5.5 MIDDLEMARCH is an epic for losers and failed marriages

If Austen is the optimistic banter of Love Island, where couples end the story with a happy engagement and promise of a good life together, Eliot is Couples Therapy, massaging the scar tissue of a fifteen-year marriage.

“There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that–to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail” (Chapter 76).

Set in 1829, Eliot wrote Middlemarch as a historical fiction, a glance back thirty years in the past to the anticipation of England’s First Reform Bil...