It’s through Lydgate, a young physician, that the novel veers most closely toward an explicit concern with contagious disease.
Eliot follows the lives of two protagonists, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, as each makes an unfortunate match: Dorothea to the mediocre and moody academic Edward Casaubon Lydgate to town beauty Rosamond Vincy, who turns out to be scheming and spoiled. On its surface, this isn’t a contagion narrative-it’s a Victorian marriage plot. You won’t have come across Middlemarch in the pandemic lit listicles that have proliferated this year. Middlemarch, in other words, is a pandemic novel without the pandemic. And if we read it closely, the finished product is still “about” contagion. Eliot probably conceived Middlemarch as a story about contagion-a plot with epidemic written into its core. But there’s a not-so-obvious reason that the 19th-century novel may have felt newly relevant for 2020 readers. On the face of it, this surge of interest in Eliot’s best-known work might seem unremarkable. Since the start of the pandemic, it’s felt to me as though everyone has been reading Middlemarch.
But regardless of whether Taylor had Eliot’s provincial character on her mind when she named the track, our reaction to it encapsulated the novel’s uncanny ubiquity in recent months. A little sadly for us, the lyrics of “Dorothea” don’t support the connection we quickly drew to Dorothea Brooke, fictional heroine of George Eliot’s Victorian novel Middlemarch. When Taylor Swift first released the track list for her latest cottagecore album, a certain corner of literary Twitter lit up over the title of its eighth song.
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