Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

by George Eliot, Gregory Maertz (Editor)

Overview

George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) is one of the classic novels of English literature and was admired by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The complex main plot and many subplots revolve around Dorothea Brooke, an ardent young woman, and her relationship to three men: Casaubon, a clergyman and scholar twice her age; Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor who shares Dorothea’s enthusiasm for reform but whose flaws compromise his ambitions; and Will Ladislaw, a young man of mysterious origins, romantic temperament, and artistic inclinations. A female Bildungsroman and a study of character and society in the realistic mode pioneered by Balzac, Middlemarch is also an historical novel that offers a panorama of English society in an era of social reform and political agitation.

This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a rich selection of contextual materials, including contemporary reviews of the novel, other writings by George Eliot (essays, reviews, and criticism), and historical documents pertaining to medical reform, religious freedom, and the advent of the railroads.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781551112336
Publisher:	Broadview Press
Publication date:	08/31/2004
Series:	Broadview Literary Texts Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	744
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Gregory Maertz is an Associate Professor of English at Saint John’s University in New York City. He is the editor of Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age (SUNY Press, 1998).

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 Text

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

Appendix A: George Eliot’s Essays, Reviews, and Criticism

1. “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,” Westminster Review (October 1854)
2. “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister,” The Leader (21 July 1855)
3. From “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” The Leader (13 October 1855)
4. From Review of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1856), Westminster Review (April 1856)
5. From “The Natural History of German Life,” Westminster Review (July 1856)
6. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review (October 1856)

Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews of Middlemarch

1. From Edward Dowden, “George Eliot,” Contemporary Review (August 1872)
2. From Richard Holt Hutton, review of Middlemarch, Spectator (7 December 1872)
3. From Edith Simcox, “Middlemarch,” Academy (1 January 1873)
4. From [Henry James], unsigned review, Galaxy (March 1873)
5. [William Hurrell Mallock], unsigned review of Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), Edinburgh Review (October 1879)
6. Margaret Oliphant, Chapter XI, “Of the Younger Novelists,” The Victorian Age of English Literature (1882)
7. From Sir John Emerich Edward Dalberg, first Baron Acton, “George Eliot’s Life,” Nineteenth Century (March 1885)
8. Virginia Woolf, “George Eliot,” Times Literary Supplement (20 November 1919)

Appendix C: Historical Documents: Medical Reform, Religious Freedom, and the Advent of the Railroads

1. From “The Apothecaries Act” (1815)
2. From “The Roman Catholic Relief Act” (1829)
3. From “An Act to amend the representation of the people in England and Wales” (1832)
4. From “An Act for regulating Schools of Anatomy” (1832)
5. Liverpool and Manchester Railroad Company Prospectus (1824)
6. From [Commentary on the projected Liverpool and Manchester Railway], Quarterly Review (March 1825)
7. From “An Act to consolidate and amend the Acts relating to the Property of Married Women” (1882)

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What People are Saying About This

A. S. Byatt

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?

Editorial Reviews

Broadview Press and editor Gregory Maertz have produced a text whose rich but judicious contextual annotation, notably highlighting Eliot’s deep immersion in German culture, makes this a crucial edition of what is arguably the greatest Victorian novel of them all.” — Michael McKeon, Rutgers University

“Gregory Maertz’s fine new edition of Middlemarch allows readers to consider the novel in relation to a range of documents—reviews and other writings by George Eliot, contemporary reviews of the novel, and contextual material. This additional material both enriches our reading of the novel and its concerns and expands our knowledge of the period.” — Mark Turner, King’s College London

From the Publisher

"Gregory Maertz's fine new edition of Middlemarch allows readers to consider the novel in relation to a range of documents—reviews and other writings by George Eliot, contemporary reviews of the novel, and contextual material. This additional material both enriches our reading of the novel and its concerns and expands our knowledge of the period."

Mark Turner King's College

"Broadview Press and editor Gregory Maertz have produced a text whose rich but judicious contextual annotation, notably highlighting Eliot's deep immersion in German culture, makes this a crucial edition of what is arguably the greatest Victorian novel of them all."

Michael McKeon Rutgers University