Ever since Middlemarch was published—in eight installments that appeared over the course of a year, beginning in December 1871—George Eliot’s magisterial novel has not only enthralled and delighted millions of readers but has also received some of literary history’s most enthusiastic and passionate tributes from other writers. When asked what she thought of the book, Emily Dickinson replied, in a letter to her cousin, “‘What do I think of Middlemarch?’ What do I think of glory?” In an essay on George Eliot, Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “magnificent . . . one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”—an often quoted, though odd, phrase, if only because, as the writer and critic Rebecca Mead has pointed out, it is a phrase that a child might use to describe an adult reading experience.
“No Victorian novel,” wrote V. S. Pritchett, “approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative. . . . I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot . . . No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully.” Iris Murdoch praised Eliot’s “godlike capacity for so respecting and loving her characters as to make them exist as free and separate human beings.”
Julian Barnes told an interviewer from The Paris Review that “Middlemarch is probably the greatest English novel,” while Martin Amis described it as “a novel without weaknesses” that “renews itself for every generation.” Indeed, the way in which Middlemarch does seem perpetually to renew itself, to take on new meanings that reflect and speak to the experience, the age, and the mood of the reader, is the subject of a book, My Life in Middlemarch, in which Rebecca Mead describes first encountering the novel when she was seventeen, then again in her twenties, then returning to it in her forties when, like George Eliot, she found herself caring for stepchildren.
What is so captivating and enduring about this sprawling novel of more than eight hundred pages, a novel that is not only physically heavy, and weighty in every other way, but also, as Virginia Woolf points out, partly if not completely lacking in a certain sort of charm? Though the novel contains flashes of wit and humor, it only rarely offers us the fun that we enjoy in the company of Thackeray, Austen, or Dickens. What could Emily Dickinson have meant by “glory”? What is a novel for grown-up people? And why, like Mead, do readers keep going back to it and each time find a different book: a novel about a period that had been gone for decades before Eliot brought it back to life on the page, but whose characters are continually having experiences and confronting situations that seem so much like the experiences and situations we may find ourselves facing now?
How, we wonder, does an author who died in 1880 know as much as or more about our inner conflicts and struggles as our closest loved ones intuit, as much as we and our therapists labor to discover?
Here is Virginia’s Woolf’s crisp, eloquent, sympathetic, and ever so slightly snobbish account of the early years of George Eliot, the pen name of the woman who was born Mary Ann Evans and who would subsequently change her name to, or at least refer to herself as, Mary Anne, Marian, Marian Evans Lewes, and, after a late-life marriage to John Cross, Mary Anne Cross: “The first volume of her life is a singularly depressing record. In it we see her rising herself with groans and struggles from the intolerable boredom of petty provincial society . . . to be the assistant editor of a highly intellectual London review.”
One can easily see what Woolf meant about struggle. Mary Ann Evans consistently chose the hard road and bravely followed her principles, regardless of the consequences. She became an unbeliever and was shunned by her devoutly religious father, whom she later nursed when he was dying. With great difficulty, she translated David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus from the German. She wrote and published sharp criticism and essays, thus becoming the sort of intellectual woman—a bluestocking—guaranteed to earn the contempt of her brother Isaac, with whom she had been close.
Writes Woolf:
Though we cannot read the story without a strong desire that the stages of her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least more beautiful, there is a dogged determination in her advance upon the citadel of culture which raises it above our pity . . . She knew everyone. She read everything. Her astonishing intellectual vitality had triumphed. Youth was over, but youth had been full of suffering. Then, at the age of thirty-five, at the height of her powers, and in the fulness of her freedom, she . . . went to Weimar, alone with George Henry Lewes.
Eliot met Lewes, a philosopher and literary critic, in a bookstore in 1851. They could not marry; Lewes already had a wife and children and was unable to obtain a legal divorce. But the couple lived and traveled together, in a harmonious partnership, until Lewes’s death, in 1878. Lewes valued and encouraged Mary Ann’s abilities, and the start of her life with Lewes coincided with the production of her greatest novels. Scenes of Clerical Life was published in 1858. A year later, Adam Bede appeared; the year after that, The Mill on the Floss. It was followed, within a few years, by the publication of Silas Marner, Romola, and Felix Holt, the Radical.
Eliot began working on Middlemarch in the late 1860s, but her work was sporadic and frequently interrupted, most shatteringly by the tragic death of Lewes’s son, Thornie, who had returned from Asia with an agonizing and fatal disease of the spine. Eliot’s first idea had been to focus on the country doctor who would eventually appear in Middlemarch as Tertius Lydgate. But after she began a short story entitled “Miss Brooke,” she decided to broaden the scope of her book.
