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.
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)