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Middlemarch is a "magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," Virginia Woolf said. There are imperfections because, like many great writers, George Eliot aspired to something that was almost too difficult. Although everyone knows that fiction is about the extraordinary, Eliot aspired to write about the ordinary. She searched beneath its surface to make it comprehensible, and succeeded in a way that is profoundly moving.
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. Extraordinarily thoughtful, and extraordinarily well read, she was assistant editor of the Westminster Review. Although she was at the centre of intellectual life in mid-19th-century London, she was shunned in polite society because she lived, unmarried, with critic and naturalist George Henry Lewes. He was separated and wanted a divorce, which the law forbade because he had agreed to his wife having a child by another man. So although Eliot and Lewes seem to have had one of the most intimately affectionate relationships in the history of literature, respectable people did not like it.
Middlemarch is about an ardent young woman, Dorothea Brooke, who marries an elderly scholar, Edward Casaubon. He is conducting laborious researches for a book, the key to all mythologies. Dorothea admires his erudition and, not knowing he will never write his book, wants to help him in his work.
Casaubon is one of the great characters of the European novel. Indeed, all the principal characters of Middlemarch have a depth that is scarcely approached by English novelists before George Eliot.
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In his literary interest and the insight he affords into the human condition, Casaubon stands alongside Emma Bovary and Rodion Raskolnikov. If you know someone who shrinks from being known and instead struggles over some intricately unending task, read about Casaubon. If, in a conversation, you hear yourself sounding pompous, or if you ever wonder whether you are irritably muddling around in a matter you won't be able to understand, read the character of Casaubon.
Another protagonist is Tertius Lydgate, an idealistic doctor who comes to the ordinary town of Middlemarch to set up a practice and to conduct research that, like Casaubon's, is impossible: "to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy." Lydgate is soon snapped up by the town beauty, the self-absorbed Rosamond Vincy, who sees in him a means to lever herself out of the confines of provincial life. Whereas Dorothea is attracted to Casaubon because she thinks he will open to her the doors of serious learning, Lydgate is easily drawn in by Rosamond because of a speck of conventionality in his character. Dorothea and Lydgate do not become romantically involved, but they develop a mutual sympathy as they realize they have both entrapped themselves in unhappy marriages.
The plot of Middlemarch is not of the usual kind: It's a counterpoint among several relationships. Eliot explores what really holds us humans together: "the quality and breadth of our emotion." And, as D.H. Lawrence said, it is she who first takes the action inside. She does this by offering three different streams of writing. The first is that of the traditional 19th-century novel. Then, as events and conversations occur in this stream, anticipating James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Eliot also gives us the stream of inner consciousness of the protagonists. Then there is a third stream: the narrator's astute commentary, which at the close of the book expresses the idea that the growing good of the world might not depend so much on the doings of extraordinary people, but on "unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life."
Middlemarch is a generous book. It is one of the world's great books because, between the three streams of writing, George Eliot enables a space to grow: a space for the reader's emotions and thoughts. You feel things you have not felt, think things you have not thought. It's a book for grown-up people.
Keith Oatley is the author of A Natural History, set in the town of Middlethorpe, where a certain Dr. Leggate undertakes a research task that is soluble to discover how infectious disease spreads.ƒo
Next week: The Wealth of Nations
