![]() ![]() The marriage is between young Dorothea Brooke and the much older (as in, over 40!) Edward Casaubon. But as Rebecca Mead, writer for The New Yorker and author of My Life in Middlemarch told IDEAS, "what George Eliot does, is she gives us a bad marriage from the very beginning of the book." Jane Austen's books often end with a wedding or, in the case of Pride and Prejudice, two weddings. ![]() ![]() It's only a small spoiler (but how do you spoil such a beloved 150-year-old book?) to say that there's no happy ending - not really - in Middlemarch. Just as in life, her characters are at the mercy of circumstance and their own, often terrible, decisions. Growth and failure: George Eliot shies away from neither. Byatt once observed, it's a book from which writers learn how novels work: how "to invent a world peopled by a large number of interrelated people, almost all of whose processes of thought, developments of consciousness, biological anxieties, sense of their past and future can most scrupulously be made available to readers, can work with and against each other, can lead to failure, or partial failure, or triumphant growth." Setting up a marriage for failure Empathy: the life lesson of George Eliot's MiddlemarchĪs A.S.Audio Love and Consequences: George Eliot's Middlemarch, Part Two ![]()
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