From rebel to sage

In the last years of the 1860s, when she began to conceive and then draft this monumental novel, George Eliot occupied a position of great eminence in English intellectual life. There is irony in her eminence. Two decades earlier, when she first left her home in the English Midlands and entered London intellectual circles, she had been a free-thinking, even subversive, radical who seemed destined to remain at odds with the dominant values of her society. Moreover, when in 1853 George Eliot decided to join her life to that of George Henry Lewes, she estranged many others who tolerated the free thinking but shuddered at the free living. Lewes, a versatile and well-known man of letters, had been unable to gain a divorce from his wife, and when his intellectual companionship with George Eliot grew into an emotional one, the two became the subject of widespread gossip and calumny. In both polite society and much of the artistic and intellectual community, George Eliot was deemed unfit to be received. All the more remarkable, then, that at the time of composing Middlemarch she had won a loyal and reverent audience which included the Queen of England, and had achieved the position of a moral sage, a position only confirmed and extended by the success of Middlemarch.

And yet, when she began to write the novel, she found herself in a condition of artistic uncertainty.