Middlemarch by George Eliot

Published 1871 · 901 pages · 312,432 words · about 22 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Victorian Literature

How hard is Middlemarch to read?

Middlemarch scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
George Eliot employs a rich, formal vocabulary with frequent use of sophisticated and sometimes archaic terms (e.g., 'epos,' 'frippery,' 'huckster's,' 'solicitudes,' 'plutocracy,' 'subauditum,' 'geognosis,' 'morbidezza'). While generally understandable through context, the density of such words requires an attentive reader and occasional dictionary consultation, placing it above 'The Great Gatsby' but below the more obscure 'Moby-Dick'.
Sentence structure: 78 out of 100
Middlemarch features long, complex sentences with multiple subordinate clauses, often extending over several lines. George Eliot frequently employs parenthetical phrases and elaborate constructions, demanding sustained reader attention to parse the intricate grammatical relationships. This hypotactic style is reminiscent of Henry James or Proust, though generally more navigable.
Abstraction: 68 out of 100
While grounded in detailed social realism and character interactions, the novel frequently delves into characters' internal moral and philosophical struggles, exploring abstract concepts of duty, faith, and societal expectations. Dorothea's yearning for a 'higher inward life' and Mr. Casaubon's 'Key to All Mythologies' introduce significant intellectual and theoretical content, moving beyond mere social observation.
Information density: 72 out of 100
The text is rich with character psychology, social commentary, and intricate plot developments, often presented through dense paragraphs and detailed descriptions. Eliot layers multiple perspectives and subtle ironies, requiring readers to actively synthesize information and infer unspoken meanings, making it more demanding than 'Lolita' but less overwhelming than 'Ulysses'.
Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
George Eliot's omniscient narrator frequently provides explicit insights into characters' inner lives, motivations, and societal context, leaving little to the reader's sole inference. For instance, the narrator directly explains Dorothea's 'theoretic' mind and her 'childlike ideas about marriage,' rather than merely showing her actions. While characters like Mr. Brooke are often misunderstood by others, the narrator clarifies his 'rambling habit of mind' and the 'fragments' in his thoughts, making his internal state clear to the reader, placing it closer to '1984' than 'Finnegans Wake'.
Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
The novel employs significant symbolism, such as Dorothea's jewels representing her internal conflict between asceticism and aesthetic appreciation, or Casaubon's 'Key to All Mythologies' symbolizing his sterile scholarship. However, the narrator often explicitly points out these symbolic meanings or uses clear metaphors (e.g., 'cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings,' 'cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship'), rather than leaving them entirely to reader interpretation. This is more direct than the pervasive, multi-layered symbolism of 'Moby-Dick' or 'The Waste Land'.
Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
The narrator maintains a consistent ironic distance, subtly critiquing characters' self-delusions and societal follies while also evoking sympathy. This is evident in the narrator's observations on Dorothea's idealized view of Casaubon, Mr. Brooke's 'easy smiling way' masking his intellectual superficiality, and Mrs. Cadwallader's sharp, cynical wit. The irony often arises from the gap between characters' perceptions and the narrator's more knowing perspective, similar to 'The Great Gatsby' where Nick's bias shapes the narrative, but here it's the omniscient narrator's sophisticated commentary.
Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
While the excerpt sets up major plot trajectories like Dorothea's marriage and Lydgate's arrival, it does not leave immediate events ambiguous or resist narrative closure in a radical way. The narrator often foreshadows future developments or comments on the likely outcomes of characters' choices, such as Mr. Casaubon's 'flatness' or the eventual disappointment of Dorothea's hopes. The narrative provides a clear sense of progression, unlike the profound uncertainties of 'Waiting for Godot' or '2666'.
Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
The novel's structure is largely linear and chronological, following the experiences of multiple characters through a consistent omniscient third-person perspective. While the narrative shifts focus between characters (Dorothea, Celia, Fred, Rosamond, Lydgate, etc.), these shifts are clearly signposted and do not involve experimental forms, fragmented chronologies, or unreliable narrators in the manner of 'Ulysses' or 'Infinite Jest.' The chapters progress sequentially, providing a clear, if broad, narrative flow, similar to 'War and Peace' in its epic scope but linear progression.

How Middlemarch is regarded

Middlemarch holds a literary regard score of 91 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

What Middlemarch asks you to hold together

Middlemarch sustains Systematic (12) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: a constellation. Its highest passage reaches the same stage. Read from the full text, all 587 passages. What the stages mean.

Where Middlemarch sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (588 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Middlemarch scores 65 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone.
Symbol: Formal (with strong Mythical/Archetypal secondary)
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun... The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.
Mythos: Ironic Tragedy iv (Autumn, Phase 4) shading toward Phase 5 (tragedy iv)
All who have cared for Fred Vincy and Mary Garth will like to know that these two made no such failure, but achieved a solid mutual happiness.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration, that Dr. Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without saying by your leave or with your leave.

Where the story of Middlemarch takes place

  • Provincial England, 1829–1832 (1829 to 1832), the main setting

Scenes in Middlemarch that Frye would name

40 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, passage 337
She laid her hand on his shoulder, and repeated, 'I am ready!' Still he was motionless... But Dorothea never gave her answer. Casaubon's death, discovered by Dorothea mid-reconciliation - the book's central death scene.
Anagnorisis, passage 147
Today she had begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own. The quiet domestic anagnorisis that pivots the marriage plot: Dorothea recognizes her idealizing error.
Epos, passage 184
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel... The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent. The famous pier-glass parable - direct philosophical address to the reader, textbook epos register.
Hamartia, passage 210
That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch: it shook flirtation into love... In half an hour he left the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own, but the woman's to whom he had bound himself. Lydgate's fatal misstep dramatized structurally - an accidental engagement that seals his tragic marriage.
Katabasis, passage 298
To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons. Explicit Charon/underworld-crossing imagery marking Casaubon's confrontation with his own mortality.
Senex iratus, passage 338
a codicil of this sort to a will which he made at the time of his marriage with the knowledge and reliance of her family—a positive insult to Dorothea! The dead hand's posthumous control of Dorothea's romantic future - the definitive senex-iratus act of the novel.

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About the author

George Eliot

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