ABSTRACT
The year after George Eliot's death, W. M. W. Call named Middlemarch 'A provincial epic' . His label was intended to offer mixed praise at best; 1 but it brought together terms that George Eliot herself had used, at the very beginning, and end, of her novel. The first is found in the studiedly unassuming subtitle, announcing Middlemarch as 'A Study of Provincial Life'; the second in the unexpectedly ambitious, and open-ended, 'Finale' to the work as a whole:
Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is sti II a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve .... It is still the beginning of the home epic - the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.2
