Middlemarch.

What do I think of Middlemarch?" Emily Dickinson wrote. "What do I think of glory?" Now that the BBC production of George Eliot's Middlemarch has concluded on public television and we turn to the book, what glory will we find there? Unfortunately, the BBC production provided few clues. Despite its rich evocation of Middlemarch society, it muted the two voices that matter most in Eliot's novel. As a consequence it missed the relevance of this great story for our times.

One of the glories of Middlemarch is that it gives us two of the strongest women's voices in all of fiction, that of the author, George Eliot, and of her heroine, Dorothea Brooke. Eliot is the poet of Dorothea's life, a life that to outward appearances has no epic meaning. Eliot reveals that some of the greatest good is done quietly and without historical acknowledgment, in the space between public and private life. It is this space that is occupied by Dorothea Brooke. In a society suffocated by convention and resistant to reform, her moral courage provides a more potent form of agency than more public lives achieve.

Middlemarch is a tale of how the pettiness and scandal of private life threaten to undo great efforts for public reform. At its moral center are three reformers: Dorothea Brooke, Dr. Tertius Lydgate, and Will Ladislaw. All are young and new to Middlemarch. Dorothea is a twenty-year-old heiress who has come to Middlemarch after the death of her parents to live with her uncle. Though she lives on a grand estate, her talent and passion is land reform. She holds no public position, but is self-taught. Most people think she should stick to being a lady, and give up her projects.

Dr. Lydgate has come to Middlemarch to reform health care. Middlemarch promises the opportunity for innovation away from the entrenched and unyielding institutions of London. Not surprisingly, the pharmacists who dispense medicine that people don't need and the doctors who offer cures that don't work resent Lydgate and wait for an opportunity to discredit him.

Will Ladislaw comes to Middlemarch to visit his elderly cousin, Rev. Edward Casaubon, a clergyman and religious scholar of independent means. After Casaubon marries Dorothea, he grows jealous of Will, and insists Will leave town. Instead, Will stays to work for political reform as a journalist and political adviser.

All three reformers are drawn together by shared ideals and mutual respect. But their fates are different because of the various ways they negotiate the pulls of public and private life.

Eliot begins Middlemarch with a "prelude," a parable by which we are to understand Dorothea's life, and through her life, the lives of many gifted women. She tells the tale of Saint Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century religious reformer, whose "passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life." Her soul could not be contained by the small pursuits of private life but "soared after some illimitable satisfaction."

Saint Teresa found her calling in the reform of a religious order. But Eliot reminds us that the fate of the modern-day Teresa is different. Women of distinctive promise arise in every epoch, but they are fettered by society, forced to leave the path of public action, or unacknowledged, never given a chance to exercise their agency in the world:

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Teresas 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.

Eliot describes Dorothea as a modernday Saint Teresa, brimming with moral passion, poised to change the world. The television series, by contrast, casts Dorothea as "girl interrupted," diverted by the claims of domesticity. The series opens by effacing Eliot's independent heroine and making Dr. Lydgate the star of the show. Lydgate's carriage sweeps into Middlemarch; Lydgate organizes a new fever hospital; Lydgate talks of his visions for medical reform. (In the novel, Lydgate enters the scene, not with a flourish, but at a dinner party.)

How is Dorothea first addressed? Not with the deference the BBC production accords Lydgate, but as "Dodo," the pet name given by her practical, but less substantial sister, Celia. Only glancing references are made to Dorothea's projects and passions. She is reduced to exactly what she is a rebel against--a Victorian lady of demure voice and at times (as one critic noted) of "preposterous saintliness." Her uncommon talent for land reform, her refusal to be fettered by gossip, her willfulness and occasional haughtiness, and her remarkable virtue are lost in a one-dimensional portrait of naive good will.

The fact that the BBC production slights the development of Dorothea's character is not the fault of Juliet Aubrey, the actress who plays Dorothea. Like the other members of the cast she is superb, and when given the chance, reveals Dorothea's willfulness and passion. It is Anthony Page (director) and Andrew Davis (screen-writer) who get Dorothea wrong, and with astonishing regularity strip her of speech, agency, and action. Instead of painting Dorothea in the vivid colors of Eliot's narrative, they render her in pastels, passive when she is active, docile when she is defiant.

In one scene, for example, Will indignantly tells Dorothea that her life with Casaubon is a "dreadful imprisonment." The television series focuses on Dorothea's protestation that she is satisfied with retreating from the world to help her husband with his ponderous scholarship, but omits the passionate, assertive parts of her dialogue. "I have a belief of my own," Dorothea affirms, to widen "the skirts of light" and make "the struggle with darkness narrower." When Will interrupts, "That sounds like beautiful mysticism," Dorothea asserts, "Please do not call it by any name. You will say it is Persian or something else geographic. It is my life. I have found it and I cannot part with it."

