What is Middlemarch about?

Middlemarch is the novel Virginia Woolf called the only English novel written for grown-up people, and the description is accurate if not entirely fair. Set in a fictional English Midlands town in the early 1830s, it tracks several intersecting lives across roughly two years: Dorothea Brooke, a serious-minded young woman who marries an elderly pedant because she mistakes him for an intellectual giant; Tertius Lydgate, a gifted physician whose medical ambitions are slowly consumed by a disastrous marriage and mounting debt; Fred Vincy, a young man of comfortable habits who has to learn what it means to earn something; and the politician Bulstrode, whose civic respectability conceals a past that eventually surfaces.

George Eliot's central argument — distributed across a thousand pages — is that most of what determines the quality of a life happens in small, unrecorded choices rather than great dramatic moments. The novel's famous Prelude compares Dorothea to Saint Theresa and asks what happens to a woman of that temperament born in a time and place that has no use for her kind of idealism. The answer the novel gives is: she gets married, she suffers, she adjusts, and she does more good in the world than she knows, through actions too small and undramatic to be remembered. This is both consoling and devastating, and Eliot seems to know it.

The prose is unlike anything before it in English fiction: philosophical, analytic, deeply interested in the gap between what characters believe about themselves and what is actually happening to them. The narrator is a constant, wry, compassionate presence, capable of zooming from a character's private thought to a sociological observation about the whole of English provincial life in a single paragraph. Reading Middlemarch is more like reading a very long essay that has been brilliantly novelized than like reading a conventional plot-driven narrative.

This is a long, dense book. Reading it is not always comfortable. Some of Dorothea's choices will frustrate modern readers who want her to act. Casaubon, her husband, is so accurately rendered as an intellectual bully that spending time in his company is genuinely unpleasant. But for readers willing to give it time — and it requires sustained time — Middlemarch pays back more per page than almost any English novel.