That breadth and depth may have been part of what Emily Dickinson meant by “glory”: a view of the world so much wider than the dimensions of the confined space that the New England poet chose to inhabit. The citizens of Middlemarch must have been, in some ways, similar to those of Dickinson’s Amherst; the political quarrels, romances, professional hopes and disappointments, the happy and unhappy marriages would surely have resembled their counterparts in a quiet western Massachusetts town.
What a woman of Dickinson’s genius, ambition, and psychosocial limitations could not have failed to notice was the courage and invention with which Eliot transcended the personal and autobiographical (despite the fact that she saw something of herself in Lydgate, and in other ways resembled Dorothea Brooke) to portray an entire society: rich and poor, bankers and farmers, men of the church, doctors and auctioneers, male and female, old and young, married and single, liberal and conservative, to say nothing of the endless individual variations of character within those larger categories.
Dickens and Thackeray had died not long before Middlemarch was published. Not many writers, and certainly few women, were announcing their intention to put the whole world, or a fully realized corner of the world, onto the printed page. Yet Eliot was clearly determined to portray the entirety of Middlemarch. Around the time that Lydgate—the ambitious young doctor and outsider—makes his appearances in the novel, a brief consideration of destiny segues into the subject of social mobility in the provinces during the decade in which the book is set:
Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rocky firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder.
So Eliot sums up an era, a place, a political climate—and sets the stage for the remainder of the novel.
This passage occurs almost an eighth of the way through the book, which until this point has been occupied largely with the subject of the fervently idealistic Dorothea Brooke and her marriage to Edward Casaubon, the withered, humorless, pompous scholar who has devoted his life to his magnum opus, The Key to All Mythologies—a gargantuan project with which Dorothea imagines that she will provide invaluable help.
Already we understand that this seemingly important and noble work would have a strong attraction for Dorothea. For in the novel’s prelude, the brief introduction that many readers page through on their way to the start of what may seem at first (deceptively!) to be the conventional marriage plot, we have been presented with the central problem of Dorothea’s life:
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? . . . That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity . . . Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.
Rereading this after finishing the novel, we cannot claim that we haven’t been warned about the fate of these Saint Theresas everywhere. And yet we begin our reading each time in the hope that the saint, and her more recent incarnations, will be able to strike out on their own, to achieve what they wish, with or without their little brothers in tow.
The novel is almost a hundred pages under way before we meet its second main character, Tertius Lydgate, whose story has numerous connections and parallels to Dorothea’s. Arriving in Middlemarch with the plan of using the region as a sort of testing ground and research facility for his scientific theories and modern ideas about medical practice, Lydgate also has something of the Saint Theresa in him: he is idealistic, determined, quasi-fanatical, dangerously flawed.
Eliot allows us to see Lydgate’s weak points—his ambition, his vanity, his shallow judgments about women—almost as soon as we meet him. We watch him chatting with the serious, high-minded Dorothea, and, lest we suppose even momentarily that there might be anything between them beyond respectful fellow feeling, Lydgate explains why he has reservations about a woman like Dorothea, whom he finds “a little too earnest . . . It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of any question, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle things after their own taste.” A page or so later, the narrator pulls back from Lydgate’s point of view to more accurately diagnose the young doctor’s ideas about women: “Miss Brooke would be found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty. She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.”
Perhaps this is the time to address the subject of George Eliot’s own views on the role of women in society. Though she had close friends who were committed feminists, and though the movement had become more vocal by the time she was at work on Middlemarch, Eliot was not among these ardent fighters for equal rights. Here is an incisive summary of her position on women, quoted from Jennifer Uglow’s marvelous, brief biography of Eliot, first published in this country in 1987 and now, regrettably, out of print:
The message for the lives of women seems to be that although change must come (preferably gradually rather than suddenly), it must not be at the expense of traditional female values. Although it is wrong for women to be excluded from access to common culture and common stores of power, they should demand them for the sake of partnership with men and for the good of society, not just for their own separate fulfillment . . . Eliot believes partnership is essential for social harmony because there are essential feminine and masculine attributes which derive from biology, cultural conditioning and individual upbringing which encourage contrasting attitudes to life.
What this means in her novels is that “the traditional roles which seem to oppress women most—the submissive daughter, the self-denying wife, the loving and patient mother—become symbols of woman’s social mission. The vital thing is not to launch women into a masculine sphere, but to ‘feminise’ men, because the feminine strengths have for so long been trampled underfoot and undervalued.”
