Middlemarch began life as two separate unfinished stories stitched together
George Eliot was working on one tale about an ambitious young doctor and another about an idealistic young woman when she merged them. The result, issued in eight instalments across 1871 and 1872, followed a whole Midlands town on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act.
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. She noted a novel called Middlemarch among her goals in her journal on 1 January 1869, centred on the physician Lydgate. Late that year she began a different story on a subject she said had occupied her since she first wrote fiction, reaching 100 pages by the end of the month and titling it Miss Brooke. By early 1871 the two were being folded into one.
Length became a worry. By May 1871 the book threatened to burst the three-volume format publishers expected, and her previous novel, Felix Holt, the Radical, set in the same pre-reform period, had sold poorly. The answer was serial release: eight paper-bound parts from December 1871 to December 1872, with a four-volume edition published alongside.
The fictional town is followed from 1829 to 1832 through intertwined lives. Dorothea Brooke, wealthy and religiously earnest, turns down the baronet Sir James Chettam to marry the far older scholar Edward Casaubon, hoping to serve his research, and discovers on their Rome honeymoon how barren it is. After his death a clause in his will cuts her off if she marries his young cousin Ladislaw. The banker Nicholas Bulstrode, who funds Lydgate's new hospital, is undone when John Raffles arrives knowing how he profited dishonestly in youth, and the scandal drags Lydgate down with him. Fred Vincy, the mayor's feckless son, earns Mary Garth only after training as a land agent.
The book tackles women's place, marriage, idealism, religion, hypocrisy, reform and education, softened with comedy and grounded in realism. With Thackeray and Dickens dead, Eliot was widely hailed as the greatest living English novelist by the time the final part appeared.
Source: Middlemarch
