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5 January 2016

eliot george manuscript 067049

The manuscript of Middlemarch is in the British Library and sixteen pages are online here. In December 1870 George Eliot decided to combine  the chapters she had already written with  a new story called ‘Miss Brooke’: the BL manuscript consists of four notebooks containing the final, revised draft; originally written on loose leaves, they were later bound into volumes. There is a book about the composition of the novel, Jerome Beaty’s Middlemarch From Notebook to Novel (Athlone Press, 1967). It would be a fascinating exercise to reread Middlemarch with Beaty’s book to hand.

 

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