Utopian Socialism, Women\u27s Emancipation, and the Origins of Middlemarch

This essay seeks to illuminate two perennial questions of George Eliot scholarship--the origins of Middlemarch, and Eliot\u27s attitude toward the Woman Question --by exploring the novel\u27s connections with utopian socialism. By tracing allusions to pre-Marxian socialism in the novel and in Eliot\u27s diary and notebooks, I demonstrate that it was crucial to the genesis, and is fundamental to the structure, of Middlemarch. Because the utopian socialists considered women\u27s emancipation the crux of social renovation, I argue that Eliot\u27s appropriation of their doctrines quietly aligns her with the proto-feminism of the contemporaneous women\u27s suffrage movement