Middlemarch

We meet Dorothea Brooke, a young woman "not yet twenty" living at Tipton Grange with her bachelor uncle Mr. Brooke and her younger sister Celia. Dorothea is beautiful but dresses with deliberate plainness: religion alone, Eliot tells us, would have been enough to determine it. Her mind is theoretic, enamoured of intensity, drawn toward grand moral purpose — she memorises Pascal and Jeremy Taylor and finds fashionable dress as sensible as an occupation for Bedlam. Her sister Celia has more common-sense. She mildly acquiesces in Dorothea's views, but Eliot is precise about the dynamic: Celia has always worn a yoke, and yoked creatures have their private opinions. There is a mixture of criticism and awe in how she sees her sister — not simple resentment, but something more complex and careful. The central scene of the chapter is the division of their mother's jewels, six months after their uncle first handed them over. Celia wants to wear them; Dorothea, in a tone half-caressing and half-explanatory, says simply "we should never wear them, you know." She gives the amethyst necklace and pearl cross to Celia without hesitation — she refuses the cross not because of vanity but because "a cross is the last thing I would wear as a trinket." Then Celia opens a ring-box, the sun breaks through a cloud, and the emerald catches the light. Dorothea is arrested. "How very beautiful these gems are," she says — and immediately begins trying to justify her delight by connecting the colors to the spiritual emblems in Revelation. She keeps the emerald ring and bracelet. Celia, quietly observing, notes the inconsistency. When she asks whether Dorothea will wear them in company, Dorothea replies haughtily: "Perhaps. I cannot tell to what level I may sink." Both sisters are left unhappy — Celia for having offended, Dorothea for questioning the purity of her own feeling. They reconcile silently, Dorothea pressing her cheek to Celia's arm. Before the jewelry scene, the chapter introduces the Reverend Edward Casaubon — a man of profound learning, noted throughout the county, understood for years to be engaged on a great work of religious history. He is coming to dine that evening. Dorothea already feels "venerating expectation" about him, even before they have met. This anticipation sits alongside her views on marriage: she has no interest in the amiable Sir James Chettam, who says "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expresses uncertainty. What she wants, Eliot tells us, is a marriage where the husband is "a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it." The arrival of Casaubon — scholar, widower, man of God — is precisely the kind of encounter her imagination has been waiting for.