The author of nearly a dozen acclaimed novels, Sheila Kohler is also a distinguished short-story writer; among the honors she’s received for her short fiction are two O. Henry Prizes and inclusion in several volumes of the yearly Best American Short Stories. A contributor to EQMM for many years, Sheila’s next story for us, “Turnabout,” is in our March/April 2024 issue, on sale toward the end of February. When she’s not writing fiction, the Johannesburg-born author teaches at Princeton University. She has contributed several essays on literary classics to this site. We think you’ll enjoy this one. I had never before thought of Middlemarch as a mystery, but I see that Sheila is right—contemporary ideas of the broad scope of crime fiction could place the novel within our genre.  —Janet Hutchings

George Eliot’s Middlemarch, published in 1871/2 is generally considered a masterpiece. It has all the elements: a wise and witty narrator, many mysterious strangers who come to Middlemarch, a vividly described though imaginary town based on the Coventry of George Eliot’s childhood at a time of change, 1829-1832, all reflected through the interlocking (almost everyone is related to everyone else) and changing lives of complex and original characters. There is much romance, attempts at reform, and searches for the true religion; there is humor and almost a happy ending, and, what interests me here, a many-page-turning plot. Why do we turn these pages with such pleasure?

Much of our interest depends on our concern for the two main characters, two attractive young people put in danger of various kinds because of their idealism: Dorothea Brooke, who is impossibly and implausibly in love with learning in the form of the moribund Casaubon, and Tertius Lydgate, a European-educated doctor who is bent on medical reform. These two characters are rendered vulnerable chiefly because of their worthy aims and their unworldly and trusting interactions with conniving partners and other devious characters, which endears our heroes to us but also puts them in increasingly dangerous situations. From the first page to the last, the seeds of betrayal, dangers of impoverishment—money plays a great role here, and even violent death are cleverly and subtly planted in the very soil of the place and grow and spread and threaten the characters’ existence at times.

Middlemarch was published in serial form with a cliff hanger at the end of each section: book three of the eight books is called “Waiting for Death” and book five “ The Dead Hand,” followed by “The Widow and the Wife,” surely good murder-mystery titles. There are two important testament tales: both Featherstone and Casaubon use their wills to punish the living from the grave, the former in the form of a bequest to a love child and the latter with a codicil that attempts to separate the lovers for many pages.

All of this violence cleverly echoes the situation in the country at the time with the increasing public clamor for democratic reform: reform of the penal code, reform of the murderous medical practices, the suspicion of the coming railways, the new machines, the hostility to all these changes and even the objects themselves.

Amongst the objects sold at auction, for example, which are praised for their utility is a sharp-edged fender. Here is how the auctioneer, Borthrop Trumbull, sells it:

“and most uncommonly useful to have a fender at hand that will cut, if you have a leather shoe-tie or a bit of string that wants cutting and no knife at hand: many a man has been left hanging because there was no knife to cut him down. Gentlemen, here’s a fender that if you had the misfortune to hang yourselves would cut you down in no time—with astonishing celerity—four-and-sixpence…”

Death, murder, or anyway a hanging appears early on in the book’s many pages: Dorothea, our principal heroine asks her guardian, Uncle Arthur Brooke:

“What news have you brought about the sheep-stealer, uncle?”

“What, poor Bunch?—well, it seems we can’t get him off—he is to be hanged.”

Dorothea’s brow took an expression of reprobation and pity.

“Hanged, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, with a quiet nod. “Poor Romilly [ Sir Samuel Romilly, an English statesman who worked for criminal law reform] he would have helped us. I knew Romilly [ of course he did—Arthur Brooke is a name dropper and knows everyone including Wordsworth]. Casaubon [who Dorothea is set on marrying] didn’t know Romilly. He is a little buried in books, you know, Casaubon is.”

Casaubon is almost entirely buried in books and seems intent on burying Dorothea with him even after his death.

Casaubon’s motivation for marrying the beautiful, idealistic, and twenty year old Dorothea from the first seems almost murderous. He seems to feel she will be less critical of his magnum opus than would be a secretary.

