Commentary by a Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society

I last read Middlemarch as a set text at school, and was pleased to be given an incentive by the BJP to re-read it. It turned out to be much, much funnier, and more psychologically and morally even-handed, than I had remembered. I can see why Freud liked to read George Eliot; she is an anatomist of the divided self, the inner conflict between how we wish we were and how we find ourselves behaving.

However, the two passages which we are to consider deal with Dorothea Brooke, the person in the book who seems to me to be the least psychologically credible, and about whom the authorial voice is most ambiguous. I remember a conversation with a girl in the English set in the year above me at school, warning me about the book. ‘It's absolutely preposterous,’ she said. ‘It starts off with two sisters dividing their mother's jewels between them. Celia wants them; Dorothea rejects them because she thinks that she shouldn't want them, but makes her younger sister feel greedy, and then feels guilty about it.’ She found Dorothea unconvincing and unendearing. Henry James, who was critical of some aspects of Middlemarch when he reviewed it in 1873, thought Dorothea ‘the great achievement of the book’, ‘that perfect flower of conception … an indefinably moral elevation’. Doubtless then we were callow adolescents, but to me, even now, Dorothea seems both less believable and less admirable than the author would seem to think. Do other people have such a transference to Dorothea nowadays,