MiddleMarch by George Eliot

Pseudonym forMaryAnn Evans

By Dr. Patrick A ODougherty

ref. Et passim Lynne Sharon Schwartz Introduction

This panoramic work by George Eliot creates a story center in a provincial town in England’s Midlands. The heroine at the center of the story is Dorothea Brooke who makes an ironic decision to make a disastrous marriage with a man who she assumes is a soul mate.

In a story within this story is a young doctor Tertius Lydgate who is quite idealistic. He falls in love with Rosemont Vinci who is beautiful but vain and leads him to his ruin.

Eliot builds her main characters around a gallery of classes from shopkeepers to workers and rising middle and then to landed gentry. 

The story within a story of a doctors ruin builds a painful irony into personal idealism.

Middlemarch relates to March 15th which is the Ides of March and also the 74th calendar day of the year.  

The philosophic challenge of the book the characters pose,  Is what is my purpose in life. How 

can I raise my standards in life to a larger and more complex portrait. 

George Eliot begin s living in wedlock withGeorge Lewis’s critic.

She renounces monetary wealth for common law Love.

Her characters is are fluid and often devious. Loved work come in union in George Eliot’s life and writings.

Individual experience is the validation in Middle march.

Daily living is philosophy in the prosaic. This is an epic of daily life. 

Your daily life is your philosophy.