Middlemarch - A Study of Provincial Life

George Eliot

Description

“Middlemarch - A Study of Provincial Life” is an 1871 novel by English author George Eliot. Set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch, the story revolves around the lives of its inhabitants in the years leading up to the Reform Act in 1832, particularly those of Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, Nicholas Bulstrode, and Mary Garth. The novel deals with a variety of themes and issues including marriage, religion, hypocrisy, education, political reform, and the status of women. Although published to mixed reviews, Eliot's “Middlemarch” is now widely considered to be one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language. A veritable classic of English literature without which no bookshelf is complete. Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), more commonly known as George Eliot, was an English poet, journalist, novelist, and translator. Among the most prominent writers in Victorian England, she wrote seven novels in total, most of which are known for their realism and psychological analyses of provincial English life. Other notable works by this author include: “Adam Bede” (1859), “The Mill on the Floss” (1860), and “Daniel Deronda” (1876). Read & Co. Classics is republishing this classic novel now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Sujets

• List of best-selling books
• Women's rights

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 31 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528791069
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

M IDDLEMARCH
A STUDY OF PROVINCIAL LIFE
By
GEORGE ELIOT

First published in 1871





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This edition is published by Read & Co. Books, an imprint of Read & Co.
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Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk


To My Dear Husband,
George Henry Lewes ,
In This Nineteenth Year Of Our Blessed Union.


Contents
Mary Ann Evans (Geo rge Eliot)
PRELUDE
BOOK I
MISS BROOKE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
C HAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
C HAPTER VI
C HAPTER VII
CHA PTER VIII
C HAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
C HAPTER XI
CH APTER XII
BOOK II
OLD AND YOUNG
CHA PTER XIII
CH APTER XIV
C HAPTER XV
CH APTER XVI
CHA PTER XVII
CHAP TER XVIII
CH APTER XIX
C HAPTER XX
CH APTER XXI
CHA PTER XXII
BOOK III
WAITING FOR DEATH
CHAP TER XXIII
CHA PTER XXIV
CH APTER XXV
CHA PTER XXVI
CHAP TER XXVII
CHAPT ER XXVIII
CHA PTER XXIX
CH APTER XXX
CHA PTER XXXI
CHAP TER XXXII
CHAPT ER XXXIII
BOOK IV
THREE LOVE PROBLEMS
CHAP TER XXXIV
CHA PTER XXXV
CHAP TER XXXVI
CHAPT ER XXXVII
CHAPTE R XXXVIII
CHAP TER XXXIX
C HAPTER XL
CH APTER XLI
CHA PTER XLII
BOOK V
THE DEAD HAND
CHAP TER XLIII
CHA PTER XLIV
CH APTER XLV
CHA PTER XLVI
CHAP TER XLVII
CHAPT ER XLVIII
CHA PTER XLIX
CHAPTER L
C HAPTER LI
CH APTER LII
CHA PTER LIII
BOOK VI
THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE
CH APTER LIV
C HAPTER LV
CH APTER LVI
CHA PTER LVII
CHAP TER LVIII
CH APTER LIX
C HAPTER LX
CH APTER LXI
CHA PTER LXII
BOOK VII
TWO TEMPTATIONS
CHAP TER LXIII
CHA PTER LXIV
CH APTER LXV
CHA PTER LXVI
CHAP TER LXVII
CHAPT ER LXVIII
CHA PTER LXIX
CH APTER LXX
CHA PTER LXXI
BOOK VIII
SUNSET AND SUNRISE
CHAP TER LXXII
CHAPT ER LXXIII
CHAP TER LXXIV
CHA PTER LXXV
CHAP TER LXXVI
CHAPT ER LXXVII
CHAPTE R LXXVIII
CHAP TER LXXIX
CHA PTER LXXX
CHAP TER LXXXI
CHAPT ER LXXXII
CHAPTE R LXXXIII
CHAPT ER LXXXIV
CHAP TER LXXXV
CHAPT ER LXXXVI
FINALE




Mary Ann Evans (Geo rge Eliot)
Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, England in 1819. A highly intelligent child, she was a voracious reader, and started at a young age to question the orthodoxy of the Anglican Church in which she was raised. When she was 21, Evans moved to Coventry, and in 1846 published her first major work – an English translation of the German author Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity. Her father became increasingly inpatient with Evans’ questioning of the Christian faith, and to avoid being thrown out she attended church and kept house for him. However, a matter of weeks after his death, at the age of 30, she moved to London, with the intention of becoming a full-ti me writer.
In 1851, Evans became assistant editor of the campaigning, left-wing journal The Westminster Review , contributing many of her own essays. At this time, a female author heading a literary enterprise was virtually unheard of; to many, the mere sight of an unmarried young woman mixing with the predominantly male society of London was scandalous. Additionally, she conducted what was effectively an open affair with the philosopher and critic, George Henry Lewes. In the mid 1850s, Evans resolved to become a novelist, and adopted the pseudonym for which she would become best-known: Georg e Elliot.
In 1858 (when Evans was 39) Amos Barton , the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life , was published in Blackwood's Magazine . Her first complete novel, Adam Bede was published a year later. Both of these were instant successes, and afforded Evans some degree of fame. After the popularity of Adam Bede , she continued to write for the next fifteen years. She produced six more novels, including her magnum opus, Middlemarch (1875), as well as a good body of poetry and a somewhat out-of-character novella The Lifted Veil (now seen as a significant milestone in the Victorian tradition of horror fiction).
Evans died in 1880, aged 61. She was not buried in Westminster Abbey because of her denial of the Christian faith; instead, she was interred in Highgate Cemetery , London, in the area reserved for religious dissenters or agnostics. Some years after her death, American author Henry James credited her with producing “deep, masterly pictures of the multifold lif e of man.”


PRELUDE
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religi ous order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned a s a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recogniz able deed.


BO OK I
MISS BROOKE
CH APTER I
Since I can do no good because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
— The Maid’s Tragedy: Beaumont An d Fletcher
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister’s, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke’s plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably “good:” if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as the