Where to Start with George Eliot
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, a woman who had to publish under a male pseudonym to be taken seriously in Victorian England. She was taken very seriously indeed: Middlemarch is routinely named the greatest English novel, and her work as a whole represents the peak of nineteenth-century realism. She wrote about ordinary provincial life with a psychological depth, moral nuance, and intellectual range that her contemporaries could not match and that later writers, including Tolstoy, admired profoundly.
Start here
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 880 pages · 1871 · Moderate
Themes: ambition, marriage, idealism, provincial life, women's lives
A young woman with enormous ideals marries the wrong man. A young doctor with enormous ambitions arrives in a provincial town. Their stories, and a dozen others, weave together into what Virginia Woolf called “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
Why Start Here
Middlemarch is long, but it is also the summit. Eliot follows an entire community, the fictional English town of Middlemarch in the 1830s, through a period of reform and upheaval, and she gives equal weight to every character’s inner life. Dorothea Brooke, who marries the elderly scholar Casaubon hoping to serve a great mind, is one of the most fully realized characters in fiction. Dr. Lydgate, who arrives determined to advance medical science, discovers that idealism does not survive contact with money, politics, and the wrong marriage.
What makes the novel extraordinary is Eliot’s moral intelligence. She never reduces her characters to heroes or villains. Everyone is partly right and partly blind, and the narrator’s commentary, wise, generous, and occasionally devastating, teaches you how to see other people more clearly than you did before.
What to Expect
A long, richly detailed novel with multiple interconnected storylines. The prose is Victorian but clear, and the characterization is unmatched. Best read over several weeks. The Penguin Classics edition is recommended.