Middlemarch

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what Virginia Woolf called ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’. It was written by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans (1819-80), published in 8 parts in 1871-72, and was originally two separate stories which became woven together. One, ‘Middlemarch’, focused on a doctor, Tertius Lydgate and the other, ‘Miss Brooke’, on Dorothea Brooke who became the central figure in the finished work. The events are set in a small town in the Midlands, surrounded by farmland, leading up to the Reform Act 1832, and the novel explores the potential to change in matters of religion, social status, marriage and politics, and is particularly concerned with the opportunities available to women to lead fulfilling lives.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Rosemary Ashton 10 episodes
  Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London
• Kathryn Hughes No other episodes
  Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia
• John Bowen 6 episodes
  Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York

Reading list

• George Eliot: A Life
  Rosemary Ashton (Faber & Faber, 2013) Google Books →
• George Eliot
  Gillian Beer (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986) Google Books →
• The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction
  Rosemarie Bodenheimer (Cornell University Press, 1996) Google Books →
• Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century
  Karen Chase (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2006) Google Books →
• Middlemarch
  George Eliot (ed. Rosemary Ashton) (Penguin, 1994) Google Books →
• Selected Critical Writings
  George Eliot (ed. Rosemary Ashton) (Oxford Paperbacks, 1998) Google Books →
• George Eliot: The Last Victorian
  Kathryn Hughes (Fourth Estate, 1998) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot
  George Levine (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2001) Google Books →
• The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot
  Rebecca Mead (Granta, 2014) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b09z1dd7

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09z1dd7

Auto-category: 823.8 (English fiction)