

Within each of their story lines, we are exposed to all levels of social class and the intricacies associated with each. Her story follows the lives and relationships of three main characters: Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate and Mary Garth. It is a novel that encapsulates all aspects of Victorian life and its social classes where the working class, middle class and country gentry live and interact in a community. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.Įliot’s most important novel, Middlemarch, we are shown a fictional representation of provincial life during the Victorian era. to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.

As she says in her first novel, Adam Bede, Authors, such as George Eliot, emphasized a realistic presentation of everyday life in their novels.The goal was to present “complex life-like characters” to the reader.

During the Victorian age, the realistic novel emerged as the preferred medium for literary expression.
