In ordinary lives Eliot perceived human nature’s “deep pathos, its sublime mysteries.” Illustration by PIERRE MORNET

The first time I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” I was seventeen years old, and was preparing to take the entrance examination for Oxford University. For several hours every weekend, I would join three or four classmates to discuss the novel, which was published in 1872, at the home of a benevolent teacher who lived on the outskirts of Weymouth, the English seaside resort where I grew up. Weymouth is in Dorset, a rural county in the southwest of the country; its rolling farmlands are traversed by narrow roads and hedgerowed lanes that discreetly delineate the ancestral holdings of landed families. A quarter century ago, as I looked out from my teacher’s living-room window at hills that seemed perpetually sodden, my domain felt hardly less provincial and remote than the Midlands of the eighteen-thirties, which Eliot had described in her novel.

I identified completely with Dorothea Brooke, the ardent young gentlewoman yearning for a more significant existence, even though my upbringing was barely similar. Dorothea lives at Tipton Grange, a large estate equipped with household staff; my family—a few generations from being household staff—occupied a modest house, built in the nineteen-fifties, with a carefully tended patch of garden. Dorothea, who at the novel’s outset is nineteen, disdains her suitor, Sir James Chettam, an amiable, pink-faced baronet whose land is adjacent to the property that any future son of hers will inherit. Instead, she makes a spectacularly unwise marriage to Edward Casaubon, the pedantic scholar laboring on the interminable “Key to all Mythologies”—“Our Lowick Cicero,” as a dismissive neighbor calls him. Ultimately, she is united with Will Ladislaw, a passionate, idealistic lightweight, a journalist turned politician.

I relished the satire in Eliot’s “study of provincial life,” as the book is subtitled, with its amused depictions of minor characters like Celia, Dorothea’s more earthbound sister, whose marriage to the passed-over Sir James produces baby Arthur—“the infantine Bouddha”—whom everyone is obliged to adore. But I missed, more or less completely, the irony in the portrayal of Dorothea, with her righteous aspirations. (Her love of riding is so great that “she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it,” and she imagines, when anticipating life with Casaubon, “It would be like marrying Pascal.”) I also failed to notice what Leslie Stephen, an early critic, described as “a slight touch of stupidity” about Dorothea. Rather, her formless desire for a life of the mind, and a life of meaning, struck not so much a chord with me as a symphony.

In my Penguin English Library edition, I marked what seemed to me particularly salient passages with a fluorescent yellow pen; the highlights have faded now to an almost imperceptible citrine. From Chapter 37, as Will enlightens Dorothea about Casaubon’s intellectual inadequacies: “Now when she looked steadily at her husband’s failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness.” From Chapter 64, where Lydgate—the high-minded, ambitious young doctor whose trajectory the novel charts in parallel with Dorothea’s—is in dire financial straits, and his relations with Rosamond, his willful, empty-headed wife, are at their most strained: “In marriage, the certainty, ‘She will never love me much,’ is easier to bear than the fear, ‘I shall love her no more.’ ”

On the brink of adulthood—not knowing where I would study, where I might live, what men I would love, whether I would have children—I felt that everything I might need to know about marriage, about love, about life itself, was encompassed in the novel’s eight hundred and fifty pages. When I finally went for my interview at Oxford, I met with a senior tutor whose study was furnished with low-slung easy chairs upholstered in mustard-colored corduroy: one could either perch on a chair’s edge or sink into its depths, and I shifted uncomfortably between one inappropriate position and the other while talking passionately about “Middlemarch.” A few months later, when I received a letter telling me that I had been offered a scholarship to read English at University College, it was the first time that George Eliot had a hand in determining the direction of my life.

In the subsequent decades, just about every love affair I had was refracted through “Middlemarch.” I spent far too much of my twenties helplessly, if resentfully, in love with a preoccupied man nearly two decades my senior—a distinguished professor who studied the classics and once told me that one of his greatest fears was to discover that he was Casaubon. It might have been like marrying Pascal, but the professor eventually decided that I was not fit to receive a proposal of the type that Casaubon, in an excruciatingly stilted letter, offers Dorothea: “I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated.”

Some years later, I gave an otherwise well-read boyfriend a copy of “Middlemarch,” on the principle that if he wanted to understand me he needed to read this; two years later, he still had not cracked its considerable spine, which should have made our parting less painful than it was. Soon after we broke up, he—of course—got around to reading it, and told me how much he admired the climactic scene of Will and Dorothea, hitherto kept apart by the terms of Casaubon’s will and by their own discretion, clutching each other’s hands, at last, as a thunderstorm rages. I find this the book’s one overwrought note, and his admiration confirmed that things would never have worked between us. When I did eventually marry, at the age of thirty-seven—older even than Eliot when she eloped with George Henry Lewes, the exuberant, omnicompetent critic who became her beloved companion for the next quarter century, despite being married to someone else—it was to a man who prized “Middlemarch” as much as I did, and whose name, by what I hope is only happy coincidence, is George.

I have gone back to “Middlemarch” every five years or so, my emotional response to it evolving at each revisiting. In my judgmental twenties, I thought that Ladislaw, with his brown curls and his callow artistic dabbling, was not entirely deserving of Dorothea; by forty, I could better measure the appeal of his youthful energies and Byronic hairdressing, at least to his middle-aged creator, who was fifty-three when the book was published. My identification with Eliot’s heroine and my dismissal of her simpler sister was shaken when I became the besotted mother of a son. (To a friend, a professor of English literature, I giddily wrote, “All these years I’ve thought of myself as Dorothea, and now I’ve turned overnight into Celia.”) And as I grew older the unfolding of Dorothea’s life became less immediately poignant to me than the story of Lydgate, who at the start of the book has the bold aim to “make a link in the chain of discovery,” but who, thanks to his own misguided marriage, becomes a society doctor known for a treatise on gout—“a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side,” in Eliot’s pointed observation.