Literary Significance and Reception
Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." In addition, V. S. Pritchett, in The Living Novel, wrote, "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." Critic Jerome Beaty argues that one could read Middlemarch as George Eliot's Reform novel, although political history is represented only "indirectly."
Popular since its first publication, the novel remains a favourite with readers today. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 27 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. In January 2007, a book entitled The Top Ten (edited by J. Peder Zane) listed Middlemarch as number ten in its list The 10 Greatest Books of All Time, based on the ballots of 125 selected writers.
In 1873, the poet Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to her cousins Louise and Fannie Norcross:
"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....Read more about this topic: Middlemarch
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“The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)