Consequently, the domestic contentment that Dorothea achieves by the end of the novel—one of the last things we see her doing is, in effect, arranging a playdate for her child and the children of her sister Celia—is not, for Eliot, a sign of failure. Dorothea’s desire to become a modern Saint Theresa was doomed to be at odds with the genuine contribution that Eliot sees her making in the form of a life of service—not service to the bogus work of scholarship on which Casaubon labored, but service to the reformist views and political career of her husband, to the household, the children, the hearth: the moral and spiritual education and improvement of her immediate circle and a few fortunate members of the next generation.
Thoughtful readers will likely suspect that there is something self-contradictory and paradoxical in Eliot giving us a female character who seems unusually forceful, reflective, and intelligent for a woman of the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, of any century—and keeping her at home. What we see by the end of the book is a woman of intense ambition, intellect, passion, and capability who is satisfied and fulfilled by a placid, loving domestic life. This is hardly the life that George Eliot herself led: traveling, receiving the accolades awarded to an extremely famous writer, holding court in her London home, hosting fellow writers and admirers who came to catch a glimpse of her or hear some words of wisdom.
If Lydgate enters into a considerably less than blissful union, it’s not—in Eliot’s view—because he insists on finding a sufficiently feminine woman who promises “sweet laughs” rather than intellectual companionship. Instead, it’s because he chooses the wrong woman, one with no concern for the good of society, no interest in anything beyond prestige and social status, in the luxuries she can acquire, and who demonstrates none of the womanly virtues that Eliot so admired. What Rosamond Vincy—Lydgate’s sweetheart and later his wife—does offer is one of the greatest portraits of a narcissist in English literature: a woman who believes she is irresistible, that no man can withstand her charms, and that there is no reason she should be denied either the most trivial whim or the costliest desire. She is not only shallow but vain, self-dramatizing, and false: “Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress . . . she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.” Unlike the straightforward, impeccably honest Dorothea, Rosamond resorts to manipulation, sulking, pouting, and stubborn resistance when she fails to get her way.
As Lydgate falls more deeply into debt, in large part because of furniture and the domestic and personal expenses that Rosamond has incurred, and as his hopes for professional success, fame, and fortune fail to materialize, Rosamond proves that she is not the sympathetic helpmate he imagined, but rather a selfish creature who seems quite willing to cut him loose when it appears that he may be unable to support her in the style to which she has been accustomed.
The Lydgate marriage is not the only unhappy one in Middlemarch; the doctor’s growing doubts about his wife and the increasing misery and discord in his household parallel that of Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon. Though they could not possibly have found two more different spouses, Dorothea and Lydgate have made similar mistakes: they have married people who will turn out to be quite unlike the people they supposed them to be. Both imagine their prospective spouses to be large-minded and quietly heroic, and subsequently find them to be petty, uncharitable, and, in their separate ways, rigid. Both Lydgate and Dorothea will make disheartening and ultimately shattering discoveries about the true natures that underlie the fantasy creatures they have wed.
Readers may feel that they know all there is to know about the Reverend Casaubon very early on, from his letter of proposal, surely one of the most chilling love letters in literature. But Dorothea’s idealism—the quasi-religious enthusiasm she feels at the prospect of aiding her husband in his monumental work—blinds her to the reality of who he is, and of what his work entails, as well as its value.
It is to Eliot’s credit that she cannot allow any of her characters—even the odious Casaubon and the maddening Rosamond—to remain one-dimensional. Each is given moments during which we are permitted to see the gap (or, in Casaubon’s case, the abyss) between their dreams and what they have been able to achieve. In the middle of an argument during which Rosamond has at last shown her true colors, refusing to empathize with her husband or join with him in contemplating what their financial problems might mean for them both, Eliot gives Lydgate (and the reader) an opportunity, however brief and transient, to consider their descent into hardship from Rosamond’s point of view. “Perhaps it was not possible for Lydgate, under the double stress of outward material difficulty and of his own proud resistance to humiliating consequences, to imagine fully what this sudden trial was to a young creature who had known nothing but indulgence, and whose dreams had all been of new indulgence, more exactly to her taste.”
Earlier in the novel, during a quarrel between Dorothea and Casaubon, Eliot demonstrates the same insistence on presenting both sides, regardless of how likely we are to favor the beautiful, loving, humiliated wife over the harsh, self-important stick of a husband:
She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers: she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently to his heart-beats, but only felt that her own was beating violently. . . . Mr. Casaubon had a sensitiveness to match Dorothea’s, and an equal quickness to imagine more than the fact. He had formerly observed with approbation her capacity for worshipping the right object; he now foresaw with sudden terror that this capacity might be replaced by presumption, this worship by the most exasperating of all criticism,—that which sees vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them.
