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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Set against the backdrop of early 19th-century England, George Eliot's "Middlemarch" is a complex tapestry of interwoven lives, relationships, and social issues. This unabridged work showcases Eliot's exceptional literary style, marked by rich characterization and nuanced psychological insight. The narrative explores themes of political reform, gender roles, and individual ambition through the lens of the English provincial town of Middlemarch, delving deeply into the lives of its characters such as Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate as they navigate personal and societal challenges. Eliot employs a third-person omniscient perspective, allowing readers to engage with the multifaceted nature of human experience while situating her characters within broader social contexts, reflecting the Victorian ethos of moral complexity. George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, was a prominent Victorian novelist whose works often focused on the interplay of society and character. Her background in philosophy and strong advocacy for women's rights profoundly influenced her writing. Eliot's experiences in a patriarchal society inspired her exploration of women's roles and ambitions, while her keen interest in social reform lent authenticity to the socio-political commentary present in "Middlemarch." "Middlemarch" is highly recommended for readers seeking a profound exploration of human nature and societal constraints. It offers a rich, multi-dimensional narrative that remains relevant today, prompting reflection on personal and collective identities amidst evolving societal mores. This masterpiece serves not only as a historical document but as a timeless exploration of the human condition that resonates with contemporary audiences. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Middlemarch (Unabridged)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a provincial town where private ideals collide with the dense claims of community, Middlemarch charts how choices reverberate through a web of lives. This is a novel about moral consequence and the intricate ties between individual aspiration and social fabric. It invites readers to consider how love, work, and reputation become entangled in public expectations and private conscience. The book’s capacious gaze turns ordinary lives into a grand panorama, revealing that the smallest decisions ripple outward. Its power lies in showing that character is tested not on distant battlefields but in parlors, surgeries, and council rooms where everyday life unfolds.
Middlemarch is widely regarded as a pinnacle of English realism because it unites breadth of social vision with psychological depth. Its enduring status stems from the way it renders inner life and public life as inseparable, thereby shaping the modern novel’s possibilities. Later writers found in its layered design a model for interwoven plots and ethically searching narration. The book altered expectations about what fiction could achieve by showing that nuance, sympathy, and complexity could sustain epic scope. Its influence persists in works that treat communities as living systems, balancing intimate portraiture with a lucid account of institutions and change.
George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), published Middlemarch in parts during 1871 and 1872, with volume editions following soon after. Set primarily in the years surrounding the Reform debates of the early 1830s, the novel unfolds in the fictional Midlands town from which it takes its title. Eliot wrote under a male pseudonym in Victorian Britain and developed a reputation for intellectually rigorous fiction grounded in history, philosophy, and moral inquiry. Middlemarch bears the subtitle A Study of Provincial Life, signaling its scope and method: a detailed, sustained examination of a community’s interdependent lives and values.
The novel interlaces multiple storylines, bringing together families, professionals, and civic leaders whose fortunes overlap in unexpected ways. At its center are an idealistic young woman seeking a meaningful life, an ambitious physician determined to advance medical practice, and the social circles that shape and challenge them. Surrounding these figures are clergy, manufacturers, landowners, and townspeople whose alliances, ambitions, and anxieties form a living social organism. Without relying on spectacle, the narrative gains momentum through the steady accumulation of choices, misunderstandings, and negotiations that define marriage, vocation, and public responsibility in a transforming provincial world.
Eliot’s artistic purpose is inseparable from her ethical imagination. She sought to cultivate sympathy, to reveal how understanding another’s perspective alters our judgment, and to trace the often-unseen links between motives and outcomes. Rather than presenting isolated heroes or villains, she composes a social spectrum and asks readers to appreciate proportion, context, and limitation. By attending to habit as much as passion, she demonstrates how character forms within customs, institutions, and historical pressures. Middlemarch examines the costs and possibilities of idealism, not to settle arguments but to enlarge the field in which moral reflection and practical action can take root.
Formally, Middlemarch is notable for its omniscient narration, flexible point of view, and use of free indirect style that carries us close to a character’s thoughts while maintaining interpretive distance. Eliot coordinates several plots with architectural precision, allowing themes to echo across households, professions, and generations. Her sentences reward attentive reading, moving from minute social observation to panoramic commentary with unforced ease. She is as alert to the cadence of gossip as to the pressure of ideas. The novel’s realist method never feels mechanical; it breathes with humor, irony, and patience, sustaining a narrative voice both critical and compassionate.
Historically, the book is located on the cusp of reform in early nineteenth-century Britain, when political representation, medical science, and economic practices were undergoing change. That context is not ornamental backdrop; it shapes the choices available to men and women, including how they work, marry, and serve the public. The town’s institutions—parish, hospital, and local government—mediate between individual hopes and collective needs. Scientific ambition, doctrinal differences, and questions of credit and reputation all circulate through Middlemarch, testing integrity and judgment. By situating private lives within public debates, Eliot shows how history enters the home and how domestic decisions carry civic consequence.
