This Norton Critical Edition of George Eliot's highly regarded novel of provincial English life is based on the 1874 edition, the last corrected by the author. Ample explanatory annotation has been provided by the editor.
"Backgrounds" elucidates Eliot's ideas on life and art with generous selections from her letters, journals, essays, and other fictional works. Five contemporary reviews record Middlemarch's initial reception.
"Recent Criticism" collects eleven essays—seven of them new to the Second Edition—that center on the novel's major themes. Mark Schorer, Jerome Bcaty, Cherry Wilhelm, Bert G. Hornback, Robert B. Heilman, Lee R . Edwards, Alan Mintz, T. R . Wright, Matthew Rich, Alan Shelston, and Claudia Moscovici provide their varied perspectives.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
Preface
Middlemarch
Prelude
Book I – Miss Brooke
Book II – Old and Young
Book III – Waiting for Death
Book IV – Three Love Problems
Book V – The Dead Hand
Book VI – The Widow and the Wife
Book VII – Two Temptations
Book VIII – Sunset and Sunrise
Finale
Backgrounds
George Eliot • Letter to Sara Sophia Hennell (9 October 1843)
From The Natural History of German Life (1856)
From Amos Barton (1857)
Journal (30 November 1858)
From Adam Bede (1859)
Letter to Charles Bray (5 July 1859)
Letter to Mme. Eugène Bodichon (26 December 1860)
Letter to Mme. Eugène Bodichon (15 February 1862)
Letter to Frederic Harrison (15 August 1866)
Letter to Clifford Allbutt (August 1868)
From Notes on Form in Art (1868)
Journal (1 January 1869)
George Henry Lewes • Letter to John Blackwood (7 May 1871)
John Blackwood • Letter to George Eliot (20 July 1871)
George Eliot • Letter to John Blackwood (4 August 1872)
Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe (October? 1872)
Journal (1 January 1873)
Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe (11 November 1874)
Emily Davies • Letter to Annie Crow (24 September 1876)
George Eliot • From Leaves from a Notebook (1871–79)
Quarry for "Middlemarch"
Quarry One
Quarry Two
Criticism
Contemporary Reviews
Saturday Review • Middlemarch
[Sidney Colvin] • Middlemarch
Henry James • George Eliot's Middlemarch
Joseph Jacobs • George Eliot
Leslie Stephen • [On Middlemarch]
Recent Criticism
Mark Schorer • Fiction and the "Matrix of Analogy"
Jerome Beaty • History by Indirection: The Era of Reform in Middlemarch
Cherry Wilhelm • Conservative Reform in Middlemarch
Bert G. Hornback • The Moral Imagination of George Eliot
Robert B. Heilman • "Stealthy Convergence" in Middlemarch
Lee R. Edwards • Women, Energy, and Middlemarch
Alan Mintz • Middlemarch: The Romance of Vocation
T. R. Wright • Middlemarch as a Religious Novel, or Life without God
Matthew Rich • "Not a Church, but an Individual Who Is His or Her Own Church": Religion in George Eliot's Middlemarch
Alan Shelston • What Rosy Knew: Language, Learning and Lore in Middlemarch
Claudia Moscovici • Allusive Mischaracterization in Middlemarch
George Eliot: A Chronology
Selected Bibliography
