Middlemarch is a Classic Historical Fiction novel By George Eliot.
Middlemarch Book Summary
George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”.
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About George Eliot Author of Middlemarch Pdf Book
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross) was born on November 22, 1819 at Arbury Farm, Warwickshire, England. She received an ordinary education and, upon leaving school at the age of sixteen, embarked on a program of independent study to further her intellectual growth. In 1841 she moved with her father to Coventry, where the influences of “skeptics and rationalists” swayed her from an intense religious devoutness to an eventual break with the church. The death of her father in 1849 left her with a small legacy and the freedom to pursue her literary inclinations. In 1851 she became the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a position she held for three years. In 1854 came the fated meeting with George Henry Lewes, the gifted editor of The Leader, who was to become her adviser and companion for the next twenty-four years. Her first book, Scenes of a Clerical Life (1858), was followed by Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1872). The death of Lewes, in 1878, left her stricken and lonely. On May 6, 1880, she married John Cross, a friend of long standing, and after a brief illness she died on December 22 of that year, in London.
Middlemarchpdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Signet Classics (December 2, 2003)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 912 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0451529170
- ISBN-13 : 978-0451529176
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.36 x 1.51 x 7.02 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,845,379 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #88,054 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews: 4.3 out of 5 stars 3,584 ratings
Middlemarch Book Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful novel, transitional and true
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 17, 2014
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Middlemarch is a gigantic, cat-crushing, end of the old guard and into the industrial revolution romance filled with incredible three-dimensional characters and a sprawling identity of a town, its politics, money, romances, and lives. Eliot’s book is incredibly precise – which in my opinion is somewhat long winded at times – but authentic to the bone.
I finally decided to read the novel after two little coincidences finally led me to its door. First, I read Mead’s My Life In Middlemarch over the summer and felt like it was a beautiful musing on a general love of reading in addition to Eliot’s body of work. I was at a wedding halfway through the book, and one of the events was at an avid reader’s house where he offered the opportunity to climb through a mountain of books he was going to donate. I found some real gems, and as luck would have it, a copy of Middlemarch. Shortly after Mead’s book was finished, I began Eliot’s. My prior experience with the author is sparse and lacks cohesion, and there is little I remember from my undergraduate and secondary school reading (even though I know I had read her work), but Silas Marner was always the clear favorite prior to this undertaking.
Middlemarch is a beautiful novel, and perhaps the most notable elements of it is the reality with which the characters, their concerns, and the overall atmosphere of life in this English country town is so vibrant and true. The characters are sublime in their humanness, and the lack of gimmick and easily reliable tropes of novels of the era is as refreshing as it is accurate to real life. The novel is a gorgeous portrayal of the transitional period in world history in many ways – when alchemy gave way to the scientific method, when medicine was treatment and not drugs, when politics was a matter of voting and public opinion and not inheritance, when women became emancipated from the constraints of love and marriage, when industry and new thought replaced old money and leisurely lives of waste, and when religion began to slip away into an enlightened skepticism. In many ways, the book is about a community in transition, growing through these major world changes along with understanding the impact on the minds and existence of so many different types of people.
In the book there are many characters, and having a little community tree with their relationships at hand might be more helpful than trying to keep them all straight as I did (I found myself confused with Ladislaw and Lydgate at times, and usually was reminded once they opened their mouth which they were). Each character’s voice and presence is brilliantly crafted, however, and the attention Eliot paid to ensuring that education, culture, and origins was apparent in their dialogue and dialects. I think the volume of characters speaks to the realism that she was intending in the novel – and much like the in-between chapters in Mariner – she is attempting to show a wholeness to reality in the book and capture the essence of it as realistically as possible. This is not as sprawling as Dr. Zhivago with hundreds of characters, many of whom are not important, but rather many characters who are all important, none more important than another.
This shouldn’t matter to modern audiences – reality in great literary writing of our time. But perhaps what makes this so unusual is the fact that this is an incredibly contemporary novel of today that was written in the Victorian era. A new mold was broken with Middlemarch – one that recognized that there need not be a direct arc or a single character or a plot trope or archetype that singly arches over the entirety of a novel. This is a period of time in the real lives of incredibly real fictitious characters – a reality that is painstakingly and beautifully constructed in the fibers of Eliots Victorian community. In a commercial sense, the book would be very unsatisfying to a commercial audience, but this is a portrait of marriage, progress, and money as the world changes around the characters, and it is a history that was likely to have been lost in many of the period’s literary and journalistic sources. She captures the community with the vision that it was an important time – and people were unsure whether the past dictated where this new world was headed. If there is any undercurrent in the novel, perhaps it is the opening and closing chapters that recognize a striking relationship to many of the people in the novel. As it winds down to its simplest relationships, so are we reminded of those the novel opened with, and as we opened the undertaking with a breath in with simplicity and a social care-free attitude toward some beautifully ignorant and simple characters, so we exhale at the end in the complexity of those who we thought so simple and free of burden as their eyes have been opened and souls chained down in the social meaning of the choices they have made.
I enjoyed Middlemarch a great deal, although I may not ever pick it up to read in its entirety again. It is definitely an intellectual commitment that requires a great deal of stamina and patience to get through. For me, it took me a little over one month to complete (although I was reading some other material at the same time). I have very few complaints about the book – and perhaps my only consistent gripe might be the inconsistent chapter opening excerpts that seem to come from sources liberal in both time and geography. To me, it only rarely added to the work and did not seem to have a linear connection among them (even though they did to the text). I also felt a little frustrated at times that Eliot went from gorgeous prose in some of the longer portions of exposition to glossing over major details in others, and there was inconsistency with that as well. Besides that, I was entranced with the wit, accuracy, and attention paid to making the most visionary and realistic novel – in a time and place where such a novel was rarely written and had never existed prior.
4.0 out of 5 stars great literature
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 29, 2022
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if you enjoy and are familiar with great classic English literature then this novel is a must..I must say in all honesty that it was a challenge to read…it was never made into a movie too many characters and in the beginning for me was tricky to keep track in my mind of all the characters but have patience that soon changes….her vocabulary and in dept description and analysis of mind emotion and soul I have found in very few other writers maybe a Jack London or Dostoevsky the Idiot or Pia Benvenutto Envy the Butterflies.
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