Middlemarch (Annotated)

Critical Edition with Literary Analysis & Author Biography | George Eliot | Erato Press

By: George Eliot

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Virginia Woolf called it the only English novel written for grown-up people. She was not wrong.

Published in eight instalments between 1871 and 1872, Middlemarch does something no novel before it had done with such precision: it takes ordinary life seriously. Not the extraordinary life — not war, not shipwreck, not crime — but the life of a provincial English town, its marriages and ambitions and failures and the slow accumulation of days that constitutes most of human existence. George Eliot understood that this was the real subject. Everything else was avoidance.

Dorothea Brooke — She wants to do something significant with her life and has no idea what that means or how to begin. She marries the wrong man for the right reasons and spends years learning the difference. She is the most intelligent person in every room she enters and the room does not notice.

Tertius Lydgate — He arrives in Middlemarch with genuine medical talent, genuine idealism, and a complete inability to understand that the woman he will marry is not the woman he thinks she is.

Rosamond Vincy — She knows exactly what she wants and pursues it with a consistency that Eliot treats as neither admirable nor contemptible — simply as a fact about a person shaped entirely by what her world told her to value.

Bulstrode, Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, Mary Garth, Fred Vincy — A provincial town in the age of the Reform Act, rendered with the patience of a naturalist and the compassion of someone who understands that most lives are neither heroic nor wasted — simply lived.

✦ Complete and unabridged — all eight books and the Finale of the original 1871–1872 text.

This edition also contains:

✦ The Web of Affinities — an original literary analysis of Middlemarch as a unified moral and artistic project, examining how Eliot builds a world in which every character's fate is connected to every other's ✦ A Study of Provincial Life: England in the Age of Reform — historical context for the novel: the Reform Act of 1832, the transformation of English medicine, the role of the Church, and the world that made Dorothea's ambitions both inevitable and impossible ✦ The Sibyl of the Strand: A Portrait of George Eliot — a full critical biography of Mary Ann Evans: the woman who took a male pseudonym, lived outside marriage by choice, and wrote the book that defined what the English novel could be

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Women's literary fiction with genuine moral and psychological depth ✦ Historical fiction set in 19th century England (Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope) ✦ Classic novels that take the interior lives of women as seriously as any other subject ✦ Fiction that rewards patience with the kind of understanding no other form provides

She was not a saint. She was something rarer: a person who wanted to do good in a world that had not decided what good women were allowed to do. The novel does not resolve this. It simply shows it, with the unflinching attention of someone who knew exactly what it cost.