The novel’s major themes emerge from this interplay of inner desire and external demand. It explores idealism and compromise, asking what counts as a worthy life when noble aims meet imperfect means. It considers marriage as a partnership of minds and temperaments, a site where aspiration can be nurtured or thwarted. Vocation, too, stands at the center: the search for useful work that harmonizes personal talent with social good. Money, credit, and reputation pose constant trials, revealing how moral choices are shaped by scarcity and scrutiny. Knowledge and ignorance, intention and accident, form counterpoints in a narrative alive to contingency and responsibility.
Eliot’s characterization is capacious and humane. Central figures are drawn with such psychological nuance that even their missteps feel intelligible rather than merely blameworthy. Peripheral characters are not mere ornaments; they carry history and exert pressure, making the town itself a protagonist. Humor arises from social incongruities, but laughter is tempered by a refusal to simplify motives. The result is a community portrait that acknowledges human limitation while cherishing the possibility of growth. This balance—critical clarity joined to sympathy—has helped readers across generations recognize themselves in the novel’s mirror without feeling reduced to a single trait or lesson.
Middlemarch exerted a marked influence on later fiction by demonstrating how a novel could be at once intimate and systemic. Its multi-plot design and moral subtlety informed the development of psychological realism and the social novel, encouraging writers to take communities, not just individuals, as their subject. It showed that narrative authority could guide readers through complexity without surrendering to dogma. The book’s craft and ethical seriousness have been celebrated by authors and critics alike, and its techniques remain visible in works that braid personal dramas with institutional forces, whether in historical narratives or contemporary explorations of professional and civic life.
For contemporary readers, the unabridged Middlemarch offers the satisfaction of immersion in a world whose details matter. Its pages trace how professional ambition meets institutional inertia, how ideals are tested in marriage and work, and how collective change is negotiated through conversation, persuasion, and patient reform. The novel’s pace invites attentiveness, rewarding it with cumulative insight rather than sudden revelation. Its humor, intelligence, and steadiness cut through fashion, while its ethical curiosity remains fresh. Readers encounter a book that enlarges sympathy without sentimentality and assesses failure without cynicism, offering durable company for thinking about responsibility and hope.
To read Middlemarch today is to engage with a searching meditation on choice, community, and the meaning of a useful life. Its themes—idealism and compromise, vocation and responsibility, love and justice—continue to resonate because they are grounded in credible people facing ordinary yet serious demands. The novel’s artistry lies in its union of breadth and precision, social analysis and psychological depth. It is a classic not because it is remote but because it is enduringly close to how lives actually unfold. In its steady light, readers find a standard for humane understanding and a reminder that significance often begins at home.
Synopsis
Set in the provincial town of Middlemarch during the years surrounding the first Reform Bill, George Eliot’s novel interweaves multiple lives to depict marriage, work, faith, and politics in a close-knit community. The narrative begins with Dorothea Brooke, an earnest young woman who longs for a grand purpose beyond fashionable society. Living with her indulgent uncle, she pursues schemes of improvement on his estate and attracts local attention for her seriousness. Around her, the town’s families, tradespeople, and professionals form a complex web of expectations. The story proceeds by moving among households, tracing how personal choices intersect with public change and communal judgment.
Drawn to learning and moral labor, Dorothea is impressed by the scholar Edward Casaubon, whose vast research project promises intellectual service to humanity. Believing she can assist in his life’s work, she accepts his proposal, despite other prospects closer to home. Her marriage takes her to Rome, where the scale of art and history contrasts with the confinement of her new responsibilities. Casaubon’s cousin, the spirited Will Ladislaw, appears as a foil to the scholar’s dryness, introducing another current into Dorothea’s orbit. The early chapters establish the tension between lofty aspiration and the practical limits imposed by temperament, custom, and marriage.
Meanwhile, a new doctor, Tertius Lydgate, arrives in Middlemarch with modern scientific training and a resolve to reform medical practice. He allies himself with the New Hospital and finds a patron in the pious banker Nicholas Bulstrode. Lydgate’s commitment to research and efficient administration soon meets the town’s entrenched habits and rivalries. Rosamond Vincy, the mayor’s accomplished daughter, is captivated by the newcomer’s refinement, as he in turn imagines a future combining science and status. Through Lydgate’s perspective, the narrative explores professional ambition, the costs of innovation in a conservative environment, and the practical entanglements that attend ideals.
The Vincy and Garth families represent contrasting attitudes toward work and money. Fred Vincy, charming but irresolute, expects an inheritance from his ailing uncle, Peter Featherstone of Stone Court, and hopes thereby to secure his future and marry Mary Garth. Mary, principled and perceptive, values steadiness over display, influenced by her father, the conscientious land agent Caleb Garth. Featherstone’s household, fraught with visitors and expectations, becomes a focal point for questions of property and dependence. The uncertainty surrounding wills, debts, and obligations shows how fortunes in Middlemarch rest on fragile promises and how character is tested by opportunity.
Public life and private life converge as the agitation for parliamentary reform reaches Middlemarch. Mr. Brooke, Dorothea’s uncle, flirts with political prominence, acquiring a newspaper and courting reformist voters, with Will Ladislaw acting as an energetic aide. Campaign speeches, editorial battles, and uneasy encounters with tenants reveal the distance between rhetoric and administration. Against this backdrop, Dorothea’s charitable impulses take practical shape in plans for better cottages and local relief, while her domestic sphere grows increasingly strained by competing expectations. The town’s response to new ideas—whether political, social, or scholarly—underscores how reputation mediates influence and how easily motives are misread.
