6 oct 1871 año - 'Middlemarch...', George Eliot

Descripción:

at the time of the 1st Reform Act (1832), where issues such as the coming of the railways, medicine, politics and concern for the poor are the issues of the day. The novel centresaroung 2 unhappy marriages: that of the intelligent heroine, Dorothea Brooke, to a cold-hearted, elderly scholar, Mr Casauban, who thinks only of his research, and that of Dr Lydgate, newly arrived in Middlemarch, idealistic and full of advanced scientific ideas which the town mistrusts, to the superficial Rosamund Viny. Will Ladislaw, Mr Casauban's cousin and a friend of Lydgate, unites the two plots. The novel undermines the Victorian view of a happy marriage, and shows how the community's expectations and conventional standars can lead to bitterness, humiliation, disillusionment, and loneliness. Idealism and self-absorption too can bring self-delusion and tragedy. The novel also dramatises the condition of women in a society which was still patriarchal. The omniscient voice of the narrator constantly reveals her characters' inner struggles and conflicts in a way which antincipates Henry James's novels