Middlemarch: The Fate of Idealism in an Age of Banality

My favorite nineteenth-century novel, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, spins its plot from this premise: What happens when a person of fervent ideals is born into a place and age that cannot support them? Eliot’s protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, is such a person, and the novel recounts Dorothea’s attempts to grasp some form of life that will enable […]

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