Leavened with comic elements, Middlemarch approaches significant historical events in a realist mode: the Reform Act 1832, early railways, and the accession of King William IV.

In August she began writing, but progress ceased in the following month amidst a lack of confidence in it and distraction by the illness of George Henry Lewes's son Thornie, who was dying of tuberculosis.

[8][4] While composing, Eliot compiled a notebook of hundreds of literary quotations, from poets, historians, playwrights, philosophers, and critics in eight different languages.

[11] The publisher John Blackwood, who had made a loss on acquiring the English rights to that novel,[10] was approached by Lewes in his role as Eliot's literary agent.

[12] This was an alternative to the monthly issues that had been used for such longer works as Dickens's David Copperfield and Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and avoided Eliot's objections to slicing her novel into small parts.

[15] With the deaths of Thackeray and Dickens in 1863 and 1870, respectively, Eliot became "recognised as the greatest living English novelist" at the time of the novel's final publication.

The narrative may be considered to consist of four plots with unequal emphasis:[17] the life of Dorothea Brooke, the career of Tertius Lydgate, the courtship of Mary Garth by Fred Vincy, and the disgrace of Nicholas Bulstrode.

Having never finished university, Fred is widely seen as a failure and a layabout, but is content because he is the presumed heir of his childless uncle Mr Featherstone, a rich but unpleasant man.

Seeking to make a good match, she decides to marry Lydgate, who comes from a wealthy family, and uses Fred's sickness as an opportunity to get close to him.

Lydgate attends him and tells Dorothea it is difficult to pronounce on the nature of Casaubon's illness and chances of recovery: that he may indeed live about 15 years if he takes it easy and ceases his studies, but it is equally possible the disease may develop rapidly, in which case death will be sudden.

Lydgate operates a successful practice outside Middlemarch and attains a good income, but never finds fulfilment and dies at the age of 50, leaving Rosamond and four children.

The action of Middlemarch takes place "between September 1829 and May 1832", or 40 years before its publication in 1871–1872,[2] a gap not so pronounced for it to be regularly labelled as a historical novel.

The critics Kathleen Blake and Michael York Mason argue that there has been insufficient attention given to Middlemarch "as a historical novel that evokes the past in relation to the present".

[22] Elsewhere, Eliot has been seen to adopt "the role of imaginative historian, even scientific investigator in Middlemarch and her narrator as conscious "of the historiographical questions involved in writing a social and political history of provincial life".

One critic views the unity of Middlemarch as achieved through "the fusion of the two senses of 'provincial'":[23] on the one hand it means geographically "all parts of the country except the capital"; and on the other, a person who is "unsophisticated" or "narrow-minded".

The literary critic Kathleen Blake notes Eliot's emphasis on St Teresa's "very concrete accomplishment, the reform of a religious order", rather than her Christian mysticism.

[27] In response, Ruth Yeazell and Kathleen Blake chide these critics for "expecting literary pictures of a strong woman succeeding in a period [around 1830] that did not make them likely in life".

[28] The novelist Henry James describes Ladislaw as a dilettante who "has not the concentrated fervour essential in the man chosen by so nobly strenuous a heroine".

[30] In addition, there is the "meaningless and blissful" marriage of Dorothea's sister Celia Brooke to Sir James Chettam, and more significantly Fred Vincy's courting of Mary Garth.

Here Fred resembles Henry Fielding's character Tom Jones, both being moulded into a good husband by the love they give to and receive from a woman.

[31] Dorothea is a St Teresa, born in the wrong century, in provincial Middlemarch, who mistakes in her idealistic ardor, "a poor dry mummified pedant... as a sort of angel of vocation".

[32] Middlemarch is in part a Bildungsroman focusing on the psychological or moral growth of the protagonist: Dorothea "blindly gropes forward, making mistakes in her sometimes foolish, often egotistical, but also admirably idealistic attempt to find a role" or vocation that fulfils her nature.

[33] Lydgate is equally mistaken in his choice of a partner, as his idea of a perfect wife is someone "who can sing and play the piano and provide a soft cushion for her husband to rest after work".

In her view, Eliot's prioritisation of "observation rather than imagination... inexorable analysis rather than sensibility, passion or fantasy" means that she should not be held amongst the first ranks of novelists.

[41] The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who read Middlemarch in a translation owned by his mother and sister, derided the novel for construing suffering as a means of expiating the debt of sin, which he found characteristic of "little moralistic females à la Eliot".

In separate centuries, Florence Nightingale and Kate Millett remarked on the eventual subordination of Dorothea's own dreams to those of her admirer, Ladislaw.

The novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have both called it probably the greatest novel in the English language,[c][53] and today Middlemarch is frequently included in university courses.

In 2013, the then British Education Secretary Michael Gove referred to Middlemarch in a speech, suggesting its superiority to Stephenie Meyer's vampire novel Twilight.

[64] In April 2022, Dash Arts produced The Great Middlemarch Mystery,[65] an immersive theatre experience[66] staged across three locations in Coventry, including Drapers Hall.

The opera Middlemarch in Spring by Allen Shearer, to a libretto by Claudia Stevens, has a cast of six and treats only the central story of Dorothea Brooke.