Dorothea Brooke

Dorothea Arthur Brooke is the elder daughter of a Middlemarch gentleman of independent means, raised in comfortable but intellectually stimulating circumstances. She is well-educated for a woman of her time, fluent in languages and interested in classical learning, theology, and abstract philosophy—interests that mark her as unusual and somewhat peculiar in her social sphere. Her mother is deceased, and she lives with her uncle, Arthur Brooke, and her younger sister Celia Brooke in the family home at Tipton. Dorothea has rejected the ordinary pleasures and pursuits expected of young women of her class; she finds talk of dress, flirtation, and marriage frivolous, and she aspires instead to a life of serious purpose and intellectual companionship. She is deeply religious, though her piety tends toward the austere and the reforming rather than the merely conventional. Her relationships are marked by an intensity of feeling and a tendency toward idealization; she seeks in those around her—particularly men she perceives as wise or learned—qualities that perhaps exist more fully in her imagination than in reality. Her situation places her in constant tension between her own aspirations and the expectations of her family and society.