قصة الكتاب :
“Middlemarch” is a novel by English author George Eliot. The author’s real name is Mary Ann Evans. She was born in 1819 and died in 1880. Mary was among the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels known for their realism and psychological insight into characters. Mary used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot\'s life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny. Despite being famous, Eliot was not buried in Westminster Abbey because of her denial of the Christian faith.
The events of the story are centered on the lives of the residents of Middlemarch, a fictitious Midlands town, from 1829 to 1832. It discusses the lives of several countryside families during the Victorian era. The author focuses on deepening the social and psychological dimension of the main characters the first of which is Dorothea Brooke, the smart, ambitious and rich woman who accepted to marry the son of a clerk called Casaubon. Dorothea wished to help her husband in his research on mythology, but he treats her with disregard and contempt. Dorothea forms a warm friendship with a young cousin of Casaubon\'s, Will Ladislaw. Eventually she marries him after Casaubon’s death. But Ladislaw remains poor because after Casaubon’s death Dorothea discovers that there was a provision to his will that states that if she marries Ladislaw, she will lose her inheritance. The other main character in the novel is Tertius Lydgate, the young doctor who is ambitious about his medical research. Tertius was not happy in his marriage with Rosamond Vincy. He tried hard to please Rosamond and win her heart to honor her father who was the supervisor on his research work. Other than these two characters there are several less central characters including Humphrey and Eleanor, Dorothea’s neighbors, Walter Vincy and Lucy Vincy, Rosamond’s parents who wish their daughter’s marriage succeeds, as well as Camden Farebrother, the town’s vicar, and Nicholas Bulstrode, a wealthy banker married to Mr. Vincy\'s sister, Harriet, and has a past he always wants to conceal. There are also many other characters that represent the different categories of people in the British countryside.
The novel was considered by many as a study of the British countryside society’s conditions in light of the development in the constitutional and political system in Britain. The novel addressed the issue of women and their stolen rights during the Victorian era, in addition to the problems of marriage, family relationships and Social hypocrisy. To this day, Middlemarch remains the most studied novel as a new approach in the structure of the English novel.