Middlemarch

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2018

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what Virginia Woolf called 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'. It was written by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans (1819-80), published in 8 parts in 1871-72, and was originally two separate stories which became woven together. One, 'Middlemarch', focused on a doctor, Tertius Lydgate and the other, 'Miss Brooke', on Dorothea Brooke who became the central figure in the finished work. The events are set in a small town in the Midlands, surrounded by farmland, leading up to the Reform Act 1832, and the novel explores the potential to change in matters of religion, social status, marriage and politics, and is particularly concerned with the opportunities available to women to lead fulfilling lives.

The image above shows Rufus Sewell and Juliet Aubrey in the BBC adaptation, from 1994

With

Rosemary Ashton Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London

Kathryn Hughes Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia

And

John Bowen Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:46.7	Hello George Allies Middlemarch, here is according to Virginia Woolf one of the few English
0:51.2	novels written for grown-up people.
0:53.0	Published in 1871 and 2 when George Elliot was in her early 50s,
0:57.0	the story set 40 years earlier in the English Midlands of Elliot's childhood
1:01.0	before the coming of the railways and the Reform Act, a time when everyone
1:04.6	was expected to know his or her place. The main characters, Dorothy A Brook and Dr Lydgate, struggle
1:10.3	to break free from social constraints and their success or failure drives the story on.
1:16.0	In particular, Elliot explores the options for young, intelligent, resourceful women who want to make
1:20.6	their mark on life and are expected to limit themselves to the comfort of their inevitable husbands
	...

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