Book 30: Middlemarch by George Eliot (100 Great Books)

George Eliot's Victorian masterpiece, written in the wreckage of old certainties, speaks with unsettling directness to a world once again losing its footing.

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Middlemarch

In 1869, Mary Ann Evans, who published under the name George Eliot to be taken seriously in a world that dismissed female intellect, sat down to write what would become, in the estimation of Virginia Woolf and nearly every critic since, the greatest novel in the English language. She was fifty years old. Her partner of two decades, the philosopher George Henry Lewes, was ailing. The optimism of mid-Victorian England with its faith in progress, in science, in the reforming power of good institutions, had begun to curdle into something more anxious and uncertain. The Reform Act had expanded the vote, the railways had collapsed the country into itself, and Darwin had unsettled the cosmos. Everything, in other words, was changing, and nobody quite knew into what.

Evans was a woman who had lived, by the standards of her age, scandalously: she had abandoned Christianity, lived openly with a married man she could not legally wed, and built one of the most formidable intellectual reputations in Europe. She understood, from intimate experience, what it cost a person to want more than the world was prepared to give them. That understanding is the engine of Middlemarch.

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.”