Middlemarch
$26.75
- Paperback
848 pages
- Release Date
15 December 2000
Summary
One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces resistance from the society she inhabits. In this epic in a small landscape, Eliot’s large cast of precisely delineated characters and the rich tapestry of their stories result in a wise, compassionate, and astute vision of human nature. As Virginia Woolf declared, George Eliot “was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment.”
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780679783312 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0679783318 |
| Author: | George Eliot, A.S. Byatt |
| Publisher: | Random House USA Inc |
| Imprint: | Modern Library Inc |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 848 |
| Edition: | 2000th |
| Release Date: | 15 December 2000 |
| Weight: | 697g |
| Dimensions: | 47mm x 133mm x 202mm |
| Series: | Modern Library Classics |
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Critics Review
“No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative.”
–V. S. Pritchett
George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans was born on November 22, 1819, in Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England. She was the youngest child of an estate agent. During her youth, she experienced a period of evangelical piety, but her strong interest in philosophy and her friendships with religious freethinkers led her to reject orthodox religion.
In 1843, she took over the translation of D.F. Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (published in 1846) from a friend’s wife. This work significantly influenced English rationalism. After her father’s death, she moved to London and from 1851 to 1854, she worked as a writer and editor for the Westminster Review, a publication associated with the Radical party.
In London, she met George Henry Lewes, a journalist and forward-thinking individual. Lewes was separated from his wife but unable to divorce her. In a bold move for the Victorian era, Mary Ann Evans began living openly with Lewes in 1854. They considered their union as sacred as a legal marriage, and it lasted until Lewes’s death in 1878.
Encouraged by Lewes, Mary Ann Evans wrote her first fictional work, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857. This was followed by two more stories published under the pseudonym George Eliot. She chose “George” after Lewes’s first name and “Eliot” because she felt it was a substantial and easily pronounced word.
At the age of thirty-nine, drawing on her memories of Warwickshire, she wrote her first full-length novel, Adam Bede (1859). This novel established her as the leading female novelist of her time. Subsequent works included The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). Her masterpiece, Middlemarch, considered one of the greatest English novels, was published in 1871-72. Her final novel was Daniel Deronda (1876).
After Lewes’s death, George Eliot married John Walter Cross. She was sixty-one years old, and he was forty. Before her death on December 22, 1880, she was widely recognized by her contemporaries as the foremost living writer of English fiction.
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