In the Library
Middlemarch
George Eliot, 1872
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 23 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 88
- Length
- Length 316k words
£1.99
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The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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Dickens maps an entire society through its institutions the way Eliot maps it through its marriages.
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About the book
Edward Casaubon has poured his life into a book called the Key to All Mythologies, a great work he will never finish, and Dorothea Brooke, ardent and not yet twenty, marries him certain she can help him carry it. That mismatch is where Middlemarch begins, before George Eliot widens the lens to hold a whole Midlands town: the gifted young doctor Lydgate, whose reforming ideals wear away under debt and his wife's lovely, immovable will; the banker Bulstrode, whose piety papers over an old crime; Fred Vincy, waiting slowly to deserve Mary Garth. Eliot knows every one of them from the inside, with a sympathy so exact it can name the very hour an idealism begins to shrink. She wrote that if we truly felt all ordinary human life we would hear the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and die of the roar that lies on the other side of silence. No other novel takes you so close to that roar, or sends you back into your own small life so much gentler for having heard it.