Autumn 2026: Middlemarch (afternoon class)

Members:  £85
Non-members: £108
Concessions: £30 (call the office 020 8340 3343)

Please note that this class takes place on the first floor meaning there is unfortunately no step-free access.

On this course, we will read just one novel, George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life which first appeared in eight paper-bound instalments between December 1871 to December 1872. By exploring some of the key contexts in which it was written, published and has been read, we will try to understand both the experimental challenge Middlemarch made/makes to the novel’s form and how it became a literary classic. 

Virginia Woolf called it ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’ while Henry James described it as ‘a treasure-house of details but an indifferent whole.’ In May 2026, it topped the Guardian list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, published in English, as selected by writers and critics, though it came second to Lord of the Rings in the readers’ list that followed. 

In classes 1-4, we will explore one or two parts of the novel in sequence (approximately 200-220 pages per session). Middlemarch began as two novels which Eliot gradually fused together, becoming many kinds of novel in the process. It is a historical novel, looking back 40 years to the period just before the Great Reform Act of 1832 and reflecting on the political turmoil of the 1860s. It is a multiple Bildungsroman, or novel of education, following the lives of a number of young people – Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate but also Fred and Rosamond Vincy – who must learn how to live in a complicated, imperfect world. It is novel about generational conflict, and a critical account of the social and political complexities of provincial life. It is a novel of revenge, compromise and corruption and, of course, it is a love story, but not a romance. On this course we will think about these very different narratives, the range of styles Eliot adopts and some of her influences, including Darwin and Balzac. In the final class we will aim to draw together our reading experience with a more detailed focus on its critical reception.

Please buy the following edition: George Eliot, Middlemarch, Oxford World’s Classics, (1986/2019)