Later Novels

Abstract

George Eliot had considered Middlemarch at various times before she made it one of her projects for 1869. In February she informed John Blackwood that she intended beginning it ‘at once, having already sketched the plan’. ‘The various elements … have been soliciting my mind for years’, she added, after stating that ‘between the beginning and middle of a book’ she was like the lazy Scheldt but ‘between the middle and end’ like the arrowy Rhone. The hero was a physician, and the ‘Introduction’ which she wrote in July almost certainly presented Lydgate’s early history and background much as it appears in the fifteenth chapter.* Her Journal for 2 August 1869 reads: ‘Began “Middlemarch” (the Vincy and Featherstone parts)’. Soon afterwards, busily engaged with medical books (including copies of The Lancet for 1830–31), she was afraid that she could not ‘make anything satisfactory’ of the novel. She asked Mrs Congreve to procure information she needed about provincial hospitals for ‘imagining the conditions’ of her hero. After a long interval the ‘Miss Brooke’ story was begun early in November 1870, and a month later she decided to make it part of Middlemarch. By March she had made good progress with this enlarged work and hoped to complete it in November; her problem was that she had ‘too much matter — too many momenti’.