Middlemarch might also have seemed to its first readers to have been a kind of historical study. Cadwallader’s apparently unmotivated matchmaking. We are asked to see the power of a kind of vicarious snobbery in her, awakening her desire to bring the socially appropriate partners together. To the closest observer of human nature, there is always an explanation. Cadwallader is so keen on engineering a match between Sir James Chettam, recently jilted by Dorothea Brooke, and Celia, Dorothea’s sister, Eliot asks us to imagine what might be revealed by “a microscope directed on a water-drop.” A weak lens might show small creatures actively swimming into the jaws of a larger one a stronger lens shows “certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims.” Eliot duly applies a strong lens to Mrs. When she is wondering why the plain-speaking, unsentimental vicar’s wife Mrs. Yet the humorous incongruity of these is part of their point. She uses a series of analogies from Victorian experimental science-batteries, microscopes, optical effects-to help us to understand human interactions. That subtitle might suggest that the novel was undertaken in a spirit of sociological enquiry, and Eliot herself sometimes plays with the idea that her characters, ranging across the classes of an unremarkable Midlands town, are the objects of scientific scrutiny. She watches them and listens to them, and draws us into her ruminations about why they behave as they do. “Discovers” because Eliot, perhaps more than any other English novelist, seems to approach those characters as beings who already exist.

Surely Woolf was thinking of the way that the novel is narrated: the subtlety and insight with which the novelist discovers her characters’ motivations.

Nor can she have had in mind the novel’s ambitious length and complexity, though Eliot’s work lives up to her subtitle-”A Study of Provincial Life”-by braiding beautifully together the stories of a cluster of characters and families. Admirers of Middlemarch often cite Virginia Woolf ’s description of George Eliot’s novel as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” But what did she mean? She cannot have been referring only to the novel’s subject matter, even if Eliot’s attention to the travails of married life, in particular, seems to envisage readers versed in life’s disappointments as well as its hopes.

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