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This short book aims to turn a modest, one might even think trivial, literary labour into something more substantial, going beyond one particular novel into broader questions of novel-writing, character and narrative. My starting point is tracking down those allusions and quotations in Middlemarch that have hitherto gone unidentified by scholars. Most of these quotations are located in the chapter epigraphs that George Eliot provides throughout, citing other writers or confecting her own past...

The middleness of Middlemarch is a moral as well as an existential quantity, a matter of ethics as both mediated and medial. The novel’s twinned mirrors situate questions of honesty or mendacity, and Eliot’s characters middle themselves somewhere between moral puritanism on the one hand—Dorothea’s over-identification with St Theresa, or Antigone, we might say—and active malignancy on the other (the melodramatic blackmailing villainy of John Raffles, say). And this brings me to another epigrap...

Many of the chapter epigraphs in Middlemarch are quoted from specifically attributed sources: ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Old Song’ and so on. Others come without attribution, and in these cases Eliot herself is the author—a snatch of poetry, or an excerpt from an Elizabethan-sounding play, which she is passing-off as a ‘quotation’. Take, for instance, the epigraph to Part 8 Chapter 72, near the end of the novel: Full souls are double mirrors, making still An endless vista of fair things before, Repeatin...

Middlemarch’s thirty-first chapter opens with a conversation between Lydgate and Rosamond about Dorothea. Lydgate that evening spoke to Miss Vincy of Mrs. Casaubon, and laid some emphasis on the strong feeling she appeared to have for that formal studious man thirty years older than herself.‘Of course she is devoted to her husband, ’ said Rosamond, implying a notion of necessary sequence which the scientific man regarded as the prettiest possible for a woman; but she was thinking at the same ...

It might be thought perverse, in a book explicitly about the use of epigraphs in Middlemarch, to have waited so long to quantify the specific lineaments of Eliot’s epigraphy in the novel. There are, though, reasons why such work belongs at the end rather than the beginning. An epigraph precedes a chapter, of course; it comes at the beginning, or strictly speaking comes before the beginning. But we cannot make sense of the epigraph until we understand its relationship to the chapter it sets up...

Alessandra Tosi was the managing editor for this book. Adele Kreager performed the copy-editing and proofreading. Anna Gatti designed the cover. The cover was produced in InDesign using the Fontin font. Luca Baffa typeset the book in InDesign and produced the paperback and hardback editions. The text font is Tex Gyre Pagella; the heading font is Californian FB. Luca produced the EPUB, MOBI, PDF, HTML, and XML editions — the conversion is performed with open source software freely available on...

I would like to talk a little more about middles. Middlemarch is a medium place, and Middlemarch a medium novel. ‘Medium’ means both middle (in a statistical, but also a general sense) and also environment, surround, that inside which we subsist. For biologists a medium is a nutrient solution for the growth of cells in vitro, which growth might of course be observed through a microscope. For plankton, brine is their medium. In a different sense, for human beings, as social creatures, society ...

In Middlemarch, George Eliot draws a character passionately absorbed by abstruse allusion and obscure epigraphs. Casaubon’s obsession is a cautionary tale, but Adam Roberts nonetheless sees in him an invitation to take Eliot’s use of epigraphy and allusion seriously, and this book is an attempt to do just that. Roberts considers the epigraph as a mirror that refracts the meaning of a text, and that thus carries important resonances for the way Eliot’s novels generate their meanings. In this lively and provoking study, he tracks down those allusions and quotations that have hitherto gone unidentified by scholars, examining their relationship to the text in which they sit to unfurl a broader argument about the novel - both this novel, and the novel form itself. Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors is both a study of George Eliot and a meditation on the textuality of fiction. It is essential reading for specialists and students of George Eliot, the nineteenth century novel, and intertextuality. It will also richly reward anyone who has ever taken pleasure in Middlemarch.

The epigraph to chapter 44 reads as follows: I would not creep along the coast, but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars. This little couplet is about Dorothea leaving behind the shore-hugging life she has had with Casaubon and charting a more adventurous and exciting (sexual) course. Or at least it is about her starting to think, obliquely, in these terms. In chapter 44, Casaubon is dying but not dead, and Dorothea, walking around the hospital grounds, is thinking about her future....

© 2021 Adam Roberts, CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.11657/OBP.0249.05 It is up to us, as readers, how we choose to pronounce Will Ladislaw’s surname. We might assume that it rhymes its final syllable with ‘coleslaw.’ Then again, we could note the clues as to his family provenance that unobtrusively accumulate as the novel proceeds (starting in chapter 8, when Mr. Cadwallader explains Ladislaw’s relationship to Casaubon: ‘his mother’s sister made a bad match—a Pole, I think—lost herself—at any ...