George Eliot was the pen name for the nineteenth-century novelist Mary Ann Evans. She wasn’t the only woman writer of that century who used a male pseudonym. The Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily, Anne) all did, while Jane Austen published her books anonymously.
Evans used the name George Eliot because she wanted her novels to be taken seriously at a time when women writers reputedly wrote only light or romance novels. Her true identity was discovered after the publication of her first novel, Adam Bede, in 1859. She was criticized and ostracized, especially after it became known she was living with a married man! But guess what? Her books were good. She kept writing and publishing under the name George Eliot.
Her masterpiece, the novel that appears at or near the top of almost every serious list of the greatest novels ever written, was Middlemarch, published in eight installments in 1871.
I finally decided to take it on. At 800 pages long and written in a dense and antiquated style, the reading was, at times, a serious slog, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to finally finish it. Which I did. Last night.
Is Middlemarch one of the greatest novels ever written? Maybe. It has a subtitle: A Study of Provincial Life. The story of this fictional English town from 1829-1832 includes an extensive cast of characters mostly focusing on what will become of three pairings: Dorothea and Casaubon, Rosamund and Lydgate, and Fred and Mary. Plus the hidden past and careful maneuverings of a wealthy banker, Bulstrode.
Eliot wrote with depth and insight about the status of women at the time. Placed at the center is Dorothea, an intelligent and ambitious young woman whose idealism ends up smothered following her marriage to the older and desiccated scholar, Casaubon. After his death, she tries to make something more of her life, but she had few options in society, and the climax and resolution of her story were conventional for the era.
Middlemarch is one of the first “social novels”, using connected plotlines and emphasizing the ripple effect that character decisions have on other characters. Occasionally, an omniscient narrator takes over to deliver context, irony, and humor, but it sometimes felt intrusive and slowed the narrative momentum.
Eliot especially shines in her ability to write complex characters. None are clear villains. None are larger-than-life heroes. They all feel real because they experience disappointment, self-deception, moral compromise, obsession, unrequited love, ambition—and every other human emotion. The point of view moves from character to character, and as readers we grasp their rich inner lives and understand the motives for their choices. It seemed that for Eliot, shifting the point of view wasn’t just a literary technique, but an imperative to demonstrate empathy for her characters.
The ending was satisfying. It reinforced the quiet purpose and brilliance of unremarkable lives, the type most of us live.
I’m glad I devoted my time to Middlemarch. Any serious reader or writer should. So if you are keen on nineteenth-century literature and have a lot of free time, I say give it a go.
