Middlemarch, which a Guardian poll of ‘experts’ has named as the best novel ever, is overrated. I enjoyed reading it when I was seventeen. I probably re-read it in my twenties. Then I grew up. I became a bit more sceptical of the para-religious sentimentalism-on-stilts that defines George Eliot’s ouvre, and this novel in particular.
This is a pile of nonsense with a grain of truth in it
Of course I was in love with Dorothea Brooke as a teenager. So high-minded, and considerate and so wisely accepting of her misfortunes, and rather pretty too. But nowadays she strikes me as a blue-stocking bore (I far prefer the feisty Gwendolyn from Daniel Deronda (partly thanks to Romola Garai’s portrayal of her).
Let’s put it simply. Dorothea embodies the assumption that post-Christian agnostics with an interest in the arts are the supreme human beings. That’s roughly how I saw myself at seventeen: the Christianity of my upbringing seemed something I was moving on from, to higher braver things. Religion seemed the old packaging of morality; the modern task was to salvage religion’s moral truth from the wreckage.
Unlike the average heroine, her prime concern is not whom to marry, but how to live a life of practical goodness. Her idealism leads her astray, into a bad marriage, which lends her a tragic aura. Then her moral quest resumes, in a more sombre key. She tells her admirer Will Ladislaw that she isn’t sure if she believes in anything supernatural any more, unless you can call the power of goodness supernatural. Her core belief is ‘that by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil – widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.’ This, she goes on, ‘is my life. I have found it out and cannot part with it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl. I used to pray so much – now I hardly ever pray.’ The implication is that religion is a stage one might progress beyond, to a purer moral idealism.
