Middlemarch: Shmoop Study Guide
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Published first published July 28th To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Middlemarch , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Barbara Latimer rated it it was amazing Jan 08, Chris rated it it was amazing Jan 14, Meanwhile, as Fred recovers, Mr. On his deathbed, he reveals that he has two wills and tries to get Mary to help him destroy one. Unwilling to be mixed up in the business of his will, she refuses, and Featherstone dies with the two wills still intact. In poor health, Casaubon attempts to extract from Dorothea a promise that, should he die, she will "avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire".
He dies before she can reply, and she later learns of a provision in his will that, if she marries Ladislaw, she will lose her inheritance. The peculiar nature of Casaubon's will leads to general suspicion that Ladislaw and Dorothea are lovers, creating awkwardness between the two. Ladislaw is secretly in love with Dorothea but keeps this to himself, having no desire to involve her in scandal or to cause her disinheritance.
He remains in Middlemarch, working as a newspaper editor for Mr Brooke, who is mounting a campaign to run for Parliament under a Reform platform. Lydgate's efforts to please Rosamond soon leave him deeply in debt, and he is forced to seek help from Bulstrode.
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He is partly sustained through this by his friendship with Camden Farebrother. Meanwhile Fred Vincy's humiliation at being responsible for Caleb Garth's financial setbacks shocks him into reassessing his life. He resolves to train as a land agent under the forgiving Caleb. John Raffles, a mysterious man who knows of Bulstrode's shady past, appears in Middlemarch, intending to blackmail him. In his youth, the church-going Bulstrode engaged in questionable financial dealings, and his fortune is founded on his marriage to a much older, wealthy widow.
Bulstrode's terror of public exposure as a hypocrite leads him to hasten the death of the mortally sick Raffles, while lending a large sum to Lydgate to allay his suspicions. However, the story of his past has already spread. Bulstrode's disgrace engulfs Lydgate, as knowledge of the loan becomes known, and he is assumed to be complicit with Bulstrode. Only Dorothea and Farebrother maintain faith in him, but Lydgate and Rosamond are nevertheless encouraged by the general opprobrium to leave Middlemarch.
The disgraced and reviled Bulstrode's only consolation is that his wife stands by him as he too faces exile.
When Mr Brooke's election campaign collapses, Ladislaw decides to leave the town and visits Dorothea to say his farewell. But Dorothea has also fallen in love with him, whom she had previously seen only as her husband's unfortunate relative. She renounces Casaubon's fortune and shocks her family by announcing that she will marry Ladislaw.
At the same time, Fred, who has been successful in his new career, marries Mary. The "Finale" details the eventual fortunes of the main characters. Fred and Mary marry and live contentedly with their three sons. Lydgate operates a practice outside of Middlemarch but never finds fulfilment and dies at the age of 50, leaving Rosamond and four children. After he dies, Rosamond marries a wealthy physician. Ladislaw engages in public reform, and Dorothea is content as a wife and mother to their two children.
Their son eventually inherits Arthur Brooke's estate.
Use our free chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis of Middlemarch. It helps middle and high school students understand George Eliot's literary masterpiece. Anything and everything you might need about Middlemarch, all free. Summary, analysis, themes, symbols, and more.
The action of Middlemarch takes place "between September and May " or forty years prior to its publication during —2, [20] a gap in time not so pronounced for it to be regularly labelled as a historical novel ; by comparison, Walter Scott 's Waverley —often regarded as the first major historical novel—takes place some sixty years before its publication. The critics Kathleen Blake and Michael York Mason opine that there has been insufficient attention given to Middlemarch "as a historical novel that evokes the past in relation to the present".
In fact, it is so successful that we scarcely think of it in terms of that subgenre of fiction". Although rarely categorised as a historical novel, Middlemarch ' s attention to historical detail has been noticed by critics; in his review, Henry James recognised that Eliot's "purpose was to be a generous rural historian".
Although a precise date is unknown, the process of incorporating material from "Middlemarch" into the story she had been working on was ongoing by March Colvin, Sidney, Fortnightly Review , 1 January Dickinson's Eliot and Middlemarch. Marriage is one of the major themes in Middlemarch as, according to the critic Francis George Steiner , "both principal plots [those of Dorothea and Lydgate] are case studies of unsuccessful marriage". Lists with This Book. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Featherstone keeps a niece of his through marriage, Mary Garth, as a companion, and, though she is considered plain, Fred is in love with her and wants to marry her.
Eliot's novel is set in the fictional town of Middlemarch, North Loamshire, which is probably based on Coventry , in the county of Warwickshire , where she had lived prior to moving to London. Like Coventry, Middlemarch is described as being a silk-ribbon manufacturing town. The subtitle of the novel—"A Study of Provincial Life"—has been viewed as significant, with one critic viewing the unity of Middlemarch as being achieved through "the fusion of the two senses of 'provincial'": In that series, Arnold classifies British society in terms of the Barbarians aristocrats and landed gentry , Philistines urban middle class and Populace the working class , and Steedman suggests that Middlemarch "is a portrait of Philistine Provincialism ".
