Rosamond initially admires Lydgate for his exotic education, and his intellect.

Rosamond Vincy's finishing school education is a foil to Dorothea Brooke's religiously-motivated quest for knowledge. The book examines the role of education in the lives of the characters and how such education and study has affected the characters. It looks at medicine of the time and reactionary views in a settled community facing unwelcome change. Despite comic elements, Middlemarch uses realism to encompass historical events: the 1832 Reform Act, early railways, and the accession of King William IV. Issues include the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism, self-interest, religion, hypocrisy, political reform, and education. Set in Middlemarch, a fictional English Midland town, in 1829 to 1832, it follows distinct, intersecting stories with many characters. It first appeared in eight instalments (volumes) in 18. The novel is full of good intentions and wishes for grand reforms, many of which are thwarted or transmogrified through bitter experience.Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by the English author Mary Anne Evans, who wrote as George Eliot. We see, then, a social milieu ranging from lowly farmers all the way up to members of the country gentry, all on the brink of immense social and often personal transformation.

Having first appeared in 1871-72, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life takes as its subject the society of a rising manufacturing town, set in the years preceding the Reform Bill of 1832. So often, when I hear people describing grand projects or speaking of their intentions for their lives (those, “tomorrow I’m gunna!” types), my mind flashes to Casaubon and his Key to all Mythologies – the ultimate deluded endeavour, both so hilarious and so totally excruciating. Who could not be enthralled by Dorothea’s youthful idealism, by the viciousness of the marriage between Tertius Lydgate and Rosamund Vincy, by Farebrother’s unrequited love for Mary Garth? Regardless, Eliot’s masterpiece is astounding, in its breadth and depth, and in its startling pathos. In fact, in its grandeur and its subtlety, it’s perhaps more akin to the great Russian novelistic tradition. There’s no single message, religious or otherwise, dictated to us from the author’s moral pulpit. None of the stock characters of Dickens, the Coronation Street-style plot twists and big reveals. Middlemarch is the defining English novel of the 1800s, hands down.

Author middlemarch