Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
752
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
752Paperback
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Overview
Long regarded as one of the greatest of the great English-language novels, Middlemarch by George Eliot has endured as the archetypal Victorian novel and an eternally resonant exploration of society and the individual. Centuries removed from the world of the landed gentry in 1830s England, the characters of Middlemarch remain as exquisitely drawn and deeply alive as any in literature: the pedantic, obsessive Reverend Casaubon, the idealistic Dr. Lydgate, and the spirited, striving Dorothea Brooke.
A novel of marriage, Eliot’s “study of Provincial Life” is also a strikingly fresh commentary on scientific and technological change, cultural and class divides, and the upheavals of a rural community experiencing global transformation. In her insightful introduction, Rebecca Mead, New Yorker writer and author of My Year in Middlemarch, explores Eliot’s “meliorism”—her belief that individuals can improve society in small, everyday ways. Dorothea’s successes and failures not only in love but as an ardent social reformer will resonate with all of us who look at the world today and ask, as Dorothea did in her time, “What could she do, what ought she to do?” With bold illustrations by artist Keren Katz, the Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch is a thoroughly modern edition of one of the most important novels ever written.
Praise for Middlemarch
“Middlemarch is so careful to correct any habit to side with one person rather than another that the narrator even corrects herself.”
—John Mullan, author of What Matters in Jane Austen?
“A novel without weaknesses, it renews itself for every generation.”
—Martin Amis, author of Inside Story
“Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
—Virginia Woolf
“Middlemarch shows us the contours and indeed the very language of the characters’ inner lives.”
—Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781632063069 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Restless Books |
| Publication date: | 09/14/2021 |
| Pages: | 752 |
| Sales rank: | 624,781 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.70(d) |
About the Author
George Eliot was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, an English Victorian author whose major works include The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.
Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She has profiled many subjects, among them Lin-Manuel Miranda, Margaret Atwood, Nico Muhly, Slavoj Žižek, and Mary Beard. She has also written more than two hundred Talk of the Town stories and is a frequent contributor to Cultural Comment on newyorker.com. She is the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding and My Life in Middlemarch. She lives in London.
Keren Katz is a cartoonist, writer, and the non-fictitious half of The Katz Sisters Duo. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts’s MFA Illustration Program and Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. She is the author of two graphic novels The Academic Hour and The Backstage of a Dishwashing Webshow and was nominated for the SPX Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist. Her work has been published in anthologies by Fantagraphics, Smoke Signal, Locust Moon, Rough House, Ink Brick, Retrofit Comics, The Brooklyn Rail, Kuš! (nominated for the SPX Ignatz Award for Outstanding Mini Comic), Carrier Pigeon and Seven Stories Press.
Read an Excerpt
WHO that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa,' has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand - in - hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide - eyed and helpless - looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child - pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many - volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her. Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self - despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far - resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill - matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, tocommon eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later - born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardour alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love - stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart -beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long recognisable deed.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction George Eliot: A Brief Chronology A Note on the TextMiddlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
Appendix A: George Eliot’s Essays, Reviews, and Criticism
- “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,” Westminster Review (October 1854)
- “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister,” The Leader (21 July 1855)
- From “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” The Leader (13 October 1855)
- From Review of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1856), Westminster Review (April 1856)
- From “The Natural History of German Life,” Westminster Review (July 1856)
- “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review (October 1856)
Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews of Middlemarch
- From Edward Dowden, “George Eliot,” Contemporary Review (August 1872)
- From Richard Holt Hutton, review of Middlemarch, Spectator (7 December 1872)
- From Edith Simcox, “Middlemarch,” Academy (1 January 1873)
- From [Henry James], unsigned review, Galaxy (March 1873)
- [William Hurrell Mallock], unsigned review of Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), Edinburgh Review (October 1879)
- Margaret Oliphant, Chapter XI, “Of the Younger Novelists,” The Victorian Age of English Literature (1882)
- From Sir John Emerich Edward Dalberg, first Baron Acton, “George Eliot’s Life,” Nineteenth Century (March 1885)
- Virginia Woolf, “George Eliot,” Times Literary Supplement (20 November 1919)
Appendix C: Historical Documents: Medical Reform, Religious Freedom, and the Advent of the Railroads
- From “The Apothecaries Act” (1815)
- From “The Roman Catholic Relief Act” (1829)
- From “An Act to amend the representation of the people in England and Wales” (1832)
- From “An Act for regulating Schools of Anatomy” (1832)
- Liverpool and Manchester Railroad Company Prospectus (1824)
- From [Commentary on the projected Liverpool and Manchester Railway], Quarterly Review (March 1825)
- From “An Act to consolidate and amend the Acts relating to the Property of Married Women” (1882)
Select Bibliography
What People are Saying About This
“A novel without weaknesses, it renews itself for every generation.”
—Martin Amis, author of Inside Story
“Middlemarch shows us the contours and indeed the very language of the characters’ inner lives.”
—Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
It is a hugely ambitious, hugely successful, wise, and satisfying work. I never reread it without discovering something I hadn't noticed before.
Reading Group Guide
1. Discuss the relationship between religious and secular, spiritual and worldly, in the novel. Is it conflicted or not? Why?
2. What is Eliot's view of ambition in its different forms-social, intellectual, political? How is this evident in the novel?
3. In her introduction, A. S. Byatt contends that Eliot was "the great English novelist of ideas." How do you interpret this? How do you think ideas-human thought-inform the plot of Middlemarch?
4. George Eliot is a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans. How does Eliot's femaleness-and her concealing of it-add resonance to the novel, if at all? Do you see Dorothea's character differently in this regard? Do you see Middlemarch as a "women's" novel?
5. Middlemarch was originally published in serial form, a single book at a time. What kinds of concerns affected Eliot's narrative in this regard? How do these discrete segments differ from the whole?
6. Discuss the convention of marriage in the novel. Do you feel it ultimately restricts the characters? Or is it the novel's provincial setting that proves more oppressive?
7. Discuss the metaphor of Dorothea as St. Theresa. What is Eliot saying here?