![]() The action takes place some 40 years before the moment of composition. Dr Lydgate is especially emblematic of Middlemarch: dying young, a bitter and disappointed man who knew he had married the wrong woman and could do nothing about it. And others still realise their mistakes but are trapped by a wrong decision and never escape. ![]() Others refuse or are incapable of learning, and spend their lives resenting their situation, and blaming others. Some learn the lessons and achieve a temporary happiness. ![]() Indeed, Middlemarch looms above the mid-Victorian literary landscape like a cathedral of words in whose shadowy vastness its readers can find every kind of addictive discomfort, a sequence of raw truths: the loneliness of the disappointed failure, Dr Lydgate the frustrations of his discontented wife the humiliation of a good woman, Dorothea the corrosive bitterness of Casaubon, and so on.įew of Eliot's characters achieve what they really want, and all have to learn to compromise. ![]() Subtitled "a study of provincial life", the novel has a didactic realism that's a world away from Vanity Fair or Great Expectations. George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, appeared after the deaths of Thackeray (1863) and Dickens (1870). ![]()
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