“Middlemarch” is a book that grows with the reader as the reader grows, which is why, two hundred years after Eliot’s birth, a reader can find it always has something to say to her or to him. I told of reading the novel at seventeen, when the inchoate, youthful passions of Dorothea Brooke, the novel’s heroine, seemed not so different from my own, despite the distance between both our times and our social stations of revisiting it in my twenties, and discovering a sobering kinship with Tertius Lydgate, the doctor who has ambitions of achieving something great in medicine but is thwarted by a misguided marriage of returning to it in middle age and recognizing the range of humbling resignations-of devastating sorrows and quiet satisfactions-that come to all of us as the years pass and experience accrues. In a book that I wrote about Eliot, “ My Life in Middlemarch,” I described returning to her greatest novel at different stages of life and discovering its changing resonances. Few authors have matched Eliot’s clear-eyed and compassionate capacity for portraying an individual’s growth, error, and disappointment-aspects of the human that do not seem to change much with the passing of the centuries.
“Middlemarch,” and Eliot’s work in general, remains remarkable for its subtle delineation of character and of inward psychology. Woolf’s essay, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, contains the most celebrated observation that anyone has ever made about Eliot’s contribution to English literature: that her masterpiece, “ Middlemarch,” which was published in eight parts between 18, is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
This week marks two hundred years since Mary Ann Evans was born, on November 22, 1819, in the upper bedroom of a farmhouse on an estate in the English Midlands, where her father was the land manager. “We must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose,” Virginia Woolf wrote of George Eliot, in 1919, appraising the author’s work on the centenary of her birth. Photograph by Universal Images Group / Getty
Two hundred years after George Eliot’s birth, “Middlemarch” and its observations about the U.K.
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