Middlemarch
- by George Eliot
I love the dilemma — how is an intelligent woman going to be intellectually stimulated in a time when there are so few options for women? (This of course is Elliot’s own story — writing under a man’s name.) Dorothea settles on marriage to an older man, a scholar and (she hopes) a mentor — ironically making an intellectual choice about an affair of the heart. What ensues is her struggle to be the person she aspires to be in a world which values none of the moral ideals that interest her.
I love how psychological Elliot is, how interested she is in the inner workings of people’s minds. Why do Dorothea and Lydgate make the choices they do? Why do they choose people so unsuited to them? As in Daniel Deronda, Elliot is very interested in intellectual/spiritual passion — how religious scholarship can inform or transform a life — but while she is attracted to the dispassionate discipline of religious wisdom, she also knows that earthly love is what sustains us. This tension, between moral ideal and human behavior, is the drive of the novel and probably makes the most sense in its historical context — a time of great intellectual inquiry, the Victorian obsession with self-improvement. Yet it isn’t that different from the self-improvement obsessions of our own time.
Middlemarch Description written by Dashka Slater (see links)