Books

An astounding masterpiece: Middlemarch by George Eliot

A year of Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s favourite books

Portrait of George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Anne Evans and author of Middlemarch.

Lucy Sweeney Byrne
Sat May 2 2020 - 06:00

Middlemarch is the defining English novel of the 1800s, hands down. None of the stock characters of Dickens, the Coronation Street-style plot twists and big reveals. There’s no single message, religious or otherwise, dictated to us from the author’s moral pulpit. In fact, in its grandeur and its subtlety, it’s perhaps more akin to the great Russian novelistic tradition.

Regardless, Eliot’s masterpiece is astounding, in its breadth and depth, and in its startling pathos. Who could not be enthralled by Dorothea’s youthful idealism, by the viciousness of the marriage between Tertius Lydgate and Rosamund Vincy, by Farebrother’s unrequited love for Mary Garth?

So often, when I hear people describing grand projects or speaking of their intentions for their lives (those, “tomorrow I’m gunna!” types), my mind flashes to Casaubon and his Key to all Mythologies – the ultimate deluded endeavour, both so hilarious and so totally excruciating.

Having first appeared in 1871-72, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life takes as its subject the society of a rising manufacturing town, set in the years preceding the Reform Bill of 1832. We see, then, a social milieu ranging from lowly farmers all the way up to members of the country gentry, all on the brink of immense social and often personal transformation. The novel is full of good intentions and wishes for grand reforms, many of which are thwarted or transmogrified through bitter experience.

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At the two revolving centres of the novel are Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, both naively hopeful in their respective quests to “make a difference”, and both going about it the wrong way, with agonising results.

We see, then, in Middlemarch, characters caught up in the particular issues of their time, as well as the same human struggles that are played out in every generation. We see illusions shattered, hopes dashed, and above all else, a set of individuals, trying to find ways to live that allow for bend, without causing too much break; in other words, Eliot shows us life, as it was then, and always will be.