Eliot was rejected by her family once she had established her common-law relationship with Lewes, and "their profound disapproval prevented her ever going home again" and she did not visit Coventry during her last visit to the Midlands in Central to Middlemarch is the idea that Dorothea Brooke cannot hope to achieve the heroic stature of a figure like Saint Theresa , because Eliot's heroine lives at the wrong time: Literary critic Kathleen Blake notes that George Eliot emphasises Saint Theresa's "very concrete accomplishment, the reform of a religious order", rather than the fact that she was a Christian mystic.
Eliot has also been criticised more widely for ending the novel with Dorothea marrying a man, Will Ladislaw, so clearly her inferior.
Marriage is one of the major themes in Middlemarch as, according to the critic Francis George Steiner , "both principal plots [those of Dorothea and Lydgate] are case studies of unsuccessful marriage". In this regard, Fred resembles Henry Fielding 's character Tom Jones , both characters being moulded into a good husband by the love they give to and receive from a woman.
Dorothea is a Saint Theresa, born in the wrong century, in provincial Middlemarch, who mistakes in her idealistic ardor, "a poor dry mummified pedant […] as a sort of angel of vocation". He therefore marries Rosamond Vincy, "the woman in the novel who most contrasts with Dorothea", with the result that he "deteriorates from ardent researcher to fashionable doctor in London". The Examiner , The Spectator and Athenaeum reviewed each of the eight books that comprise Middlemarch as they were published from December to December ; [37] such reviews hence speculated as to the eventual direction of the plot and responded accordingly.
Writing as it was being published, the Spectator 's reviewer R. Hutton criticised the work for what he perceived as its melancholic quality. Collins noted the work's most forceful impression to be its ability make the reader sympathise with the characters. The author Henry James offered a mixed opinion on Middlemarch , opining that it is "at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels".
His greatest criticism "the only eminent failure in the book" was towards the character of Ladislaw, who he felt to be an insubstantial hero-figure against that of Lydgate. The scenes between Lydgate and Rosamond he especially praised, on account of their psychological depth—he doubted whether there were any scenes "more powerfully real […] [or] intelligent" in all English fiction. Although finding merit in certain scenes and qualities, Bentzon faulted the structure of the novel, describing it as being "made up of a succession of unconnected chapters, following each other at random […] the final effect is one of an incoherence which nothing can justify".
In her view, Eliot's prioritisation of "observation rather than imagination […] inexorable analysis rather than sensibility, passion or fantasy" means that she should not be held amongst the first ranks of novelists. In spite of the divided contemporary response, Middlemarch gained immediate admirers; in , the poet Emily Dickinson expressed high praise for the novel, exclaiming in a letter to a friend: What do I think of glory. In separate centuries, Florence Nightingale and Kate Millett both remarked on the eventual subordination of Dorothea's own dreams to those of her admirer, Ladislaw.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Middlemarch continued to provoke contrasting responses; while her father Leslie Stephen dismissed the novel in , Virginia Woolf described the novel in as "the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people". Leavis 's The Great Tradition is regarded as having "rediscovered" the novel, [53] describing it in the following terms:. Leavis' appraisal of it has been hailed as the beginning of the critical consensus that still exists towards the novel, in which it is recognised not only as Eliot's finest work but also as one of the greatest novels in English.
Pritchett , in The Living Novel , two years earlier, in had written that "No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative […] I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot […] No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully".
In the twenty-first century, the novel continues to be held in high regard. The novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have both described it as probably the greatest novel in the English language, [e] [56] and today Middlemarch is frequently taught in university courses.
Middlemarch: Shmoop Study Guide
In , the then British Education Secretary Michael Gove made reference to Middlemarch in a speech, suggesting its superiority to Stephenie Meyer 's vampire novel Twilight. Middlemarch has been adapted numerous times for television and the theatre. This series was a critical and financial success and revived public interest in the adaptation of classics. The Series , aired on YouTube as a video blog. The opening lyrics of the song How Soon is Now?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
- Middlemarch: Shmoop Study Guide by Shmoop.
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- The Scent of Home;
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For other uses, see Middlemarch disambiguation. Title page, first ed. The mysteries of human nature surpass the "mysteries of redemption," for the infinite we only suppose, while we see the finite. The immediate success of Middlemarch may have been proportioned rather to the author's reputation than to its intrinsic merits. Retrieved 1 April Middlemarch, by contrast [to Twilight ], though years older, features a free-thinking, active and educated heroine.
If we want our daughters to aspire, which provides the better role model? I think she would be better starting with Silas Marner or The Mill on the Floss and leaving Middlemarch until she had greater life experience and emotional maturity. Prentice Hall, , p. Carolyn Steedman, " Going to Middlemarch: Leavis, The Great Tradition. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine , December Reprinted from Swinden, Patrick, ed. Revue des deux Mondes Nietzsche, Eliot, and the Irrevocability of Wrong. Dickinson's Eliot and Middlemarch. The Literary Dictionary Company. Retrieved 5 April