Middlemarch depicts a very particular people, place, and time: the English provincial middle-class of the 1830s. Eliot cares about detail. The speech of the characters, their behavioral decorum, the parsing of status and misfortune, even the physical details of habitat are described with such fidelity that the reader experiences a gradual change in focus. What was initially context, the environment in which things happen, sharpens into the foreground. Meanwhile, the events in characters’ lives, their decisions and fates—the standard centerpiece of a bildungsroman—recede and blur. It’s true that Middlemarch is a work of great psychological depth, particularly in the many scenes when two people who are bound to each other (either by love or marriage but never, until the end, both) sit in a room and try to figure out how to get what they want. Eliot is unparalleled in provoking readers to feel a sighing familiarity with situations of relational stress. But the more unique quality of Middlemarch is its strange and tender bottling-together of lives—almost literally, as if the characters are, chapter by chapter, walking slowly into a glass bottle together, until the bottle is finally corked and thrown out to sea. Maybe Eliot is the hand that throws, or maybe she’s the one that unstops the cork on the other shore. 8
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. William Blackwood and Sons, 1871/2. Reviewed Sep 28, 2024.