Middlemarch
George Eliot (1871)
“The most ambitious novel in the English language — a microscope turned on an entire society, and a devastating portrait of what happens when great souls are born into small worlds.”
Character Analysis
The novel's Saint Theresa: a woman of genuine moral and intellectual greatness born into a social world that has no institutional place for her. Her tragedy is not that she chooses badly (though she does) but that every available choice was inadequate to her capacity. Her goodness is real, tested, and costly — the Rosamond scene proves it. She does not become a monument, and the novel argues that this is simultaneously a loss and, in its diffusive effect on those around her, a form of sufficiency.
Latinate, formal, dense with subordinate clauses. His proposal letter reads like a legal document.