Monahan has a Ph.D. in English and operates an editing service, The Inkwell Works. In the following essay, Monahan explores how Eliot's parable of the pier glass explains the limitation of characters' points of view and implies those limitations can be surpassed.
George Eliot's Middlemarch has as its title the name of a fictional town in the English Midlands; the novel presents a picture of provincial life during a little less than three years, from September 30, 1829, to May 1832. This broad subject is narrowed by Eliot's focus on characters whose romantic and professional lives are interconnected. Four courtships (two of which involve the main character, Dorothea Brooke) are dramatized, along with the professional struggles of the newcomer Dr. Lydgate and the sudden disgrace of the well-established banker, Nicholas Bulstrode. These plots show various angles.....
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