Personal commitments deepen the stakes for several characters. Lydgate’s private life binds him more closely to Middlemarch society, even as his finances tighten and his reforms provoke resistance among established practitioners. Rosamond’s social hopes and Lydgate’s scientific economy pull in different directions, bringing everyday pressures to bear on principle. Casaubon’s anxieties about his work and household intensify, casting shadows over Dorothea’s hopes of active partnership. Through these developments, the novel sets up pivotal choices about loyalty, autonomy, and prudence, as individuals seek to secure dignity without surrendering their aims or alienating the community on which they depend.
Long-buried histories begin to surface, concentrating the moral focus of the town. A figure from Bulstrode’s past arrives, unsettling the banker’s standing and threatening to implicate others through financial and charitable ties. Lydgate’s reliance on institutional support exposes him to suspicion, while public scrutiny magnifies private missteps. Gossip spreads rapidly, assigning motives and blame before facts are settled. In this climate, Dorothea’s capacity for sympathy emerges as a steadying force, and Will Ladislaw’s position grows more precarious as competing loyalties and rumors shape how he is perceived. The narrative emphasizes how judgment circulates and how difficult it is to speak plainly.
The later movements gather the threads into moments of reckoning. Families confront the consequences of debt, patronage, and inheritance; marriages are tested by illness, secrecy, and unequal expectations; and professional vocations are weighed against comfort and conformity. Choices made under pressure—whether to compromise, to confess, or to persevere—determine new alignments in the town. Fred Vincy searches for a path that matches his abilities, guided by the practical ethics of the Garths. Political fervor cools into administrative realities, and friendships are redefined by candor. Throughout, the plot advances by modest crises that reshape futures without overturning the fabric of community.
In closing, the novel affirms the significance of ordinary lives, showing how small acts of integrity and kindness influence a wider social web. Middlemarch presents marriage as both burden and opportunity, vocation as a discipline requiring patience, and reform as a process measured in incremental change. Without isolating heroes or villains, it portrays character as emerging from choices within constraint. Dorothea’s idealism, Lydgate’s scientific purpose, and the town’s collective conscience converge to suggest that sympathy enlarges what is possible. The book’s enduring message lies in its balanced attention to individual yearning and the gradual, shared work of a community.
Historical Context
Middlemarch is set in a fictional provincial town in the English Midlands during the years 1829 to 1832, a liminal moment between Georgian and early Victorian Britain. The economy of such market towns rested on agriculture, small-scale manufacture, and regional trade linked by canals and turnpikes rather than railways. Social life moved within layered hierarchies: landed gentry, professional men (clergy, physicians, lawyers), tradesmen, and laborers. County politics hinged on patronage networks and a narrow electorate. The Church of England dominated civic ritual and moral authority, while Dissenting congregations grew in number and influence. This transitional geography and chronology underpin the novel’s conflicts and ambitions.
The town’s institutions—parish vestries, charitable boards, a subscription-funded hospital, and a locally controlled bank—reflect pre-reform governance and economy. Estates like Tipton and Lowick tie landownership to political power and clerical livings. Scientific modernity appears in fragments: a doctor trained in Paris, the stethoscope, and anatomical method enter a society still attached to deference and custom. Newspapers circulate Reform debates from London to provincial inns, yet civic offices remain in few hands. The setting captures England just before railways and electoral reconstruction would reorganize space, time, and influence, enabling the novel to test local characters against national change proceeding from 1829 through the Reform Act of 1832.
The Great Reform crisis of 1830–1832 reshaped British politics by redistributing parliamentary seats and enlarging the electorate. The Whig government of Earl Grey introduced the first Reform Bill in March 1831; after its defeat and dissolution, new elections produced a pro-reform majority in the Commons. A second bill passed the Commons but was rejected by the Lords in October 1831, prompting riots in Bristol and Nottingham. A third bill, introduced December 1831, stalled again until May–June 1832, when the threat of mass unrest during the “Days of May” and the prospect of creating new peers moved King William IV to facilitate passage. The Reform Act received royal assent on 7 June 1832.
The 1832 Reform Act eliminated many “rotten” and “pocket” boroughs, redistributed 143 seats to growing towns such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, and created new county divisions. In boroughs, adult male householders occupying property worth at least £10 per year gained the vote; in counties, certain leaseholders and copyholders met revised qualifications. The electorate rose from roughly 366,000 to about 650,000 in England and Wales—still limited, but transformative in representation. Middlemarch mirrors the agitation: petitions, hustings, pamphlets, and tavern debates resemble the documented practices of 1831–1832, grounding the narrative in the procedural and symbolic mechanics of reform.
At the local level, Reform campaigns mobilized committees, subscription funds, and processions, while hostile groups defended traditional franchises. Provincial papers amplified parliamentary speeches and caricatured candidates. In the novel, Mr. Brooke’s pro-Reform candidacy dramatizes how genteel aspirants navigated constituency demands, press scrutiny, and the logistics of canvassing. His inept hustings speech and withdrawal evoke real embarrassments suffered by underprepared reformers in 1831–1832, while the town’s divided reaction reproduces the uneasy coalition of middle-class activists, moderate gentry, and artisans whose expectations could outstrip the cautious scope of the Act itself.
