‘We must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of George Eliot in 1919, appraising the author’s work.
Eliot’s magnum opus deals with issues of morality, love, idealism and political upsurge within the realistic setting of a nineteenth-century English town. It is a slow, gripping burn which grasps the reader’s attention through its mundanity. Broken marriages, political agendas, failures and changing fortunes within a closely knit community are what this text offers, while simultaneously relating to a world of reachable possibilities.
Having stood the test of time, Middlemarch has been passed through generations beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries to be known as one of the most nuanced texts in the history of English Literature.