Middlemarch

In a Midlands town around the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate each marry badly and see their high hopes worn down by the pressures of provincial society. Eliot's Middlemarch is drawn from Coventry and its Warwickshire country: the town and its gossip, the parish of Lowick, the new fever hospital of Lydgate's reforms, and the estates on which fortunes and marriages turn.

Rosamond

Middlemarch town

Provincial society

Middlemarch itself, a busy Midlands market town of banks, shops, doctors and endless talk, is the real subject of the book, the dense web in which every private hope is caught. Eliot anatomises provincial society with unmatched fullness, tracing how the town's opinion, money and marriages shape and thwart the people who live inside it.

Throughout

inspired by The town of Middlemarch is Eliot's invention, drawn from Coventry in Warwickshire where she grew up; sited in that region of the Midlands.

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