Eliot's commanding contrapuntal voice as narrator is eliminated from the TV series, except for a brief coda. Without Eliot's constant reminder that Middlemarch society has got Dorothea wrong, the television series unwittingly adopts Middlemarch's view of her, taking on the smug, condescending tone of the society Eliot disdains. To write Eliot out of the script is like staging Shakespeare without the soliloquies and asides. In the voice of narrator, Eliot is at once ironist and social critic. Her narration is an essential counterpoint to the decorous speech of her characters. It provides the piercing insights into their souls.

Eliot reveals that Dorothea's moral courage goes beyond her vigorous efforts for reform. In two extraordinary acts Dorothea rises to redeem others wrongly brought down by scandal. First, Dorothea refuses to bow to public opinion and acts independently to defend Dr. Lydgate when he is unfairly discredited. In a sordid concatenation of events, Lydgate is drawn into a scandal not of his making. A stranger comes to Middlemarch and tells of the unsavory past of Bulstrode, the pious town banker who financed Lydgate's fever hospital. The stranger dies under Lydgate's care and the townspeople (many resentful of his medical reforms) imply Lydgate assisted in his murder. It doesn't help that Lydgate has recently asked Bulstrode for a large loan to pay a personal debt.

Even the men who admire Lydgate are too cautious to act on his behalf. Into the breach steps Dorothea Brooke. She holds no office. She has no career. She is a woman. Yet she uses her position as a woman to act boldly to bridge the gap between private and public life in a way no man can. While the men she respects stand at the sidelines, advising Dorothea to let Lydgate clear his name if he can, she refuses their caution. "Let us find out the truth and clear him," she argues. "Then we would all stand by him and bring him out of his trouble. People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbor."

To act without regard for public opinion for a greater good is reason enough to celebrate Dorothea's moral courage. But she does more than this. She also rises above scandal that touches closer to home. After speaking to Lydgate, she offers to talk with his wife Rosamond to reassure her that Lydgate's name will be cleared. But when she goes to Lydgate's home she comes upon Rosamond and Will Ladislaw intimately clasping hands. Startled and shocked, Dorothea retreats from the scene.

After Casaubon's death, Dorothea had felt a growing love for Will, but as a widow, was restrained by propriety from seeing him. Witnessing the scene with Will and Rosamond wounds Dorothea deeply. She gives vent to the anger of spurned love. But unlike most of us, who would turn away with outrage and wounded pride, she rises to the higher call of justice. Just as Dorothea wrestled with the moral dilemma of what loyalty required in her marriage to Casaubon, she now wrestles with what loyalty to her friends requires. She considers Lydgate's life and work and Rosamond's bond to him. The "objects of her rescue," Dorothea realizes, "were not to be sought out by her fancy; they were chosen for her....She was part of that involuntary, palpitating life and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining."

Acting on these higher claims, Dorothea returns to Rosamond to reassure her of the efforts on her husband's behalf. And Rosamond, moved by Dorothea's goodness, overcomes the vanity of a flirtatious woman, and confesses that she threw herself at Will, that Will loves only Dorothea. Dorothea and Will finally free themselves from the constraints of propriety and affirm their mutual love. Dorothea forgoes Casaubon's fortune and marries Will, a man without property or position, who is later elected to Parliament on a platform of political reform.

Eliot concludes the novel with both a lament and a celebration of Dorothea's life. The lament is that Dorothea never receives public recognition for her work. Those close to her appreciate her gifts, but she devotes the rest of her life to her husband and family. In Middlemarch lore, Eliot notes with irony, Dorothea was viewed as not a "nice woman," faulted for marrying first a sickly old scholar, then his young cousin.

Yet despite society's judgment, Eliot celebrates Dorothea's greatness. Dorothea faces down scandal. She refuses to retreat to the safety of a sheltered life. Hers is an inner moral courage that makes a difference in the world.

With Dorothea Brooke at its moral center, Eliot's Middlemarch offers a parable for our times. We too live in a time when reform is in the air, but so is scandal that threatens to undo it. We too struggle to weigh public virtues against private vices, to sort out the conflicting, overlapping claims of the public and the private spheres of life. Our confusion about the public and the private swirls about us--we degrade our inner lives by baring our souls on television talk shows; we read lurid accounts of the private vices of politicians and celebrities in tabloids and, increasingly, the mainstream press, accounts that make the vicious gossip of Middlemarch society seem elevated by comparison.

At the same time, the invasion of public life by talk of scandals, vices, and confessionals, seems a kind of revenge against a public realm that tyrannizes over the private, depreciates domestic lives, prizes careers and professions over children and families. In the war between the public and private in our time, it is women who are typically the casualties.

Eliot's novel, with its redemptive view of the inner life, is a balm to our battered psyches. It affirms the heroism of Dorothea's "unhistoric" life. So much of our greatest fiction is about the unraveling of women's lives--Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, the tortured heroines of Dostoyevsky, the quiet desperation of Wharton's Lily Bart, to say nothing of the women stuck in the spiritual flatlands of postmodern fiction. In Dorothea Brooke, Eliot offers us a different vision, a portrait of a woman who does not come undone.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature...spent itself in channels that had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.