Middlemarch

Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury

Middlemarch is a complex tale woven with themes of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty, and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of life in an English provincial town during the social unrest leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832 is brought to life through:

• The experiences of Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Tertius Lydgate
• A rich ensemble of other paradigm characters who vividly illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century

Henry James praised Middlemarch as a ‘treasurehouse of detail’, while Virginia Woolf famously called George Eliot’s masterpiece ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.’