“But why always Dorothea?” famously opines the narrator of George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch. Professor Bruce Robbins wrote the quote on the board, and continued to explain: Dorothea is young and charming, our darling protagonist. Eliot’s point, however, is that Dorothea – or, rather, all the Dorotheas who exist in the world of nineteenth century fiction – is always at the center of attention. But who deserves to be the center of a novel, anyway? By having her narrator ask the question, Eliot provides the answer: Anyone.
