Young gentlewoman Dorothea Brooke lives with her sister Celia and her bachelor uncle Mr. “Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.”.Middlemarch started out as two separate stories that Eliot eventually combined.

The two lived together openly – a scandal in 19th century England.

George Eliot’s lifelong partner was the married journalist George Henry Lewes.

The plot is based on the precept that everything in life has consequences and people’s pasts determine their futures.

Eliot modeled Middlemarch on the English town of Coventry, where she lived with her father after her mother’s death.

She used a male pseudonym to avoid the prejudices against female writers as well as to disassociate her work from the scandal of her private life.

George Eliot’s real name was Mary Ann Evans.

The story is set in the early 19th century, just a few years before the United Kingdom’s Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832.

Beautiful, inquisitive noblewoman Dorothea Brooke and young, ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate’s idealistic quests to make a difference in the world cannot survive unhappy marriages and the small-mindedness of Middlemarch society.

Middlemarch is George Eliot's most important novel and one of the seminal works of English Realism.

Middlemarch is not only the author’s most impressive work, but also a seminal contribution to the 19th-century English novel. Eventually, the individual storylines converge into an overall picture that captures and represents the multifaceted reality of small-town life. She beautifully sketches even minor characters, letting the reader into their thoughts and struggles. In the novel, Eliot depicts small-town life in the 1830s with its class system, rivalries, and social restrictions in minute detail. George Eliot’s influential novel Middlemarch is, according to its subtitle, a “study of provincial life.” At its center are the beautiful and inquisitive Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate, who both have to abandon their idealist views when faced with the reality of daily life.

Middlemarch by George Eliot