In a book that I wrote about Eliot, “ My Life in Middlemarch,” I described returning to her greatest novel at different stages of life and discovering its changing resonances. Few authors have matched Eliot’s clear-eyed and compassionate capacity for portraying an individual’s growth, error, and disappointment-aspects of the human that do not seem to change much with the passing of the centuries. “Middlemarch,” and Eliot’s work in general, remains remarkable for its subtle delineation of character and of inward psychology.
Woolf’s essay, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, contains the most celebrated observation that anyone has ever made about Eliot’s contribution to English literature: that her masterpiece, “ Middlemarch,” which was published in eight parts between 18, is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” This week marks two hundred years since Mary Ann Evans was born, on November 22, 1819, in the upper bedroom of a farmhouse on an estate in the English Midlands, where her father was the land manager. “We must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose,” Virginia Woolf wrote of George Eliot, in 1919, appraising the author’s work on the centenary of her birth. Photograph by Universal Images Group / Getty
Two hundred years after George Eliot’s birth, “Middlemarch” and its observations about the U.K.
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