Two religious milestones frame the period: repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 ended Protestant Dissenters’ exclusion from municipal office, and the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 (Catholic Emancipation) allowed Catholics to sit in Parliament. These measures eased centuries of confessional restrictions, widening civic participation and inflaming debates on church authority. Middlemarch registers this shift in its portraits of Anglican clerics contending with Evangelical and Dissenting energy, and in social negotiations over respectability untethered from strict Anglican monopoly—tensions encapsulated in Bulstrode’s Evangelical influence and the friction between parish patronage and new moral standards.
Medical professionalization advanced through the Paris Clinical School, whose figures—Xavier Bichat (d. 1802), René Laënnec (inventor of the stethoscope, 1816), and Pierre Louis (numerical method, 1820s–1830s)—reoriented practice toward anatomical pathology and statistical observation. In Britain, the Apothecaries Act (1815) mandated examinations for general practitioners, yet licensing remained fragmented among colleges and companies. Curricular modernization met entrenched habits like heroic bloodletting. Middlemarch channels this modernization through Lydgate, trained abroad, determined to establish pathological anatomy and clinical rigour in a town reliant on deference, routine prescriptions, and lay charity oversight—exposing conflicts between science and parochial governance.
The Anatomy Act of 1832 legalized the supply of unclaimed bodies for dissection, responding to public outrage after the Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh (1828) and the “resurrectionist” trade in corpses. Before 1832, scarcity of legal cadavers impeded anatomical teaching and fueled suspicion of surgeons. The Act facilitated medical education but stigmatized the poor, whose bodies disproportionately entered anatomy schools. Middlemarch reflects these sensitivities in the town’s suspicion of Lydgate’s anatomical interests and of hospital reforms perceived as invasive or irreverent. The novel’s tensions reproduce the period’s uneasy bargain between scientific need and communal fears of violation and class injustice.
Britain’s first cholera pandemic (1831–1832) provoked emergency Boards of Health, quarantines, and street cleansing, while debates raged between miasma and contagion theories. Mortality spikes in Sunderland (1831) and London (1832) catalyzed sanitary concern that later matured into the 1848 Public Health Act. Provincial towns implemented ad hoc measures—limewashing, improved drainage, and fever hospitals—often meeting popular distrust of commissioners. Middlemarch’s fever episode, the push for hospital governance, and Lydgate’s sanitary recommendations echo these national concerns, showing how nascent public health met resistance from local elites and patients unsettled by new authorities, diagnostic instruments, and cost-cutting standards of care.
Provincial banking was reshaped by the Panic of 1825, when over 70 English country banks failed amid speculative collapse. The Country Bankers Act of 1826 encouraged larger joint-stock banks outside a 65-mile radius of London and allowed the Bank of England to establish branches, aiming to stabilize credit. Yet private banks persisted, entwined with local trade and morality. In Middlemarch, Bulstrode’s bank exemplifies reputational capital and the systemic risk of concentrated, opaque finance. His scandal dramatizes how personal history, evangelical image, and credit interdependence could destabilize a town’s economy in an era when legal frameworks and deposit guarantees were minimal.
Poor relief in the novel’s timeframe operated under the Old Poor Law, parish-based and often influenced by the Speenhamland system (from 1795), which subsidized wages according to bread prices. Mounting costs and perceived demoralization drove the 1832 Royal Commission and culminated in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, instituting workhouses and central Boards of Guardians. In Middlemarch, charitable committees, clerical influence, and lay benefactors manage relief and hospital subscriptions, illuminating pre-1834 welfare’s paternalism and its political leverage. The town’s debates foreshadow the national shift toward deterrent relief, while exposing how philanthropy could mask social control and fiscal anxieties.
The Church of England’s structure—pluralism, lay patronage of livings, and tithe collection—provoked calls for reform in the 1820s–1830s. Conflicts over sinecures and residence obligations preceded the Ecclesiastical Commission (1836) and the Tithe Commutation Act (1836). Earlier, church-building initiatives (from 1818) aimed to extend Anglican reach amid urban growth. Middlemarch dramatizes clerical careerism and conscience: Mr. Farebrother’s precarious living, Casaubon’s scholarly inefficacy, and the lay manipulation of preferment reveal the moral economies of patronage. The novel’s attention to sermons, vestry business, and endowments reflects contemporary disputes over spiritual labor, income distribution, and pastoral responsibility.
Women’s civil status in the 1830s was constrained by coverture, which subsumed a married woman’s legal identity under her husband’s. Property typically passed through settlements controlled by male relatives; divorce required a private Act of Parliament until reforms in 1857. Educational opportunities were limited to finishing schools and private tutelage, with universities closed to women. Middlemarch translates these legal facts into lived impediments: Dorothea’s marriage settlement, Rosamond’s strategic domesticity, and the social penalties for female independence demonstrate how property law and custom directed women’s life-choices, finances, and public voice in provincial politics and philanthropy.
Industrialization and transport accelerated national integration, though Middlemarch’s chronology lies just before railway ubiquity. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened in 1825; the Liverpool and Manchester in 1830 signaled commercial feasibility and altered freight and passenger movement. Canals and turnpikes still dominated most provincial corridors in 1829–1832, preserving local monopolies and slow news cycles. Middlemarch captures this pre-rail tempo—a politics of face-to-face canvassing, regional newspapers, and county fairs—while the narrative’s hindsight registers the impending transformation of markets, migration, and political communication that would erode oligarchic control and provincial insularity.