Will Ladislaw, Casaubon’s young cousin, puts it this way speaking of Casaubon: “If he chose to grow grey crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business luring a girl into his companionship. It is the most horrible of virgin sacrifices.”

Our Casaubon, who is 27 years older than Dorothea, tells her himself that he lives with the dead. What he says exactly explaining his motivation is:

“The fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in voices, [Dorothea, though she is not musical, has a beautiful voice] and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader. It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes. But I find it necessary to use the utmost caution about my eyesight.”

What dear Dorothea—for we cannot help loving her—sees in Casaubon is “a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint.”

We fear for poor Dorothea, who is in reality in love with learning, which she erroneously believes Casaubon, despite his moles and his blinking eyes and the slurping he makes while eating his soup, possesses. “It would be like marrying Pascal, ” the unfortunate girl thinks, rapturously. George Eliot is nothing if not wonderfully funny.

Lady Chettam and Mrs. Cadwallader, two aristocratic women of the town, describe Casaubon thus:

“The bridegroom—Casaubon. He has certainly been drying up faster since his engagement.”

“I should think he is far from having a good constitution, ” said Lady Chettam.

“Next to Sir James he looks like a death’s head skinned over for the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this time that girl will hate him. She looks up at him as an oracle now and by and by she will be at the other extreme.”

We are not quite sure who will kill whom!

Again and again the narrator uses the tomb as a metaphor to describe their marriage:

“She longed for work which would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and rain and now it appeared she would have to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labour producing what would never see the light.”

This becomes exacerbated once she has incurred the delight of meeting the young, fresh Will Ladislaw, Casaubon’s cousin, with all his blond curls. “Today she had stood at the door of the tomb and seen Will Ladislaw receding into the distant world of warm activity and fellowship.”

It turns out, though, that the women in the book do quite well, though Dorothea suffers bravely.

Mr. Casaubon has a delicate heart which is easily shocked by the ardent flash of Dorothea’s bright eyes, her frank words. Not many months after their wedding there is an argument at Lowick Manor.

“You speak to me as if I were something to contend with. Wait at least until I appear to consult my own pleasure apart from you,” she says.

“You are hasty,” Casaubon says.

“It is you who are hasty,” Dorothea dares to reply, after which Mr. Casaubon’s pen trembles while Dorothea’s does not shake. Indeed the Latin she is learning seems clearer to her until she hears the bang of a book and the butler announces that “Mr. Casaubon has had a fit.” Though he recovers and Dorothea tries desperately not to upset him again she is obliged to refuse his final demand. In the middle of the night he asks her to promise to carry out what he wishes even after his death, without telling her what it is. She is afraid he will demand of her the work on his unfinished and obviously unworthy book. “You refuse?” Mr. Casaubon asks her when she does not respond immediately and demands at least until the morning to make her decision. She keeps silent until late the next morning, when she finally decides to give the answer he requests: “I am come Edward; I am ready,” she says, but finds him already dead in the summer house (and I am afraid we are not sorry) and it is Lydgate to whom she explains her motivation in a sort of delirium.

In Lydgate’s case, the young doctor, the nearest character to a hero in the book, who has recently arrived in Middlemarch, though he makes two successive attempts at love, commits the same mistake twice, choosing first a literal and then a metaphorical killer. Lydgate, the attractive stranger with the European education and the aristocratic connections, even before he arrives in Middlemarch, has fallen in love with Laure, an actress who stabs her lover in a play night after night while Lydgate watches, admiring the actress’s dark eyes and Greek profile. The lover she stabs on the stage is actually played by her husband, until one night she veritably stabs him and he falls to his death. Lydgate rushes onto the stage and helps the fainting Laure, making her acquaintance and finding a contusion on her head. He lifts her gently in his arms and carries her off.

He firmly believes it is an innocent accident, a slip that has caused the man’s death, and that the notion of murder is absurd until later, having tracked the actress down and proposing marriage to her, she tells him she meant to do it, that her husband wearied her, he was too fond of her. “I do not like husbands,” the woman said.

This sets up Lydgate’s marriage in Middlemarch ominously. He comes to town interested in reforming the murderous medical profession of those years. Bloodletting and leeches are common practices as well as the administration of medicines which seem to poison rather than cure even if they enable the doctors and apothecaries/surgeons to remain solvent.

