The Key to Epic Life?: Classical Study in George Eliot's Middlemarch

The Middlemarch narrator invokes the classical genre of epic in the "Prelude," introducing Dorothea Brooke as a character disposed for "epic life." Within the fiction of the novel, however, we see Dorothea and other characters try in various ways, but fail, to make sense of their lives through the study, employment, or imitation of classical models. Nevertheless, the narrator ultimately seems to suggest that classical study and classical models can have value for understanding contemporary life—provided one recognizes that "the past" is not a fixed thing, but a series of ideas and images always open to reinterpretation, preferably in a playful manner.