Agricultural distress after the Napoleonic Wars, intensified by price volatility under the Corn Laws (enacted 1815; repealed 1846), framed rural politics. The Swing Riots of 1830, centered in southern and eastern counties, protested threshing machines and low wages through arson and threatening letters. Landowners debated poor relief and rents against a backdrop of cyclical downturns in the early 1830s. Middlemarch’s landlords and tenants inhabit this atmosphere of guarded paternalism and anxiety. Conversations about rents, stewardship, and charity show how national agrarian tensions penetrated household economies and colored attitudes toward Reform, public order, and obligations between classes.
Municipal governance before the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 was often in the hands of self-electing corporators, with limited transparency and patronage-prone administration of markets, policing, and charities. Ratepayers had uneven influence, and officeholders overlapped with local business elites. Middlemarch reproduces this oligarchic civic ecology in hospital boards, ad hoc committees, and informal caucuses binding bankers, landowners, and professionals. Disputes over appointments and expenditures in the town serve as micro-histories of pre-reform local power, underscoring why national electoral change in 1832 was soon followed by urban corporate overhaul to broaden participation and rationalize governance.
As a social and political critique, Middlemarch exposes the friction between emergent professional merit and entrenched patronage, between public zeal for Reform and private incapacity for ethical renewal. It indicts the narrow franchise of knowledge, capital, and office: scientific innovation meets gatekeeping; philanthropy masks control; clerical and financial hierarchies reward compliance over service. By tracing the costs of coverture, the perils of parochial finance, and the moral evasions of reformist rhetoric, the novel reveals how 1829–1832 England’s partial reforms left deep inequities intact. Its provincial lens makes systemic critique legible in everyday choices, contracts, elections, and marriages.
Author Biography
George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, was a central figure of the Victorian era, renowned for realist novels that combine intellectual range with acute psychological insight. Writing in the mid- to late nineteenth century, she explored provincial English life, ethical struggle, and the consequences of human choice. Her fiction is distinguished by its narrative breadth, sympathetic characterization, and philosophical seriousness. Across novels, poems, and criticism, Eliot expanded what the English novel could encompass, engaging history, religion, science, and reform. Her work remains canonical for its searching treatment of conscience and community, and for techniques that shaped modern narrative art.
Raised in rural Warwickshire in early nineteenth‑century England, Evans received schooling typical for girls of her class, then pursued rigorous self-education. Early immersion in evangelical thought gave way to independent inquiry, especially through reading European philosophy and biblical criticism. In the 1840s she learned German and undertook demanding translation projects that deepened her engagement with historical skepticism and ethics. Encounters with freethinking salons in Coventry broadened her intellectual horizons and oriented her toward secular humanism tempered by respect for moral tradition. These experiences formed the substratum of her later fiction, where sympathy, error, and formation within communities become central concerns.
In the mid‑1840s Evans published her English translation of David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, followed in the mid‑1850s by Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. These landmark works introduced advanced continental thought to an English readership and established her authority as a serious intellectual. In the early 1850s she worked at the Westminster Review, contributing essays and reviews and, effectively, helping to steer a major organ of Victorian debate. During this period she developed the balanced, analytic prose and moral reflectiveness that would characterize her fiction, and formed key professional relationships within London’s literary and scientific circles.
Turning to fiction in the late 1850s, she adopted the pseudonym “George Eliot,” partly to secure impartial reception in a male‑dominated market and to protect private life from public scrutiny. Scenes of Clerical Life introduced her voice in three linked tales of provincial experience, admired for compassionate realism. Adam Bede soon confirmed her reputation, followed by The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, works that examine kinship, vocation, and the consequences of moral choice. Critics and general readers praised the depth of her rural settings and the seriousness with which she treated ordinary lives, aligning her with a high realist tradition.
Ambition and range marked her next phase. Romola, a historical novel set in Renaissance Florence and serialized in the early 1860s, displayed extensive research and an enlarged canvas of politics, faith, and conscience. Felix Holt engaged contemporary questions of reform and representation, while the long narrative poem The Spanish Gypsy explored destiny and cultural allegiance. Throughout these years, Eliot enjoyed steady critical attention, though responses varied with each experiment. Her long partnership with the critic and thinker George Henry Lewes provided intellectual companionship and practical guidance in research and publishing, reinforcing her commitment to a fiction grounded in inquiry and sympathy.
Eliot’s mature achievement culminated in the 1870s with Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Middlemarch interweaves multiple lives within a provincial town to consider vocation, marriage, and the binding force of social ties. Daniel Deronda extends the range to cosmopolitan themes, including identity and national aspiration, reflecting her sustained curiosity about history and moral responsibility. Both works deploy a flexible, reflective narrator and techniques later associated with psychological realism. Reception in her lifetime ranged from admiration to controversy, but the novels soon entered the core of English literature. Critics have since emphasized their ethical intelligence and their innovative orchestration of complex communities.
