George Eliot is every bit as self-conscious as any of her modernist heirs. So there’s no way to capture the sum of things as they are and the dream of literary realism, the dream on which this novel depends, must remain in the end impossible. “The flattering illusion” of that order must instead be made it depends on point of view – a light held to the mirror – and anyone’s sense of the world will inevitably leave some things out. There she suggests that our world is entirely without any kind of intrinsic order. The greatest is the pier-glass metaphor at the start of Chapter 27. Some of Middlemarch’s best passages offer a kind of user’s guide, as if the book itself were telling you how to read it. Critics call that ‘free indirect discourse,’ and for most writers it’s above all a question of literary technique. “Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only?” She must learn – and we must learn with her – how to take some full account of the sheer otherness of other people, who have all “their equivalent centres of self.” That’s one of the great lessons Middlemarch offers, and it does so not only through its plot but also by taking us into the minds of its many different characters, by showing us the contours and indeed the very language of their inner lives. We compare one marriage, one person, to another, and another, and learn this disconcerting truth: bad people, like the banker Nicholas Bulstrode, can make good husbands. Her protagonists wed early in the page-count – and then she lets us watch as their lives begin to fray. They are as much a part of any reader’s mind as Jane Eyre or Jay Gatsby, and in an age when many novels still found their subject in courtship, George Eliot used them to look at marriage instead. Middlemarch has at least three characters whose names have become bywords, starting with its great heroine, Dorothea Brooke the others are the young doctor, Tertius Lydgate, and Dorothea’s first husband, the pedant Edward Casaubon. Each page is a lesson in how to be honest with yourself.

If you really read this novel, you will learn about yourself if you listen to her, if you let her sentences penetrate, you will find out things about yourself that you didn’t and maybe don’t even want to know. Her pronouns pull the reader into the narrative, dispensing wisdom, and as often as not suggesting that our first reactions are shallow. It has George Eliot, it has a narrator whose voice and presence are as memorable as that of any character in English literature.

Middlemarch by george eliot