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Dorothea Brooke
fictional character
Dorothea Brooke, fictional character, the heroine of Middlemarch (1871–72), George Eliot’s acknowledged masterpiece. Dorothea’s intelligence and idealism lead her to blindly marry Edward Casaubon, a middle-aged scholar she hopes to assist, who proves both pompous and ineffectual. Her story parallels that of the young doctor Tertius Lydgate, another thwarted idealist in Middlemarch who marries disastrously.
This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.
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