Middlemarch - George Elliot

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Résumé :
Middlemarch is George Eliot's great novel of provincial English life, marriage, ambition, reform, disappointment, and moral growth. Set in the fictional Midlands town of Middlemarch during the years surrounding the Reform Bill, the novel follows Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, Rosamond Vincy, Fred Vincy, Mary Garth, and a wide cast of interconnected characters whose private choices are shaped by property, class, religion, gender, medicine, politics, and social expectation. Eliot gives the life of a provincial town the scope of epic fiction, showing how ordinary ambitions, compromises, errors, and acts of sympathy become the substance of history. Widely regarded as one of the finest novels in English, Middlemarch combines psychological depth, social realism, intellectual seriousness, and humane moral vision. Its portraits of marriage, vocation, failed idealism, reforming energy, and the limits placed upon women remain central to its lasting power. For readers of Victorian literature, English literary classics, realist fiction, nineteenth-century novels, and major works of moral and social fiction, Middlemarch remains one of the essential achievements of the English novel....

Biographie:
About the BookAdam Bede, the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time. The novel has remained in print ever since and is used in university studies of 19th-century English literature. Carpenter Adam Bede is in love with the beautiful Hetty Sorrel, but unknown to him, he has a rival, in the local squire's son Arthur Donnithorne. Hetty is soon attracted by Arthur's seductive charm and they begin to meet in secret. The relationship is to have tragic consequences that reach far beyond the couple themselves, touching not just Adam Bede, but many others, not least, pious Methodist Preacher Dinah Morris. A tale of seduction, betrayal, love and deception, the plot of Adam Bede has the quality of an English folk song. Within the setting of Hayslope, a small, rural community, Eliot brilliantly creates a sense of earthy reality, making the landscape itself as vital a presence in the novel as that of her characters themselves.About the AuthorMary Ann (Marian) Evans was born in 1819 in Warwickshire. Under the name of George Eliot, she wrote Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, as well as numerous essays, articles and reviews. She died in 1880, only a few months after marrying J. W. Cross, an old friend and admirer, who became her first biographer. Margaret Reynolds works on literature from the C18th to the present day, especially poetry, and especially in the Victorian period. Her The Sappho History (2003) traced the transmission of the works and images of the ancient Greek poet as they appear in the works of Mary Robinson, S.T. Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, Baudelaire, Swinburne, H.D. and Virginia Woolf. Margaret Reynolds is the presenter of BBC Radio 4's 'Adventures in Poetry', now in its 11th series. She has a weekly column on classic books in the Saturday Times.Excerpt. ? Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.CHAPTER IThe WorkshopWith a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June.

Sommaire:
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the major English novelists of the nineteenth century and a central figure in Victorian literature. Born in Warwickshire, she became known for fiction of exceptional psychological insight, moral seriousness, social observation, and intellectual range. Before turning fully to the novel, she worked as a translator, editor, critic, and essayist, engaging deeply with religion, philosophy, history, politics, and European thought. Her decision to publish fiction under a male pen name reflected both the conventions of the period and her desire to have her novels judged seriously in a literary culture often dismissive of women writers.Eliot's major works include Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, the Radical, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Her novels are especially important for their complex treatment of conscience, sympathy, education, vocation, marriage, social change, and the moral consequences of ordinary choices. Unlike many novelists of her period, Eliot often resisted melodrama in favour of careful psychological development and broad social analysis, making her work foundational to English realism and the modern literary novel.Middlemarch is widely considered Eliot's masterpiece and one of the greatest novels in English. Her influence extends across Victorian fiction, literary realism, feminist literary history, ethical criticism, and the development of the social novel. She remains essential to readers of classic literature, nineteenth-century British fiction, women writers, realist novels, and the intellectual history of the Victorian age....