SOURCE: “Middlemarch down the Aisle.” Wilson Quarterly 19, no. 1 (winter 1995): 147.

In the following essay, the author provides a brief summary of Himmelfarb's essay “George Eliot for Grown-Ups,” published in the American Scholar, autumn 1994.

What a disappointment it was for many viewers of the recent PBS television series based on Middlemarch (1871-72), not to mention generations of readers, when the high-minded Dorothea wed the morally flawed Will Ladislaw. The idealistic Dr. Lydgate (who, inconveniently, was already married) seemed so much more suited to her. But even a marriage to Lydgate—had author George Eliot (1819-80) contrived to make him available—would have had some feminists gnashing their teeth. To them, Eliot (whose real name was Mary Ann Evans) is a feminist role model who defied the bourgeois, patriarchal convention of marriage by living in sin with the man she loved. Why, then, in her greatest novel, could she not create...