"That Spanish woman [Saint Theresa] 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 ardor 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." ("Prelude")

The Prelude to Middlemarch is just three paragraphs—and it sets the tone for everything in the lengthy four volumes to come. Eliot's novel is set in the first half of the 19th century, but that's not where she begins. Instead, she goes back three hundred years to imagine Saint Theresa as a young girl.

Saint without a Cause

The narrator figures that this is a character type, and that "many Theresas" must be born into times and places that, well, are anything but the stuff of epic. What do you do if you've got the makings of a hero in you, but you can't find any heroic quests? And even if you manage to invent a quest for yourself, what if no one's watching—let alone a poet who'll write you up to be larger-than-life?

Eliot is getting at questions that we're still asking today. Are saints (or geniuses, or artists, or star athletes) born, or are they made? How much control do we have? Are we limited by our personalities and our circumstances? Eliot suspects that "later-born Theresas" might not be saints through and through—they might also be human and have a flaw or two. But even if they were entirely perfect, "tangled circumstance" can still get in the way of the most ardent of the ardent.

But it gets even more complicated. The narrator isn't just talking about rebels without causes, she's also talking about women. What's a woman to do in the 19th century if she's caught between some lofty purpose and everyday life, between a "vague ideal" and "womanhood"? Do you have to choose one, and if so, have you already failed?

Stylistic analysis

Eliot's version of the Woman Question is a nuanced one—and it has to be, since she's going to trace these ideas across a four-volume, multi-plot novel. The Prelude sets a tone, and Eliot's narrator will keep picking up that thread as the novel goes on. Those "tangled circumstances" will become embodied in the plot, with all its characters and cross-purposes. And what begins as an abstract character type—the Saint Theresa type—will be reimagined in actual characters, like Dorothea and Lydgate.