Her narrator examines everyday choices with moral seriousness, demanding that we attend not only to the motivations and decisions of characters, but also that we scrutinize our own daily lives. Her narrator brings a scientist’s sensibility to the project, noting that “there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.” Indeed, Eliot’s town often seems to have a will of its own, as when the narrator remarks of an enthusiastic young physician that “Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him comfortably.”īecause Middlemarch follows characters over a significant sweep of time, Eliot can consider the consequences of ambition, idealism, pride, and selfishness in depth. Through the novel’s multiple plots and sets of characters, Eliot explores how individuals are shaped by, and seek to shape, “this particular web” of community. There’s a good reason George Eliot named her greatest novel after the fictional English provincial town in which it is set: Middlemarch is arguably the book’s most powerful force. Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch
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