Apparently Lydgate does not learn much from this first love affair. Instead he marries the beauty of Middlemarch, moved by the joy he gives her, not understanding that Rosamund Vincy is at heart a superficial snob who is attracted to the doctor only because of his aristocratic relations. She leads him into increasing debt so that the reforms he had planned can never be performed. She becomes what he calls his “ Basil plant, and when she asked for an explanation said that basil was a plant which flourished wonderfully well on a murdered man’s brains,” referring not just to his own brilliant mind and projects but to Boccaccio’s story from the Decameron, about the murder by her brothers of a girl’s lover who comes to her in a dream and tells her where his body is buried. She buries his head in a pot of basil and weeps on it until the brothers take it away and she dies.

Lydgate’s life in Middlemarch becomes even more dangerously compromised by his links with the man who may be seen as the main murderer in the plot. This is the rich banker, Bulstrode, with a dark past. Slowly, imperceptibly, and subtly the information is trickled into the novel, and a murder unfolds, seeds of which are cleverly planted from the first chapters of the book. This is an act or lack of action committed by Bulstrode, who is gradually and plausibly led to the possibility of murder by the insufferable, swaggering, red-faced man with his false bonhomie and swinging leg called Raffles, who has information about the banker’s past that he uses to blackmail Bulstrode. Bulstrode has offered to finance many of the medical reforms and a new hospital where Lydgate is to be employed. Lydgate, who is spurned by the other medical men of the town, turns increasingly to Bulstrode unaware of his past. Bulstrode professes to be a deeply religious Evangelical Christian, but he has made his fortune as a pawnbroker selling stolen goods. He has also married Will Ladislaw’s grandmother. Will is our other golden-haired hero, who falls desperately in love with Dorothea. After the grandmother’s first husband dies, leaving her his fortune, she marries the young Bulstrode, who works for the family. Raffles knows that Bulstrode has inherited his money from his wife and that this money has come from an illegal source and also through the lie Bulstrode tells his wife, that her daughter, Sarah, has disappeared when he knows where she is, so that the wealthy woman will marry him and leave him her money when she dies. Raffles comes to Bulstrode again and again with his desire to torment, insinuating himself into his household and demanding money and making himself increasingly obnoxious so that Bulstrode can only hope he will die. Finally, ill with alcoholism, he comes to Bulstrode’s house, and Lydgate is called in. Bulstrode, who was willing to see Lydgate in a debtor’s prison, now gives him a large cheque, thus involving Lydgate seemingly in Raffles’s death. For Bulstrode ignores Lydgate’s advice in the care of his patient and leaves Raffles with the housekeeper, who gives him opium and alcohol which probably kills him.

Lydgate is thus associated with the scandal that results when the townspeople hear of Raffles’s story and Raffles’s suspicious death. This causes Lydgate’s downfall, as he loses his medical and financial independence. Thanks to Dorothea, in perhaps one of the most touching scenes of the book, Lydgate is able to clear his name at least in his own wife’s eyes. Dorothea tells Rosamund he knew nothing about Raffles except his illness, and had accepted the money thinking it came from the goodness of Bulstrode’s heart. Rosamund then tells Dorothea that Will loves only her and has never loved anyone else, despite the appearances of a moment Dorothea has glimpsed of Ladislaw leaning toward her and holding Rosamund’s hands while she stares tearfully up at him. Lydgate then leaves Middlemarch with his Rosamund and becomes a successful doctor for the rich, though his ambition is destroyed. Dorothea is finally able to marry Will Ladislaw, who becomes an ardent public man whom she helps and loves despite having to relinquish the fortune she should have inherited from Mr. Casaubon, who has left a codicil in his will to this effect.

Thus the two characters we care the most about in the book escape at least with their lives if not all their ambitions intact. Lydgate dies in his fifties— providing if not a completely happy ending, at least a realistic and believable one. They live out unsung lives and are buried in unvisited tombs and yet hold our attention to the last word as the best of murder mysteries do through the almost 800 pages of this wonderful book.