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English Novels
Middlemarch by George Eliot Read Tell me about Middlemarch, A Study in Provincial Life which is from 1874. What makes this a great novel? It’s partly the sheer ambition of it. Eliot was absolutely determined to paint a serious, detailed picture of provincial life. The other radical thing was to do it from the point of view of a disappointed woman. Dorothea is a very enthralling portrait. What else is Eliot trying to do? Is it a social critique? Was she trying to warn people not to marry the wrong person? It’s not that explicit. It’s more about the choices that you might make as a woman—or indeed as a man. Is it about what it is to be a good person? Yes. That’s another element of the book, that it has a very strong moral core. This is why someone like F. R. Leavis chose it in The Great Tradition . That’s a new development. Until Eliot’s time, the primary consideration was to be entertaining. Virginia Woolf famously said Middlemarch was “one of the...
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