When Eliot first began to write fiction, she wrote that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” The best thing an artist achieves is “the extension of our sympathies.” And even if she doubted that at times, Middlemarch is proof that she didn’t give up on it: if her books were only a sandgrain, they were nevertheless a sandgrain. On rereading Middlemarch now, no longer a young woman hoping to get into Oxford but someone who’s been married and divorced, I can see more clearly that Dorothea is confusing a wish to better herself with marriage. “What a lake” Casaubon is, she thinks, “compared with my little pool!” I notice the signs of someone who doesn’t know herself yet, wanting something that could never suit her. In the opening scene of the novel, Dorothea and her younger sister Celia are splitting their dead mother’s jewels between them. Dorothea refuses to take anything, shuddering at what wearing a cross made of pearls “as a trinket” would do to her principles. But on opening a ring box they discover an emerald surrounded by diamonds, then notice a matching bracelet, and Dorothea conveniently remembers that “gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John,” and holds her hand up to the window so that the stones catch the light. “Yes! I will keep these.” She is not so immune to beauty as she thought; she is not so able to renounce luxury as she imagined. (She is deeply likable in this.) Along with other glimpses of Dorothea as she is, rather than how she claims to be, Eliot extends the reader’s sympathies further by giving us access to Casaubon’s feelings. He had dismissed love in favor of work, but as he got older he began to see marriage differently, as a solace: “Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was.” So much for the lake Dorothea saw in him! Before this, he could tell himself that true love would sweep him away when he found it, but now he can only suspect he’s not capable of it. I can imagine his disappointment now in a way I couldn’t when I was seventeen.