Middlemarch Madness?

By John Elson

AS FANS OF MASTERPIECE THEatre well know, adaptations of great books sometimes make for less than great viewing. Anyone out there in favor of some Bleak House reruns? All the more reason to cheer, therefore, when one of public TV's bundles from Britain elegantly packages a literary classic.

Middlemarch is a six-part rendering of George Eliot's monumental novel that premieres on Masterpiece Theatre this Sunday. The mini-series, which cost some $10 million to make, was a recent critical and popular success in Britain, leading to lectures and even debates on the novel. As a result of the show, a Penguin paperback of the novel topped best-seller lists for five weeks, and is still doing well. The town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, where exteriors were filmed, is preparing for a summertime influx of tourists.

In America, PBS is hoping for at least a mini-hit, and Random House has issued a handsome new Modern Library edition of the book. But can the series' success at home be duplicated here? It's hard to say. As Masterpiece Theatre host Russell Baker wryly suggests, many Americans, like himself, developed a terminal aversion to Eliot's writing after having to read Silas Marner in ninth grade. That is a shame. Middlemarch is truly among the greatest books ever written and is, as Virginia Woolf put it, "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Its author, whose given name was Mary Ann (later Marian) Evans, was a Victorian feminist who lived openly with a married man and pursued a career as a writer and editor.

Middlemarch was published in installments in 1871 and '72, but the action of the book, which the mini-series dutifully reflects, takes place in the troubled 1830s. Railways have begun to girdle (and befoul) England's green and pleasant land, and the Industrial Revolution has brought new wealth to towns like Eliot's fictional Middlemarch. The passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, which enlarged the franchise, has created fear of revolution among reactionaries while holding out the promise of democratizing a corrupt and elitist Parliament.

Middlemarch is a moral tale, but one told with frequently mordant wit. At the novel's center are two altruists whose yearning to serve others is frustrated in large measure by ill-advised marriages. Dorothea Brooke (Juliet Aubrey) is ward of her eccentric uncle Arthur (Robert Hardy), who is known as "the worst landlord in the county" for the shabby way he treats his tenants. Dorothea's desire to improve the lot of others leads her to wed the Rev. Edward Casaubon (Patrick Malahide), a scholar and cleric more than twice her young age. She is enraptured by his dream -- to write a book proving that all religions stem from the same source.

Casaubon, as Dorothea soon discovers, is a pious monster. He rejects both her love and her offer to help with his work. He is uncontrollably jealous of attentions paid her by his impoverished cousin Will Ladislaw (Rufus Sewell), a handsome would-be artist turned political journalist. After Casaubon's death, Dorothea discovers that he has added a humiliating codicil to his will: she will forfeit his estate if she marries Ladislaw -- which, at Middlemarch's end, she does anyway. (In an unconvincing final chapter, which the series summarizes in a voice-over, Eliot assures readers that the marriage is a happy one.)

Dorothea's male counterpart is Tertius Lydgate (Douglas Hodge), a young doctor who sets up practice in Middlemarch and agrees to run, for free, a research hospital funded by the town's grasping banker. Lydgate also makes a disastrous marriage -- to Rosamond Vincy (Trevyn McDowell), a flirtatious ninny whose spendthrift ways soon bring the couple to the edge of bankruptcy. Burdened by debt, Lydgate abandons his dreams of reforming medicine to take a conventional but lucrative practice in London.

Middlemarch has such a tangle of subplots that viewers unfamiliar with the novel may find themselves in need of a trot to avoid getting lost. As usual with BBC productions, the atmospherics and costumes are spot on and the performances are consistently competent. Aubrey, a grave, wide-eyed newcomer, stands out as a luminous Dorothea.

Yards of dialogue have been taken almost verbatim from the novel. It is a token of Eliot's genius for realism that most of it rings truer than some of the words concocted by Middlemarch's capable scenarist, Andrew Davies. In a bodice-ripping love scene that is not in the novel, Rosamond tells her smitten husband, "You must be gentle with me, Tertius, now I am with child." Even on her worst day, George Eliot could never have written a line as precious as that.

If there is any real problem with this production, it involves the issue of critical distance. In writing about an era that had passed, Eliot felt free to comment on it, as a humorist and stern solon. By contrast, the mini-series is more of a period piece. It replicates the story but reflects only in part the wisdom of Eliot's novel.