Dorothea Brooke
A Saint Theresa born too late for a convent, hungry for a large life.
Realism & Victorian · Novel · 1872
Middlemarch
George Eliot
In a Midlands town, Dorothea’s ardor and Lydgate’s ambition meet the web of other people’s money and marriages. Vocation is tested by the everyday.
Provincial novel
Characters
Tertius Lydgate
Doctor whose scientific future is mortgaged to a drawing room.
Edward Casaubon
A scholar whose Key to all Mythologies is a tomb.
Themes
Vocation
What a life is for, when history offers no monastery and no simple reform.
The social web
No plot is private; gossip and debt are forms of fate.
Motifs
Science as a figure for the novel’s own attention.
The famous close: hidden lives that hold the world together.