How Middlemarch drew on Faust, Part Two
A documented line of influence: George Eliot demonstrably engaged Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Faust, Part Two
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1832
RomanticismThe influenced
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1872
The Age of the NovelRelevance
4/10
On Middlemarch’s page
- Behind Middlemarch stands Eliot's long apprenticeship to Goethe — the German she translated, the Life of Goethe she helped Lewes write in Weimar
- It's lineage more than direct quotation: Goethe taught her the patient, unsentimental study of a soul's development, and that's the spirit of Dorothea's story
On Faust, Part Two’s page
- George Eliot was one of Goethe's great English readers — she translated German and spent months in Weimar helping G. H. Lewes research his Life of Goethe (1855)
- That immersion carried Goethe's moral seriousness into her own novels; Middlemarch breathes the same air, even if its closest structural debt is to Wilhelm Meister rather than Faust