Middlemarch, George Eliot’s capacious imagining of the life of a Midlands town, is one of the masterpieces of 19th-century English literature. Though less popular than Jane Austen’s slices of penetrating wit, and less frequently adapted than Dickens’s teeming, socially engaged sagas, Middlemarch continues to exert its hold on readers. “It is one of the few English books written for grownup people,” wrote Virginia Woolf. There are many ways to understand that pithy assessment. One is that Eliot did not avoid exploring the consequences of disappointment: Dorothea’s poor choices in marriage; Dr Lydgate’s idealism and talent, so tarnished by compromise.
Middlemarch stays with us because it has so much to say now: about politics, about social change, about science, about love; about the web of connections that binds people together in a community. BBC Radio 3 will on Sunday broadcast a series called Middlemarch Monologues – new dramas by writers including Tanika Gupta and Sabiha Mank that translate Eliot’s concerns into a modern context, touching on issues affecting the Midlands in our own time: the building of HS2, Black Lives Matter and Covid-19. The works are part of the programme for Coventry’s year as the UK’s City of Culture. That city, where Eliot went to school, provided her with a model for her fictional town, and its streets will also form the backdrop for Dash Arts’ immersive adaptation of the book, The Great Middlemarch Mystery, which will be staged early next month. The writers of this version have also chosen to modernise the novel, placing the action in 1982 – a moment, they argue, that echoes the social and political flux of the novel’s setting in the early 1830s.
The specificity of Middlemarch to its locale is important. The Nuneaton-born Eliot was writing about a town in the middle of England – one that might seem marginal or on the edge of things (as in “the marches”, or the borderlands) – but that in fact demands to be seen as the centre of its world, and the opposite of peripheral in its calls on our attention. The novel, so intellectually rigorous, is often concerned with perspective: with who is looking at whom, and with what intent. When Will Ladislaw happens upon Dorothea at the Vatican, where she is on her unhappy honeymoon with her pedant of a husband, Casaubon, she is in a reverie, not looking at the ancient statue of the sleeping Ariadne she stands beside – she has turned away from the overwhelming carnal spectacle the city offers, since she is in denial about her own sensuality.
At another moment the novel tells us, when we are asked to observe Dorothea weeping six weeks after her marriage, “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” So the novel deftly and wittily reminds us that we are surrounded by personal tragedy, which can be glimpsed only fleetingly by our coarse minds, when gently steered towards it, by a writer of Eliot’s capabilities.