If we go back and reread Casaubon’s chilling letter of proposal, we find a rather complicated mixture of pomposity, self-regard, and insecurity. He begins by citing Dorothea’s ability to fill a need in his own life, her capacity for “devotedness,” and his hope that she is perfectly suited to help with “a work too special to be abdicated.” But he ends by somewhat obliquely acknowledging the difference in their ages and describing the emotions with which he waits for her reply: “I await the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety which it would be the part of wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a more arduous labour than usual. But in this order of experience I am still young, and in looking forward to an unfavourable possibility I cannot but feel that resignation to solitude will be more difficult after the temporary illumination of hope.”
With the exception of the unfailingly selfless, patient, and honest Mary Garth and her industrious mother and younger siblings, nearly all the characters in Middlemarch have their virtues and their flaws; though, as we may have noticed, in some people the balance tips further toward one side than the other. The vast majority of characters contain a mixture of the admirable and the foolish, the selfish and the selfless, and (in the case of Bulstrode) the penitent, the generous, the secretive, and the reprehensible.
This, too, may be part of what Woolf meant when she said that this was a novel for “grown-up people.” Unlike children, with their innocent faith in good guys and bad guys, adults are more likely to understand that to divide our fellow humans into two categories—angelic heroes and devilish villains—is, in most cases, to oversimplify and underestimate human psychology. Often Eliot seems to know more about her characters than they know about themselves, yet somehow this does not diminish them or make them seem lacking in self-awareness, or deluded. She understands how much we can bear to know about ourselves at any one time, and how difficult we find it to admit that we have made serious—and perhaps irremediable—mistakes.
Nearly everyone in Middlemarch makes mistakes—yet another truth about adult life that Woolf would have recognized. They marry the wrong people. They champion the wrong side in an argument. They ally themselves with supporters whose patronage is compromised by self-interest or tainted by a past crime that must be hidden, at all costs. And though some of the wrongs can be righted—Dorothea is rescued from her disastrous choice by the death of Casaubon—others (like Lydgate’s marriage) are beyond help, incapable of being fixed. Some of the most uncomfortable and painful sections of the novel occur when we watch its central characters realizing how badly they have misjudged a person or a situation—and beginning to fear that they may have ruined their lives.
Unlike other, equally brilliant but rather more charming and comforting novels (the work of Jane Austen comes to mind), Middlemarch is a book in which, again with lifelike accuracy, only a small minority of the characters get what they want. And most must settle for some compromise that promises a reasonable measure of satisfaction and happiness, if there is to be any at all.
The last paragraph of the novel is worth quoting, for its eloquence and for the sheer force of George Eliot’s ambivalence about what a person—a woman, in particular—can and should expect from life.
Dorothea herself had no dreams of being praised above other women, feeling that there was always something better which she might have done, if she had only been better and known better. . . . [But] no life would have been possible for Dorothea which was not filled with emotion, and she had now a life filled also with a beneficent activity which she had not the doubtful pains of discovering and marking out for herself. . . . Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in certain circles as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done . . . Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature . . . spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Whatever one imagines that one’s life is going to be, how often one is mistaken, how one’s life ultimately turns out—that story, different for each character and each reader, is only one of the stories for grown-up people that Middlemarch tells. Another is the eternally timely, relevant, and interesting story of the unending conflict between ambition and conscience.
Much of what happens to Lydgate transpires in this arena, and his decisions about these matters are ultimately more destructive than his unwise choice of a wife. Rather than spoil one of the novel’s critical plot points, I’ll refrain from recounting the details of an essential scene that occurs a little less than a quarter of the way through—and from which everything that happens to Lydgate thereafter could be said to proceed. All I will say is that it’s an informal election to decide who will get the chaplaincy of the charity hospital that Mr. Bulstrode plans to establish. There are two candidates. Lydgate has certain reasons (friendship, preference, good judgment) for voting for one man, and other reasons (a sense of what Bulstrode wants) for voting for the other.
It’s a quiet scene, a vote about a relatively insignificant religious-political matter, in a country district. But the scene is so well written, so elegantly paced, and, finally, so startling that it may take the reader a while to recover from what it tells us about Lydgate—and what it may suggest about us and the people we know. Perhaps that is partly because grown-up people may recall a similar choice that occurred in the course of their own lives, or one that they read or heard about or witnessed. Certainly, such moments are what V. S. Pritchett had in mind when he wrote of Eliot, “No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully.”
Middlemarch is rich with plot turns and incidents of this sort. The result is a novel written for grown-up people, thoughtful, complicated, gloriously expansive and old-fashioned, and at the same time as modern and timely as anything we may experience or observe.