Middlemarch

                        Middlemarch 

                         George Eliot

                                George Eliot:

Mary Anne Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Ann" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

                               About The Novel:

Middlemarch is a huge book. In fact, it's of the longest novels ever written in English. But the reason that it was – and is – so popular is that there's something in it for everyone. Yes, it's about marriage, but it's also about science, politics, reform, and second chances… 

If we had to sum up Middlemarch in just a few words, we might say that it's a novel about social and political reform. But it's also a novel about love and marriage. And about trying and failing. And about second chances. It is, in other words, a huge and wide-ranging novel. And we do mean huge: the edition we're using (the 1994 Penguin edition, edited by Rosemary Ashton) is 838 pages long. That's a lot of pages, but then, Eliot had a lot to say.

The length of the novel actually forced Eliot's agent (and long-time lover), George Henry Lewes, to invent a new way to publish it. For most of the 19th-century, novels were published in one of two ways – either broken into installments of one or two chapters to be printed in a magazine (like Charles Dickens's novels), or published in 3-volume hardbacks (called triple deckers). But Middlemarch was too big to fit into three volumes, and publishing it a chapter or two at a time would take forever. So Lewes arranged to have it printed in eight installments over the course of sixteen months to get people hooked on the story, and then to print it altogether in four volumes. This was a great move by Lewes – Middlemarch sold like crazy, and confirmed Eliot's reputation as the greatest living English novelist.

It was socially and politically relevant when it first came out: it was published in 1870-71, just four years after the 2nd Reform Bill was passed in Parliament. Reform was a big deal in 19th-century England. Who would get to vote, and who would take care of poor people, and healthcare, and minimum wages – everyone had some pet reform project they wanted to bring before Parliament. But Eliot didn't want to write a novel about something that had just taken place, so she set the novel forty years earlier, in 1830 – just before the First Reform Bill was passed.

 Eliot believed that it takes time to understand historical events – it's impossible to understand all the consequences of something right after it takes place. It's like how all the best Vietnam War movies were made at least 5-10 years after the end of the conflict. Forty years, Eliot reasoned, was the perfect amount of distance: it's long enough that people have gained some perspective on what happened back then, but it's recent enough that the events are still pretty familiar.