Class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays
Session 1: Tuesday, January 12
Session 2: Thursday, January 14
Session 3: Tuesday, January 19
Session 4: Thursday, January 21
Session 5: Tuesday, January 26
Session 6: Thursday, January 28
Session 7: Tuesday, February 2
Session 8: Thursday, February 4

Do you feel depleted and discouraged? Undone by 2020 and worried about 2021? There is no balm for the soul as effective as a hefty Victorian novel, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch is one of the best. By the time she wrote it at age 37, Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was recognized as the greatest living English novelist. Published in eight installments (1871-72), Middlemarch offers a masterly evocation of connected lives, changing fortunes, and human weakness in a provincial English town c. 1830-1832. In it, Eliot examines the trajectories of Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to a pedantic scholar, and Dr. Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods and unwillingness to compromise them, combined with an imprudent marriage to a spendthrift beauty, threaten to undermine his career. Eliot’s formidable intelligence, imaginative sympathy, and wry awareness illuminate these stories and many others to gradually disclose the author’s unique “Religion of Humanity.” Considered to be her masterpiece, Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “…one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Reading comprises 200 pages of the novel each week, plus shorter critical materials.