George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’: the greatest English novel?

If I could only read one book for the rest of my life, it would, without a doubt, be Middlemarch.

A Victorian realist novel of epic proportions, Eliot uses her text to enact a ‘Study of Provincial Life’ (the novel’s subtitle), in which she details the lives, loves and losses of the people of Middlemarch, a fictional Midlands town, alongside those of the landed gentry in the surrounding villages. Combining social and political commentary with medical drama and romance, Eliot’s prose creates an incisive and emotional image of existence, opening readers up to ‘that roar which lies on the other side of silence’.

Motivated by a moral and social desire to ‘amplify experience and extend our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot’, Eliot gives us ardent doctors, naive philanthropists, intellectuals, musicians, scholars, gamblers, romantics, spinsters, brides, criminals, politicians, artists: a full spectrum of life. Middlemarch is a book that relishes in the fact that our lives are all ‘woven and interwoven’: something that Eliot clearly does not want her readers to forget, as she uses her narrator to force us to look beyond individual narratives and recognise the limiting human instinct to view ourselves as the protagonists of our own stories.

What arguably makes the novel so captivating is Eliot’s mode of psychological realism, which dives beyond external facts into the depths of the individual consciousness: an innovative style for the Victorian era, which would later be developed and popularised by modernist writers like Virginia Woolf. I am forever in awe of the ease with which Eliot moves between the perspectives of her characters, creating a web across class, gender, religion, profession and place, whilst remaining acutely aware of the exclusivity of individual minds.

She sees right through her own characters in a way that makes you feel certain she’d see right through you as well, if only she knew you. Her wry reflections on the foibles and failings of her figures (Rosamund’s vanity, Farebrother’s selflessness, Lydgate’s ambition, Dorothea’s naivety, Causabon’s blindness, Mary’s pragmatism, Fred’s irresponsibility) make them all the more lovable, as they each succumb to or wrestle to overcome these defining characteristics.

It is ultimately a novel that challenges you to recognise and appreciate the imperfections of existence, turning the potential tragedy of an unfulfilled life into a celebration of our capacity for quiet heroism and sacrifice.