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Synopsis:

George Eliot's masterpiece, portraying every level of society in a provincial English town, tells the story of the romantic idealist Dorothea Brooke, her misguided marriage to a dessicated scholar incapable of loving her, and the passionate love affair that ultimately brings meaning to her life. A parallel plot involves the plight of Lydgate, the equally idealistic doctor who arrives in Middlemarch hoping to bring advanced medical techniques to the village poor, but becomes ensnared by a spoiled and materialistic young woman. The novel explores the idea that the search for one's true function in life may be warped or frustrated by one's environment--but also that those obstacles may ultimately be overcome or transcended. MIDDLEMARCH, published in 1872 but set 40 years earlier, is a grand Victorian panorama--a fascinating and detailed look at English life, rich in personality types worthy of Dickens. It is also an intensely readable and gripping story, and an unexpectedly witty one, sometimes reminiscent of Jane Austen in its sharp-grained social observations. Like all Eliot's fiction, MIDDLEMARCH has a strong moral center--epitomized in the noble Dorothea--that is unrelated to formal religion and that is closely allied with a healthy skepticism about any belief system that does not include a deep and abiding respect for human frailty.

Author Bio:

George Eliot's mother died young, and young Mary Ann Evans (as she was known until she was nearly 40) was raised by her father in a country town. She refused to embrace the fundamentalist religion of her father and, when she was 16, objected to going to church with him; however, she agreed to accompany him as long as she could be free to let her mind wander during the service. Soon after that, she translated THE LIFE OF JESUS by the German theologian David Friedrich Strauss into English--a work that questioned the divinity of Christ. Following the death of her father, George Eliot was free to lead the life of an intellectual and scholar; she moved to London and began to write for, and eventually edit, the Westminster Review. It was there that she met the man with whom she eventually spent most of her life, George Henry Lewes, who was married to another woman--a daring move in Victorian England, which resulted in Eliot's condemnation by her family, including her beloved brother, Isaac. (She explored the complexities of the brother-sister bond in her 1860 novel, THE MILL ON THE FLOSS.) With Lewes's encouragement, Eliot began to write novels and stories, and began publishing them in 1857, taking the pseudonym "George Eliot" largely to avoid the prejudice her public might have toward her unorthodox living arrangements. Upon Lewes's death, Eliot married a much younger man--delighting her family, who finally considered her respectable--but she died six months after the wedding. She became widely celebrated for her fiction, and is considered one of the greatest novelists of all time; D. H. Lawrence called her the first modern novelist. All her life, George Eliot was torn between her reverence for the old ways--religious, political, and social--in which she was raised, and the new, represented by her intellectual agnosticism and bohemian life. Always, she placed the responsibility for a person's life on the moral choices he or she makes, and she believed that the function of the novel is to increase people's sympathy and tolerance for others. As a strictly realist writer, she embraced the doctrine that "all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms...in place of definite, substantial reality."