Where to Start with George Eliot Before Committing to Middlemarch

Many readers come to George Eliot because of Middlemarch, open it, and stop somewhere in the first book. The novel is long, the cast is wide, and the narrator pauses often to comment. None of this is a reason to give up on Eliot. It is a reason to meet her in a shorter book first.

This guide uses three complete novels that each stand on their own, and then explains why Middlemarch is better treated as a later reward than as a first attempt. Openings, structure, and narrative voice are described. Endings, late deaths, and the outcome of any trial or courtship are not.

First choice: Silas Marner

The book opens on the pale, undersized linen-weavers who once walked the lanes of rural England with heavy bags on their backs, feared by shepherds’ dogs and distrusted by villagers. Silas is one of them, settled on the edge of the village of Raveloe after a wrong done to him elsewhere.¹

It is the shortest of the three and the clearest in shape. Two parts, twenty-one chapters, and a brief conclusion. The first part follows Silas and the Cass family of the Red House in loosely alternating scenes; the second part picks up years later. A chapter a sitting works well, and the break between the two parts is a natural place to stop and think about what has changed.

Listen to the villagers at the Rainbow inn. Eliot gives them long, meandering arguments about ghosts, cows, and parish customs, and these scenes carry much of the book’s humour. They also show how a community decides what to believe about a stranger, which is the question the whole novel keeps returning to.

Second choice: Adam Bede

Eliot announces her method in the first sentence. Like an Egyptian sorcerer using a drop of ink as a mirror, she promises to show the reader a carpenter’s workshop in the village of Hayslope on an afternoon in June 1799. The scent of pine planks and elder blossom follows immediately.²

This was her first full-length novel, and it is long: six books, fifty-five chapters, and an epilogue. The chapters have titles, which helps. “The Workshop,” “The Preaching,” “The Hall Farm,” “The Dairy” tell you where you are. Four people hold the story between them: Adam the carpenter, Dinah the Methodist preacher, Hetty the dairymaid, and Arthur, the young squire who will inherit the estate.

Chapter XVII is called “In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” and it does. Eliot steps out of the narrative to explain why she writes about ordinary, unbeautiful people rather than heroes. Readers who find this interruption irritating may want to try Silas Marner first; readers who find it the most interesting page so far are going to enjoy the rest of Eliot a great deal.

The later books darken. A criminal trial occupies part of the fifth book, and the chapter titles make that plain. This guide does not say who stands accused or how it turns out.

Third choice: The Mill on the Floss

The narrator begins on the banks of the river Floss, watching the February tide carry ships toward the town of St Ogg’s, and then confesses to dozing in an armchair while remembering Dorlcote Mill as it was years ago. The book that follows is a memory of childhood as much as a novel about adults.³

Seven books, each with a title that describes a stage of life: “Boy and Girl,” “School-Time,” “The Downfall,” “The Valley of Humiliation,” “Wheat and Tares,” “The Great Temptation,” “The Final Rescue.” Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom grow up at the mill, and their father’s quarrels over water rights and lawyers shape everything that happens to them.

Of the three, this is the novel readers tend to feel most personally. Maggie is clever in a family and a town that does not know what to do with a clever girl, and the early chapters about her cutting her hair and running off to the gypsies are as funny as anything in Eliot. The aunts and uncles, the Gleggs, the Pullets, and the Dodson pride in linen and wills, give the first book its comedy and the third book its sting.

The title “The Downfall” is Eliot’s own, so it is fair to say that the family suffers a reversal. What follows from it is left for the reader.

Why Middlemarch can wait

Middlemarch begins with a prelude about Saint Theresa of Avila and then runs through eight books and eighty-six chapters before a finale.⁴ Several storylines share the town: Dorothea Brooke and her marriage, the young doctor Lydgate and his ambitions, the banker Bulstrode, the Vincy family, and the Garths. The narrator comments more freely here than anywhere else.

None of that is a reason to avoid the book. It is a reason to arrive knowing what Eliot’s commentary sounds like and trusting that her digressions pay off. After Silas Marner or Adam Bede, the prelude reads as an invitation rather than an obstacle. A reader who has only an hour or two a week may also find it helpful to estimate the commitment first; the reading-time guide for classics explains how to do that from an EPUB’s word count.

Which novel to open first

If you have enjoyed Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss are closest in setting and pace; the Hardy guide covers that ground. Readers who liked the voice of Dickens’s narrator but wanted less exaggeration will find Eliot’s steadier tone in any of the three. Our Dickens guide is the place to compare.

Reading the narrator

Eliot’s narrator generalizes. A scene between two characters will end, and a paragraph will follow about how people in general deceive themselves, or how a small town judges a newcomer. Readers used to invisible narrators sometimes treat these passages as padding.

Try the opposite. Read the general statement, ask whom in the scene it applies to, and then return to the dialogue. The commentary almost always points back at a particular character, often one the narrator has just been gentle with. In Adam Bede the method is explicit; in Silas Marner it is compressed into single sentences at the ends of paragraphs.

Dialect is the other hurdle. Farmers and villagers speak in spelled-out regional English. Read these lines for rhythm first and sense second; the meaning usually arrives by the end of the speech, and the surrounding narration repeats anything that matters.

Content notes

Adam Bede includes seduction, a criminal trial, and a prison scene. Silas Marner turns on a false accusation, a theft, and a case of addiction in a secondary character. The Mill on the Floss includes bankruptcy, illness, and a long family estrangement. None of the three is graphic by modern standards; all three take grief seriously. Period attitudes toward class, gender, and dissenting religion appear throughout, voiced by characters and sometimes by the narrator.

How to read them

Each novel is on Project Gutenberg as a free EPUB. Download the file, upload it to BlueReader, and wait for server processing; the book then appears on your bookshelf and your place is kept across devices.⁵ Silas Marner is short enough to finish in a few evenings; for Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, the book divisions make good weekly goals.

If Gutenberg’s edition choices look confusing, there are usually several numbers for each title; the ones cited below are the editions used for this guide. Other sources for free EPUBs are compared in our free EPUB guide.