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.

Contents

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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

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Tags: Literature, LiteraryCriticism, History, 19CEngland

John Sutherland, "Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? More Puzzles in Classic Fiction" 4 puzzles on Eliot Novels

John Rignall (ed), "Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot"

R. C. Terry, "Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope"

Julia Prewitt Brown, "A Reader's Guide to the Nineteenth-Century English Novel"

Ian Gregor (ed), "Reading the Victorian Novel: Detail into Form"

Daniel Pool, "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist -- The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England"

John Sutherland, "Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? Further Puzzles in Classic Fiction (World's Classics)" 2 puzzles on Eliot Novels

Kristine Hughes, "The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Regency and Victorian England"