The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot

In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. In this episode, McCarthy joins Thomas Jones to discuss Eliot’s radical masterpiece, which marks a revolution in English fiction as significant in its way as the political, scientific and industrial revolutions that it's set against. They look at the novel’s philosophical underpinnings, its treatment of knowledge and desire, money and debt, sex and marriage, and whether or not Casaubon was onto something with his ‘Key to All Mythologies’.

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Read more on Eliot in the LRB:

Rosemary Ashton:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n14/rosemary-ashton/homage-to-mrs-brater

Terry Eagleton:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n18/terry-eagleton/biogspeak

Rachel Bowlby

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n07/rachel-bowlby/waiting-for-the-dawn-to-come

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