Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life

Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, a novel by G. Eliot, published 1871–2.

The scene is laid in the provincial town of Middlemarch, Loamshire, during the years immediately preceding the first Reform Bill. It has a multiple plot, with several interlocking sets of characters. Dorothea Brooke, an ardent, intelligent, idealistic young woman, marries the elderly pedant Mr Casaubon, despite the doubts of her sister Celia, her neighbour and suitor Sir James Chettam (who later marries Celia), and Mrs Cadwallader, the rector's outspoken wife. The marriage proves intensely unhappy; Dorothea realizes during a disastrous honeymoon in Rome that Casaubon's scholarly plans to write a great work, a ‘Key to all Mythologies’, are doomed, as are her own aspirations to share her husband's intellectual life, and her respect for him gradually turns to pity. She is sustained by the friendship of Casaubon's young cousin, Will Ladislaw, a lively young man detested by Casaubon, who begins to suspect Dorothea's feelings for Ladis-law. Shortly before he dies, with characteristic meanness, he adds a codicil to his will by which Dorothea forfeits her fortune if she marries Ladislaw.

Meanwhile we follow the fortunes of Fred and Rosamond Vincy, son and daughter of the mayor of Middlemarch; the extrovert Fred is in love with his childhood sweetheart Mary Garth, daughter of Caleb Garth, a land agent. Mary will not pledge herself to Fred unless he abandons his father's plan for him to enter the Church and proves himself stable and self-sufficient. Rosamond, the town's beauty, sets herself to capture the ambitious, idealistic, and well-connected doctor Tertius Lydgate: she succeeds, but their marriage is wrecked by her selfishness and materialism. Lydgate, heavily in debt, borrows money from Mr Bulstrode, the mayor's brother-in-law; Lydgate's career is ruined by his involvement in a scandal concerning the death of Raffles, an unwelcome visitor from Bulstrode's shady past. Only Dorothea maintains faith in him, but she is severely shocked to find Ladislaw and Rosamond together in apparently compromising circumstances. Rosamond finally reveals that Ladislaw has remained faithful to the memory of Dorothea. Dorothea and Ladislaw at last confess their love to one another; she renounces Casaubon's fortune and marries him. Fred marries Mary. Lydgate dies at 50, his ambitions frustrated.