Dorothea, who at the novel’s outset is nineteen, disdains her suitor, Sir James Chettam, an amiable, pink-faced baronet whose land is adjacent to the property that any future son of hers will inherit.
Dorothea lives at Tipton Grange, a large estate equipped with household staff my family-a few generations from being household staff-occupied a modest house, built in the nineteen-fifties, with a carefully tended patch of garden. I identified completely with Dorothea Brooke, the ardent young gentlewoman yearning for a more significant existence, even though my upbringing was barely similar. A quarter century ago, as I looked out from my teacher’s living-room window at hills that seemed perpetually sodden, my domain felt hardly less provincial and remote than the Midlands of the eighteen-thirties, which Eliot had described in her novel. Weymouth is in Dorset, a rural county in the southwest of the country its rolling farmlands are traversed by narrow roads and hedgerowed lanes that discreetly delineate the ancestral holdings of landed families. For several hours every weekend, I would join three or four classmates to discuss the novel, which was published in 1872, at the home of a benevolent teacher who lived on the outskirts of Weymouth, the English seaside resort where I grew up. The first time I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” I was seventeen years old, and was preparing to take the entrance examination for Oxford University. In ordinary lives Eliot perceived human nature’s “deep pathos, its sublime mysteries.” Illustration by Pierre Mornet
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