In her later years Eliot maintained a prominent public presence and issued a final collection of character sketches and essays, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, in the late 1870s. She died in 1880, leaving a body of work that continues to prompt debate among scholars and general readers. Her novels are read for their exploration of sympathy, responsibility, and the pressures of history on individual lives; for their rigorous engagement with religion and secular ethics; and for narrative strategies that influenced later fiction. Modern criticism places her at the crossroads of Victorian realism and the psychological novel, a durable, formative voice.
To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes, in this nineteenth year of our blessed union.
Middlemarch (Unabridged)
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 religious 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 as 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-recognizable deed.
Book I. Miss Brooke.
Chapter 1
“Since I can do no good because a woman, Reach constantly at something that is near it. — The Maid’s Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER[1].
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[2] gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate. Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster’s daughter. Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious feeling; but in Miss Brooke’s case, religion alone would have determined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister’s sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew many passages of Pascal’s Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection. With all this, she, the elder of the sisters, was not yet twenty, and they had both been educated, since they were about twelve years old and had lost their parents, on plans at once narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne, their bachelor uncle and guardian trying in this way to remedy the disadvantages of their orphaned condition.
It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange with their uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote. He had travelled in his younger years, and was held in this part of the county to have contracted a too rambling habit of mind. Mr. Brooke’s conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was only safe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions, and that he would spend as little money as possible in carrying them out. For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his own interests except the retention of his snuff-box, concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.
In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults and virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle’s talk or his way of “letting things be” on his estate, and making her long all the more for the time when she would be of age and have some command of money for generous schemes. She was regarded as an heiress; for not only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from their parents, but if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would inherit Mr. Brooke’s estate, presumably worth about three thousand a-year — a rental which seemed wealth to provincial families, still discussing Mr. Peel’s late conduct on the Catholic question, innocent of future gold-fields, and of that gorgeous plutocracy which has so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life.
And how should Dorothea not marry? — a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles — who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers, was generally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking, while Miss Brooke’s large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking. Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it.
Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her by this alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably reconcilable with it. Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed, it was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with attractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia: Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered from Celia’s point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good for Celia to accept him. That he should be regarded as a suitor to herself would have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance. Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said “Exactly” to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty — how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.
These peculiarities of Dorothea’s character caused Mr. Brooke to be all the more blamed in neighboring families for not securing some middle-aged lady as guide and companion to his nieces. But he himself dreaded so much the sort of superior woman likely to be available for such a position, that he allowed himself to be dissuaded by Dorothea’s objections, and was in this case brave enough to defy the world — that is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader the Rector’s wife, and the small group of gentry with whom he visited in the northeast corner of Loamshire. So Miss Brooke presided in her uncle’s household, and did not at all dislike her new authority, with the homage that belonged to it.
Sir James Chettam was going to dine at the Grange to-day with another gentleman whom the girls had never seen, and about whom Dorothea felt some venerating expectation. This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon, noted in the county as a man of profound learning, understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history; also as a man of wealth enough to give lustre to his piety, and having views of his own which were to be more clearly ascertained on the publication of his book. His very name carried an impressiveness hardly to be measured without a precise chronology of scholarship.
Early in the day Dorothea had returned from the infant school which she had set going in the village, and was taking her usual place in the pretty sitting-room which divided the bedrooms of the sisters, bent on finishing a plan for some buildings (a kind of work which she delighted in), when Celia, who had been watching her with a hesitating desire to propose something, said —
“Dorothea, dear, if you don’t mind — if you are not very busy — suppose we looked at mamma’s jewels to-day, and divided them? It is exactly six months to-day since uncle gave them to you, and you have not looked at them yet.”
Celia’s face had the shadow of a pouting expression in it, the full presence of the pout being kept back by an habitual awe of Dorothea and principle; two associated facts which might show a mysterious electricity if you touched them incautiously. To her relief, Dorothea’s eyes were full of laughter as she looked up.
“What a wonderful little almanac you are, Celia! Is it six calendar or six lunar months?”
“It is the last day of September now, and it was the first of April when uncle gave them to you. You know, he said that he had forgotten them till then. I believe you have never thought of them since you locked them up in the cabinet here.”
“Well, dear, we should never wear them, you know.” Dorothea spoke in a full cordial tone, half caressing, half explanatory. She had her pencil in her hand, and was making tiny side-plans on a margin.
Celia colored, and looked very grave. “I think, dear, we are wanting in respect to mamma’s memory, to put them by and take no notice of them. And,” she added, after hesitating a little, with a rising sob of mortification, “necklaces are quite usual now; and Madame Poincon, who was stricter in some things even than you are, used to wear ornaments. And Christians generally — surely there are women in heaven now who wore jewels.” Celia was conscious of some mental strength when she really applied herself to argument.
“You would like to wear them?” exclaimed Dorothea, an air of astonished discovery animating her whole person with a dramatic action which she had caught from that very Madame Poincon who wore the ornaments. “Of course, then, let us have them out. Why did you not tell me before? But the keys, the keys!” She pressed her hands against the sides of her head and seemed to despair of her memory.
“They are here,” said Celia, with whom this explanation had been long meditated and prearranged.
“Pray open the large drawer of the cabinet and get out the jewel-box.”
