Middlemarch

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Interwoven provincial epic—Dorothea's Casaubon marriage, Lydgate's ruin, Bulstrode's past—cross-illuminates through Eliot's web-of-fate design, so plot scores 94.

that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters

Dorothea, Casaubon, Ladislaw, Lydgate, Rosamond, Mary Garth, Bulstrode—richest Victorian ensemble, none reducible to type—so cast scores 96.

"Your horses of the Sun," he said, "And first-rate whip Apollo! Whate'er they be, I'll eat my head, But I will beat them hollow." Fred Vincy, we have seen, had a debt on his mind

'A Study of Provincial Life' deliberately slows through Casaubon honeymoon and Featherstone will to anatomize social process; Eliot rewards patience with cumulative moral force, so pace scores 78.

has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?

Eliot's omniscient moral intelligence fuses psychological depth with social analysis in a register that anticipates modernism, so prose scores 94.

There was a billiard-room at the Green Dragon, which some anxious mothers and wives regarded as the chief temptation in Middlemarch. The Vicar was a first-rate billiard-player, and though he did not frequent the Green Dragon

Middlemarch town as social organism—Tipton Grange, Lowick, the hospital, the Green Dragon—maps every institution and class layer of a complete Victorian microcosm, so world scores 94.

that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters

The Prelude's Saint Theresa and Ch.I's Miss Brooke establish character and theme powerfully but assume scholarly patience; ignition is intellectual rather than sensational, so hook scores 84.

for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The multiplot provincial novel as instrument of social analysis—'unhistoric acts' with incalculable diffusive effect—created the template for Woolf and Lawrence, so innov scores 96.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life

The Finale epilogue refuses romantic closure for moral-historical framing; formally complete, emotionally sober, structurally definitive, so ending scores 88.