【商品详情】
书名：Middlemarch米德尔马契
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1210L
作者：George Eliot 乔治·艾略特
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2011
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451531964
商品尺寸：10.6 x 4 x 17.3 cm
包装：简装
页数：928
Middlemarch《米德尔马契》的作者乔治·艾略特是英国一流的小说家，她创作的《米德尔马契》在情节转折、并置、线索等方面设计非常成功，在心理描写上为小说艺术创造了新高度，是19世纪维多利亚时代真正的代表作。艾略特采用多种技巧使小说情节设计严谨连贯，用艺术形式对心。她的作品以广泛的社会内容和对女性生活的关注著称于世。她从自身女作家地位探讨女性解放问题，并塑造了一些具有“双性”特征的女性形象，也使她的小说带有女性文学的特点，可以说，她是两性关系进步和变化的推动者。她的作品中表达出了非常强烈的女性意识。
本书为Signet Classics推出的英文原版，由Michel Faber作序，Philippa Gregory后记，内容完整无删减，书本小巧便携。
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” — Virginia Woolf
“We believe in [Dorothea Brooke] as in a woman we might providentially meet… when we should find ourselves doubting of the immortality of the soul.” — Henry James
“I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot.” — V. S. Pritchett
“No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully.” — Frank Kermode
Middlemarch is a town on the rise. With its old country gentry, middle class, and tradesmen, it is ever growing and changing with the times, circa 1830. Vast and crowded, rich in irony and suspense, the novel Middlemarch is richer still in psychological insight. One of the best-loved works of the nineteenth century, it introduces two of the era’s most enduring characters—Dorothea Brooke, a passionately idealistic woman, and Tertius Lydgate, and ambitious young doctor—and explores the complex social relationships in a town that moves and breathes with a life of its own.
With an Introduction by Michel Faber and a New Afterword by Philippa Gregory
Middlemarch《米德尔马契》一书有两条主线。其一是理想主义少女多萝西娅的灾难性婚姻与理想的破灭，其二是青年医生利德盖特可悲的婚姻与事业的失败。作者运用对比、对称、平行和重复等手法，把这两条主线巧妙地交织在一起，把众多人物写了进去，成功地表现了“社会挫败人”这样一个幻灭主题。
乔治·艾略特（1819~1880），十九世纪知名英国女小说家，本名玛利安·伊凡斯，成名作为《教区生活小景》，其他代表作有《亚当·比德》《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》《织工马南》《米德尔马契》等。《米德尔马契》一书出版后，艾略特的心理分析手法引起评论界重视。随着后人对爱略特的深入研究，她的心理分析手法得到评论界的充分肯定和高度赞扬。她凭借她的创新精神，在英国文学乃至世界文学中占据了显著的地位。
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross) was born on November 22, 1819 at Arbury Farm, Warwickshire, England. She received an ordinary education and, upon leaving school at the age of sixteen, embarked on a program of independent study to further her intellectual growth. In 1841 she moved with her father to Coventry, where the influences of “skeptics and rationalists” swayed her from an intense religious devoutness to an eventual break with the church. The death of her father in 1849 left her with a small legacy and the freedom to pursue her literary inclinations. In 1851 she became the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a position she held for three years. In 1854 came the fated meeting with George Henry Lewes, the gifted editor of The Leader, who was to become her adviser and companion for the next twenty-four years. Her first book, Scenes of a Clerical Life (1858), was followed by Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1872). The death of Lewes, in 1878, left her stricken and lonely. On May 6, 1880, she married John Cross, a friend of long standing, and after a brief illness she died on December 22 of that year, in London.
WHO that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her. Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardour alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long recognisable deed.
