ABSTRACT
Introduction What kind of novel is Middlemarch? Perceptive readers at the time of its publication recognized the problems of trying to categorize a novel at once so long and so complex, and Henry James perhaps spoke for many of these Victorian readers when he wrote in an unsigned review in Galaxy in March 1873, that Middlemarch 'sets a limit ... to the development of the old-fashioned English novel' (James, 1987, p.Sl). While such an observation rather begs the question of what an 'old-fashioned English novel' might be.james seems tacitly to acknowledge both the extent to which Middlemarch was engaging with the familiar territory of moral, social and historical issues, and the extent to which it was breaking new ground in its references to and deployment of other literary forms, and in its awareness of its own fictional devices. The novel thus becomes both a kind of paradigm of Victorian realist fiction and at the same time a challenge to many of its conventions. Karen Chase summarizes this paradox clearly and effectively:
It is impossible to consider the history of realism in the novel ... without quickly naming Middlemarch as a landmark ... To the impatient question, But what do you mean by realism? it is tempting just to lift the novel high and to say, I mean This. And yet if Middlemarch is a work which confirms and dignifies a central literary tradition, it is also a work which shows the unsteadiness, even the selfcontradictions, of the realist project. George Eliotcan usefully be seen as that English novelist who most forcefullyexpresses the claims of realism and who most vividlyshows its instability.
