Key themes
- The unlived life and its quiet tragedy
- Marriage, ambition and institutional constraint
- Reform, idealism and the weight of the ordinary
About this book
Ambition, marriage and idealism in a provincial English town; widely held to be the wisest of all Victorian novels.
Published in eight instalments in 1871–72, Middlemarch is widely considered the greatest English novel. Virginia Woolf called it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.'
Discussion questions
- Dorothea chooses Casaubon. Virginia Woolf called this a 'blundering life' cut short by being a woman. How does Eliot balance sympathy for Dorothea's choices with a clear-eyed view of their costs?
- Middlemarch is unusual in its sympathy for ordinary people doing their best in difficult circumstances. Who in the novel do you find most sympathetically drawn — and why?
- The novel is about reform — national, social, medical, moral. What does it say about the relationship between individual idealism and institutional resistance?
- Lydgate is undone by his marriage. How does Eliot make Rosamond comprehensible rather than simply villainous — and what does the novel say about the power of limited imagination?
- Eliot famously said the novel was about 'the growing good of the world' depending on 'those who lived faithfully a hidden life.' Is this a consoling philosophy or a sad one — and do you believe it?
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