This, says one of Eliot's recent biographers, "is that very rare thing: a successful historical novel. Middlemarch was the last of her Warwickshire novels, published in parts in 18. Middlemarch was Eliot's seventh novel, and one of the three she set in fictionalized versions of the time, place, and politics of her own childhood (the other two are The Mill on the Floss and Felix Holt ). She avoided the city during her last Midlands visit, in 1855. After her family learned of her relationship with the physiologist and psychologist George Henry Lewes (who could not marry her, as the divorce law made it impossible for him to break with his wife), their profound disapproval prevented her ever going home again. The last time Marian Evans visited Coventry-Middlemarch-was in 1853. Warwickshire, the county that Henry James called the "the core and center of the English world midmost England, unmitigated England" is named "North Loamshire" here, and is the countryside surrounding the fictional parishes of Tipton and Lowick, the country houses, granges, and rectories in which the plot of Middlemarch is played out. Middlemarch is Coventry, the fictionalized version of the place in which she grew up. Mary Ann Evans was born in 1819 in Arbury, Nuneaton-just north of the city of Coventry-where her father was land agent to the Newdigate family. The University of Warwick, where I teach, is a campus university, built in 1963, two miles outside the boundary of the City of Coventry, an industrial city in the heart of the English Midlands and the county of Warwickshire. The first proposition is this: that the place where I am is Middlemarch I shall turn out to mean that, even though this account may have been given hundreds of miles from Middlemarch, far away, and in another country. The propositions are made by considering George Eliot a kind of historian, and her novel of 1871, Middlemarch, as a kind of history. Here is a series of propositions, about the writing of history and the writing of fiction.
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