Middlemarch: A Romance of Diffusion

Abstract

Like Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch made its strongest impact on me when I came to teach it. Student-reading it hungrily for its wit and romance, and above all as the pride-imparting proof of a woman writer’s sublime mastery of both world and word, I eventually faced the teacher’s problem of establishing some illuminating, and preferably intriguing, framework for the two or three weeks during which we could read the novel together, from the beginning, for structure as well as character and theme. I also found, to my surprise, considerable discontent in the critical tradition about the romance that drove the novel, between Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw. Many felt betrayed by a plot that, having established what Henry James called the “two suns in the firmament of the novel,” Dorothea and “the real hero,” Tertius Lydgate, then cheated us of the romance we had a right to expect.²

… May I reach

That purest heaven, be to other souls

… the sweet presence of a good diffus’d,

And in diffusion ever more intense!

George Eliot¹