Middlemarch

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

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Title: Middlemarch
Author: George Eliot
Release Date: July, 1994 [EBook #145] [This file was last updated on
June 29, 2003]

Edition: 11
Language: English
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MIDDLEMARCH ***

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Middlemarch
By George Eliot
New York and Boston H. M. Caldwell Company Publishers
To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes, in this nineteenth year of
our blessed union.

PRELUDE
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the
mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time,
has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not
smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking
forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and
seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from
rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with
human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality
met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great
resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate,
ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances

of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame
quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after
some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify
weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous
consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a
religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly
not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for
themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of
far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a
certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity;
perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept
into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to
shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to
common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and
formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent
social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge
for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague
ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was
disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient
indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures
of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as
the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be
treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains,
and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would
imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favorite
love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared
uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the
living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and
there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving
heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are
dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some
long-recognizable deed.

BOOK I.
MISS BROOKE.
----
CHAPTER I.
"Since I can do no good because a woman, Reach constantly at
something that is near it. --The Maid's Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND
FLETCHER.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into
relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she
could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the
Blessed Virgin