Middlemarch ranks among the world's great novels

E.M. Forster famously (and quaintly) said that "English poetry fears no man" [ sic ], but that English fiction is just not on the same level as the other great European (and American, I would add) fiction: can any English writer stand up to the level of Proust, Mann, Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy? Well, without getting into a debate on the relative merits of Dickens, Woolf, Cervantes, and Austen in comparison with Melville, Cervantes, Garcia Marquez, and Lampaduso, let's just say that George Eliot's Middlemarch holds its own as one of the great works of world literature. Though seemingly a "provincial" novel, not only in our past but in Eliot's as well (by about 40 years), admittedly a novel about one social class with few or no appearances of working-class people or of urbanites, few novels can stand up to M. for its intellectual scope, its vivid characters, its well-designed plot, and most of all Eliot's shrewd, intelligent, often quirky narrative voice. Though the novel (more or less) begins and ends with marriages, it's by no means a comedy of manners (a la Austen) and though it follows the course of several characters as they learn, grow, and change over time (about 2 yeas, with a coda), it's not a bildungsroman (a la Fielding, Dickens) - nor is it a tragedy, either, though it imbued with hubris and with sorrow and pity. Though the term is dull, I guess Eliot was right in describing her novel as "study," but not a study that pins characters to the page but that brings them to life. The concluding chapter (before the finale, that follows the characters over the course of their lives but beyond the scope of the central narrative) ends with a flash of youthful enthusiasm - life goes on, despite the losses and defeats that some of the characters experience: the end is a precursor to the end of Forster's great Howards End, in fact. The "finale" chapter has its own kind of poignancy, as Eliot shows us how the characters live "beyond" the novel: how lives that can seem to be successful (Lydgate's prosperity treating wealthy Europeans for gout) can in fact be almost a tragic defeat, and how lives that seem simple and ordinary (Dorothea and Ladislaw) can be lives of great meaning and beauty - as she wisely notes that so much of our history is truly about those who rest in unvisited graves.