Middlemarch
Middlemarch follows Dorothea Brooke, an ardent, idealistic young woman in the provincial English town of Middlemarch who longs to devote her life to some great purpose. She marries the dry, pedantic scholar Edward Casaubon, hoping to share his intellectual labors, only to find the marriage stifling and his life's work hollow. Around her, George Eliot weaves the parallel story of Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor whose medical ideals are eroded by debt and his marriage to the beautiful, self-regarding Rosamond Vincy, alongside a wide cast of townspeople whose fortunes, loves, and reputations intertwine.
A sweeping panorama of English provincial society on the eve of reform, the novel examines the gap between noble aspiration and ordinary circumstance, the compromises of marriage, money, and ambition, and the quiet heroism of unhistoric lives. Celebrated for its psychological depth and moral wisdom, it remains one of the greatest English novels.
How it begins
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 religious order. That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.