the life of the mind, and learn from brilliant scholars, and this is what leads her to marrying, against the hopes and advice of the surrounding community, the Reverend Edward Casaubon. Dorothea Brooke’s youth and beauty are extensively described in the opening chapter, as well as her priggishness and sanctimony.

And when I read the first 50 pages, I remembered why. I read it in college for a Victorian lit class, but I remembered very little about it other than that I’d disliked it. A few friends of mine turned out to be reading Middlemarch too. If you’ve decided to read a big book, by all means, leave us a comment and let us know what it is. I just read the long, dense, and repetitive Absalom, Absalom again, it being timely, given that it is about how great wealth and power requires the exploitation and degradation of women and black people–and by extension, all people of color, children and non-hegemons–but more on that book later.

It was an instant commercial and critical success, and continues to captivate readers 150 years later.Middlemarch, like many many-paged books, seems to be a top candidate for lockdown reading these days, 819 pages in my Penguin edition. The earliest part, entitled MIDDLEMARCH, Book 1 - Miss Brooke, was published on 1st December 1871. George Eliot's novel was first published in eight instalments, in an innovative new style of serialisation. VINTAGE CLASSICS 150th ANNIVERSARY GIFT EDITION Middlemarch contains all of life: the rich and the poor, the conventional and the radical, literature and science, politics and romance, but above all it gives us a vision of what lies within the human heart. But their stories do not proceed as expected and both they, and the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in the world.

Both of them long to make a positive difference in the world. Lydgate is the ambitious new doctor in town. ' If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life.'ĭorothea is bright, beautiful and rebellious. 150th ANNIVERSARY GIFT EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZADIE SMITHĭiscover one of the most admired, best loved and influential novels in the history of English literature.

Middlemarch pages