The casket was soon open before them, and the various jewels spread out, making a bright parterre on the table. It was no great collection, but a few of the ornaments were really of remarkable beauty, the finest that was obvious at first being a necklace of purple amethysts set in exquisite gold work, and a pearl cross with five brilliants in it. Dorothea immediately took up the necklace and fastened it round her sister’s neck, where it fitted almost as closely as a bracelet; but the circle suited the Henrietta-Maria style of Celia’s head and neck, and she could see that it did, in the pier-glass opposite.
“There, Celia! you can wear that with your Indian muslin. But this cross you must wear with your dark dresses.”
Celia was trying not to smile with pleasure. “O Dodo, you must keep the cross yourself.”
“No, no, dear, no,” said Dorothea, putting up her hand with careless deprecation.
“Yes, indeed you must; it would suit you — in your black dress, now,” said Celia, insistingly. “You MIGHT wear that.”
“Not for the world, not for the world. A cross is the last thing I would wear as a trinket.” Dorothea shuddered slightly.
“Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it,” said Celia, uneasily.
“No, dear, no,” said Dorothea, stroking her sister’s cheek. “Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.”
“But you might like to keep it for mamma’s sake.”
“No, I have other things of mamma’s — her sandal-wood box which I am so fond of — plenty of things. In fact, they are all yours, dear. We need discuss them no longer. There — take away your property.”
Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.
“But how can I wear ornaments if you, who are the elder sister, will never wear them?”
“Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets to keep you in countenance. If I were to put on such a necklace as that, I should feel as if I had been pirouetting. The world would go round with me, and I should not know how to walk.”
Celia had unclasped the necklace and drawn it off. “It would be a little tight for your neck; something to lie down and hang would suit you better,” she said, with some satisfaction. The complete unfitness of the necklace from all points of view for Dorothea, made Celia happier in taking it. She was opening some ring-boxes, which disclosed a fine emerald with diamonds, and just then the sun passing beyond a cloud sent a bright gleam over the table.
“How very beautiful these gems are!” said Dorothea, under a new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. “It is strange how deeply colors seem to penetrate one, like scent I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more beautiful than any of them.”
“And there is a bracelet to match it,” said Celia. “We did not notice this at first.”
“They are lovely,” said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet on her finely turned finger and wrist, and holding them towards the window on a level with her eyes. All the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colors by merging them in her mystic religious joy.
“You WOULD like those, Dorothea,” said Celia, rather falteringly, beginning to think with wonder that her sister showed some weakness, and also that emeralds would suit her own complexion even better than purple amethysts. “You must keep that ring and bracelet — if nothing else. But see, these agates are very pretty and quiet.”
“Yes! I will keep these — this ring and bracelet,” said Dorothea. Then, letting her hand fall on the table, she said in another tone —”Yet what miserable men find such things, and work at them, and sell them!” She paused again, and Celia thought that her sister was going to renounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do.
“Yes, dear, I will keep these,” said Dorothea, decidedly. “But take all the rest away, and the casket.”
She took up her pencil without removing the jewels, and still looking at them. She thought of often having them by her, to feed her eye at these little fountains of pure color.
“Shall you wear them in company?” said Celia, who was watching her with real curiosity as to what she would do.
Dorothea glanced quickly at her sister. Across all her imaginative adornment of those whom she loved, there darted now and then a keen discernment, which was not without a scorching quality. If Miss Brooke ever attained perfect meekness, it would not be for lack of inward fire.
“Perhaps,” she said, rather haughtily. “I cannot tell to what level I may sink.”
Celia blushed, and was unhappy: she saw that she had offended her sister, and dared not say even anything pretty about the gift of the ornaments which she put back into the box and carried away. Dorothea too was unhappy, as she went on with her plan-drawing, questioning the purity of her own feeling and speech in the scene which had ended with that little explosion.
Celia’s consciousness told her that she had not been at all in the wrong: it was quite natural and justifiable that she should have asked that question, and she repeated to herself that Dorothea was inconsistent: either she should have taken her full share of the jewels, or, after what she had said, she should have renounced them altogether.
“I am sure — at least, I trust,” thought Celia, “that the wearing of a necklace will not interfere with my prayers. And I do not see that I should be bound by Dorothea’s opinions now we are going into society, though of course she herself ought to be bound by them. But Dorothea is not always consistent.”
Thus Celia, mutely bending over her tapestry, until she heard her sister calling her.
“Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan; I shall think I am a great architect, if I have not got incompatible stairs and fireplaces.”
As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against her sister’s arm caressingly. Celia understood the action. Dorothea saw that she had been in the wrong, and Celia pardoned her. Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia’s mind towards her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?
Chapter 2
“‘Dime; no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene sobre un caballo rucio rodado que trae puesto en la cabeza un yelmo de oro?’ ‘Lo que veo y columbro,’ respondio Sancho, ‘no es sino un hombre sobre un as no pardo como el mio, que trae sobre la cabeza una cosa que relumbra.’ ‘Pues ese es el yelmo de Mambrino,’ dijo Don Quijote.”— CERVANTES.
“‘Seest thou not yon cavalier who cometh toward us on a dapple-gray steed, and weareth a golden helmet?’ ‘What I see,’ answered Sancho, ‘is nothing but a man on a gray ass like my own, who carries something shiny on his head.’ ‘Just so,’ answered Don Quixote: ‘and that resplendent object is the helmet of Mambrino[4].’”
