Middlemarch
$33.80
- Paperback
848 pages
- Release Date
15 December 2000
Summary
One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces resistance from the society she inhabits. In this epic in a small landscape, Eliot’s large cast of precisely delineated characters and the rich tapestry of their stories result in a wise, compassionate, and astute vision of human nature. As Virginia Woolf declared, George Eliot “was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment.”
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780679783312 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0679783318 |
| Author: | George Eliot, A.S. Byatt |
| Publisher: | Random House USA Inc |
| Imprint: | Modern Library Inc |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 848 |
| Edition: | 2000th |
| Release Date: | 15 December 2000 |
| Weight: | 646g |
| Dimensions: | 43mm x 131mm x 203mm |
| Series: | Modern Library Classics |
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Critics Review
“No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative.”
–V. S. Pritchett
George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans was born on November 22, 1819, at Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England, the last child of an estate agent. During her girlhood, she went through a phase of evangelical piety, but her strong interest in philosophy and her friendship with religious freethinkers led to a break with orthodox religion. When one of these friends married in 1843, Mary Ann took over from his wife the task of translating D.F. Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846), a work that had a deep effect on English rationalism.
After her father’s death, she settled in London and from 1851 to 1854 served as a writer and editor of the Westminster Review, the organ of the Radical party. In London, she met George Henry Lewes, a journalist and advanced thinker. Lewes was separated from his wife, who had had two sons by another man, but had been unable to obtain a divorce. In a step daring for Victorian times, Mary Ann Evans began living openly with Lewes in 1854, in a union they both considered as sacred as a legal marriage and one that lasted until his death in 1878.
With Lewes’s encouragement, Mary Ann Evans wrote her first fictional work, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857. It was followed by two more stories published under the pseudonym George Eliot—”George” because it was Lewes’s name and “Eliot” because, she said, it was a “good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” At the age of thirty-nine, she used her memories of Warwickshire to write her first long novel, Adam Bede (1859), a book that established her as the foremost woman novelist of her day. Then came The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). Her masterpiece and one of the greatest English novels, Middlemarch, was published in 1871-72. Her last work was Daniel Deronda (1876).
After Lewes’s death, George Eliot married John Walter Cross. He was forty; she was sixty-one. Before her death on December 22, 1880, she had been recognized by her contemporaries as the greatest living writer of English fiction.
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