Contemporary reviews
The Examiner, The Spectator and Athenaeum reviewed each of the eight books that comprise Middlemarch as they were published from December 1871 to December 1872;[34] such reviews speculated on the eventual direction of the plot and responded accordingly.[35] Contemporary response to the novel was mixed. Writing as it was being published, the Spectator reviewer R. H. Hutton criticised it for what he saw as its melancholic quality.[36] Athenaeum, reviewing it after "serialisation", found the work overwrought and thought it would have benefited from hastier composition.[b][37] Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine reviewer W. L. Collins saw as the work's most forceful impression its ability to make readers sympathise with the characters.[38] Edith Simcox of Academy offered high praises, hailing it as a landmark in fiction owing to the originality of its form; she rated it first amongst Eliot's œuvre, which meant it "has scarcely a superior and very few equals in the whole wide range of English fiction".[39]
"What do I think of 'Middlemarch'?" What do I think of glory – except that in a few instances this "mortal has already put on immortality." George Eliot was one. The mysteries of human nature surpass the "mysteries of redemption," for the infinite we only suppose, while we see the finite.
Emily Dickinson, Letter to her cousins Louise and Fannie Norcross[40]
Henry James presented a mixed opinion, Middlemarch, according to him, was "at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels ... Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole". Among the details, his greatest criticism ("the only eminent failure in the book") was of the character of Ladislaw, who he felt was an insubstantial hero-figure as against Lydgate. The scenes between Lydgate and Rosamond he especially praised for their psychological depth – he doubted whether there were any scenes "more powerfully real... [or] intelligent" in all English fiction.[22] Thérèse Bentzon, for the Revue des deux Mondes, was critical of Middlemarch. Although finding merit in certain scenes and qualities, she faulted its structure as "made up of a succession of unconnected chapters, following each other at random... The final effect is one of an incoherence which nothing can justify." In her view, Eliot's prioritisation of "observation rather than imagination... inexorable analysis rather than sensibility, passion or fantasy" means that she should not be held amongst the first ranks of novelists.[41] The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who read Middlemarch in a translation owned by his mother and sister, derided the novel for construing suffering as a means of expiating the debt of sin, which he found characteristic of "little moralistic females à la Eliot".[42]
Despite the divided contemporary response, Middlemarch gained immediate admirers: in 1873, the poet Emily Dickinson expressed high praise for the novel, exclaiming in a letter to a friend: "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory."[43][44][45]
The immediate success of Middlemarch may have been proportioned rather to the author's reputation than to its intrinsic merits. [The novel] ... seems to fall short of the great masterpieces which imply a closer contact with the world of realities and less preoccupation with certain speculative doctrines.
—Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (1902)[46]
In separate centuries, Florence Nightingale and Kate Millett remarked on the eventual subordination of Dorothea's own dreams to those of her admirer, Ladislaw.[47] Indeed, the ending acknowledges this and mentions how unfavourable social conditions prevented her from fulfilling her potential.
Later responses
In the first half of the 20th century, Middlemarch continued to provoke contrasting responses; while Leslie Stephen dismissed the novel in 1902, his daughter Virginia Woolf described it in 1919 as "the magnificent book that, which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."[48] However, Woolf was "virtually unique" among the modernists in her unstinting praise for Middlemarch,[49] and the novel also remained overlooked by the reading public of the time.[50]
F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948) is credited with having "rediscovered" the novel:[50]
The necessary part of great intellectual powers in such a success as Middlemarch is obvious ... the sheer informedness about society, its mechanisms, the ways in which people of different classes live ... a novelist whose genius manifests itself in a profound analysis of the individual.[51]
Leavis' appraisal of it has been hailed as the beginning of a critical consensus that still exists towards the novel, in which it is recognised not only as Eliot's finest work, but as one of the greatest novels in English. V. S. Pritchett, in The Living Novel, two years earlier, in 1946 had written that "No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative ... I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot ... No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully".[52]
In the 21st century, the novel is still held in high regard. The novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have both called it probably the greatest novel in the English language,[c][53] and today Middlemarch is frequently included in university courses. In 2013, the then British Education Secretary Michael Gove referred to Middlemarch in a speech, suggesting its superiority to Stephenie Meyer's vampire novel Twilight.[54] Gove's comments led to debate on teaching Middlemarch in Britain,[d] including the question of when novels like Middlemarch should be read,[e] and the role of canonical texts in teaching.[55] The novel has remained a favourite with readers and scores high in reader rankings: in 2003 it was No. 27 in the BBC's The Big Read,[56] and in 2007 it was No. 10 in "The 10 Greatest Books of All Time", based on a ballot of 125 selected writers.[57] In 2015, in a BBC Culture poll of book critics outside the UK, the novel was ranked at number one in "The 100 greatest British novels".[58]
On 5 November 2019, the BBC News reported that Middlemarch is on the BBC list of 100 "most inspiring" novels.[59]