“Sir Humphry Davy[3]?” said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy smiling way, taking up Sir James Chettam’s remark that he was studying Davy’s Agricultural Chemistry. “Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy; I dined with him years ago at Cartwright’s, and Wordsworth was there too — the poet Wordsworth, you know. Now there was something singular. I was at Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him — and I dined with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright’s. There’s an oddity in things, now. But Davy was there: he was a poet too. Or, as I may say, Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two. That was true in every sense, you know.”
Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual. In the beginning of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of a magistrate’s mind fell too noticeably. She wondered how a man like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality. His manners, she thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke. He had the spare form and the pale complexion which became a student; as different as possible from the blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered type represented by Sir James Chettam.
“I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry,” said this excellent baronet, “because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands, and see if something cannot be done in setting a good pattern of farming among my tenants. Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?”
“A great mistake, Chettam,” interposed Mr. Brooke, “going into electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor of your cow-house. It won’t do. I went into science a great deal myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone. No, no — see that your tenants don’t sell their straw, and that kind of thing; and give them draining-tiles, you know. But your fancy farming will not do — the most expensive sort of whistle you can buy: you may as well keep a pack of hounds.”
“Surely,” said Dorothea, “it is better to spend money in finding out how men can make the most of the land which supports them all, than in keeping dogs and horses only to gallop over it. It is not a sin to make yourself poor in performing experiments for the good of all.”
She spoke with more energy than is expected of so young a lady, but Sir James had appealed to her. He was accustomed to do so, and she had often thought that she could urge him to many good actions when he was her brother-in-law.
Mr. Casaubon turned his eyes very markedly on Dorothea while she was speaking, and seemed to observe her newly.
“Young ladies don’t understand political economy, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. “I remember when we were all reading Adam Smith. THERE is a book, now. I took in all the new ideas at one time — human perfectibility, now. But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself. The fact is, human reason may carry you a little too far — over the hedge, in fact. It carried me a good way at one time; but I saw it would not do. I pulled up; I pulled up in time. But not too hard. I have always been in favor of a little theory: we must have Thought; else we shall be landed back in the dark ages. But talking of books, there is Southey’s ‘Peninsular War.’ I am reading that of a morning. You know Southey?”
“No” said Mr. Casaubon, not keeping pace with Mr. Brooke’s impetuous reason, and thinking of the book only. “I have little leisure for such literature just now. I have been using up my eyesight on old characters lately; the fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader. It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes. But I find it necessary to use the utmost caution about my eyesight.”
This was the first time that Mr. Casaubon had spoken at any length. He delivered himself with precision, as if he had been called upon to make a public statement; and the balanced sing-song neatness of his speech, occasionally corresponded to by a movement of his head, was the more conspicuous from its contrast with good Mr. Brooke’s scrappy slovenliness. Dorothea said to herself that Mr. Casaubon was the most interesting man she had ever seen, not excepting even Monsieur Liret, the Vaudois clergyman who had given conferences on the history of the Waldenses. To reconstruct a past world, doubtless with a view to the highest purposes of truth — what a work to be in any way present at, to assist in, though only as a lamp-holder! This elevating thought lifted her above her annoyance at being twitted with her ignorance of political economy, that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights.
“But you are fond of riding, Miss Brooke,” Sir James presently took an opportunity of saying. “I should have thought you would enter a little into the pleasures of hunting. I wish you would let me send over a chestnut horse for you to try. It has been trained for a lady. I saw you on Saturday cantering over the hill on a nag not worthy of you. My groom shall bring Corydon for you every day, if you will only mention the time.”
“Thank you, you are very good. I mean to give up riding. I shall not ride any more,” said Dorothea, urged to this brusque resolution by a little annoyance that Sir James would be soliciting her attention when she wanted to give it all to Mr. Casaubon.
“No, that is too hard,” said Sir James, in a tone of reproach that showed strong interest. “Your sister is given to self-mortification, is she not?” he continued, turning to Celia, who sat at his right hand.
“I think she is,” said Celia, feeling afraid lest she should say something that would not please her sister, and blushing as prettily as possible above her necklace. “She likes giving up.”
“If that were true, Celia, my giving-up would be self-indulgence, not self-mortification. But there may be good reasons for choosing not to do what is very agreeable,” said Dorothea.
Mr. Brooke was speaking at the same time, but it was evident that Mr. Casaubon was observing Dorothea, and she was aware of it.
“Exactly,” said Sir James. “You give up from some high, generous motive.”
“No, indeed, not exactly. I did not say that of myself,” answered Dorothea, reddening. Unlike Celia, she rarely blushed, and only from high delight or anger. At this moment she felt angry with the perverse Sir James. Why did he not pay attention to Celia, and leave her to listen to Mr. Casaubon? — if that learned man would only talk, instead of allowing himself to be talked to by Mr. Brooke, who was just then informing him that the Reformation either meant something or it did not, that he himself was a Protestant to the core, but that Catholicism was a fact; and as to refusing an acre of your ground for a Romanist chapel, all men needed the bridle of religion, which, properly speaking, was the dread of a Hereafter.
