Brooke, Dorothea

A beautiful, noble-minded and ardent girl, with an intense longing for goodness and a great desire to be helpful to others. "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Vergin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible--or from one of our elder poets--in a paragraph of today's newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remakably clever, but with the addition that sister Celia had more common-sense." "She came into the drawing room in her silver-grey dress--the simple lines of her dark brown hair parted over her brown and coiled massively behind, in keeping with the entire absence from her manner and expression of all searc after mere effect. Sometimes when Dorothea was in the company there seemed to be as complete an air of repose about her as if she had been a picture of Santa Barbara." "The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic and intellectually consequent; and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency." Dorothea at nineteen marries the middle-aged and pedantic Mr. Casaubon because she is in love with the idea of being a helpmate to him in his great work. She soon realizes that she has idealized her husband, who is a cold, jealous, and selfish man, engaged in a work of no real value. Although the shock of the disilluison is great and her intense nature at times rebels, she loyally devotes herself to Mr. Casaubon while he lives. She is on the point of sacrificing her future happiness by making him a promise, which, though she does not know its nature, would have separated her from Will Ladislaw, his young cousin, when Mr. Casaubon dies. Eventually she gives up her social position and Mr. Casaubon's money in order to marry Will Ladislaw. Dorothea's religious side was drawn, recognizably, from letters to George Eliot from Emilia Strong, who became first Mrs. mark Pattison and later Lady Dilke. There are points in her character--her opinions and her relation to her sister--which were suggested by things in George Eliot's own life.

<em>Middlemarch</em>

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