(Guest post by Yang Huang)

George Eliot’s Middlemarch changed the way I think about reckoning in fiction. A sprawling novel about provincial life in 19th century England, Middlemarch is endowed with an urgent plot and slow-burning character development. Eliot is not protective of her characters; she takes them to the cliff and makes them jump. Dorothea is a high-minded young woman who marries a shriveled old scholar. Mr. Casaubon suffers almost as much as Dorothea in their incompatible marriage; the spirited young wife, with all her good intentions, perhaps drives him to an early grave.