Others refuse or are incapable of learning, and spend their lives resenting their situation, and blaming others. Some learn the lessons and achieve a temporary happiness. Indeed, Middlemarch looms above the mid-Victorian literary landscape like a cathedral of words in whose shadowy vastness its readers can find every kind of addictive discomfort, a sequence of raw truths: the loneliness of the disappointed failure, Dr Lydgate the frustrations of his discontented wife the humiliation of a good woman, Dorothea the corrosive bitterness of Casaubon, and so on.įew of Eliot's characters achieve what they really want, and all have to learn to compromise. Subtitled "a study of provincial life", the novel has a didactic realism that's a world away from Vanity Fair or Great Expectations. George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, appeared after the deaths of Thackeray (1863) and Dickens (1870).
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