Was it sisterly or unsisterly of George Eliot to celebrate in Middlemarch Dorothea's contribution to human progress by means of 'unhistoric acts' carried out under limiting social conditions which ensured that, unlike St Theresa, she remained 'foundress of nothing'? Certainly, Dorothea's sphere of action is represented as being - true to life for her class and time - confined to the domestic. She passes from eligible spinster to helpmeet, wife and mother, and on the whole George Eliot describes that passage as one to fulfilment. Contemporary women readers, lacking the vote and still, despite decades of agitation by reformers, without rights over their own property - the Married Women's Property Act was not passed until 1883 - were perhaps expected to take comfort, even pride, in the conclusion that 'the effect of [Dorothea's] 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.'

LRB 7 August 1986 | PDF Download