Dorothea seldom left home without her husband, but she did occasionally drive into Middlemarch alone, on little errands of shopping or charity such as occur to every lady of any wealth when she lives within three miles of a town. Two days after that scene in the Yew-tree Walk, she determined to use such an opportunity in order if possible to see Lydgate, and learn from him whether her husband had really felt any depressing change of symptoms which he was concealing from her, and whether he had insisted on knowing the utmost about himself. She felt almost guilty in asking for knowledge about him from another, but the dread of being without it—the dread of that ignorance which would make her unjust or hard—overcame every scruple. That there had been some crisis in her husband's mind she was certain: he had the very next day begun a new method of arranging his notes, and had associated her quite newly in carrying out his plan.

Basic set-up:

This is the beginning of George Eliot's novel. We see Dorothea, the protagonist, worrying about her husband. He's much older than she is, and he has been working on this book for ages.

Unfortunately, he never seems to get anywhere with it.

George Eliot presents us with a perfect example of the "quotidian" in Realist literature. Dorothea is just a housewife in a small provincial English town, and Eliot takes us into her domestic drama from the very first page of the novel.

There's something going on with Dorothea's husband, Casaubon. He's acting strangely. He's re-arranged his research notes. Oh. My. God. And Dorothea's on a quest to find out what, exactly, has happened.

On one level, the stuff that Dorothea is thinking about is trivial. So what if some old dude has re-arranged his research notes? But what Realist writers like Eliot show us is the importance of these dramas of daily life. Little stuff happens to all of us all the time. And this stuff may not matter to anyone but us, but it's still important.

Middlemarch is another great example of the use of the omniscient narrator. The narrator begins by entering into Dorothea's thoughts here: we can immediately see how she feels and thinks in this instant. Throughout the novel, the narrator will move from character to character and from scene to scene, giving as much access to other characters' thoughts and feelings as we get to Dorothea's here.