Middle March

 This is a charming vignette of Saint Theresa of Avila as a little girl, holding her brother by the hand, going out into the country side looking for martyrdom, illustrating the “passionate, ideal nature [that demands] an epic life.” Such a girl who has a “rapturous consciousness of life beyond self” could hardly be content with a normal woman’s life. She is the type of many such women today who yearn for an expanded life but are not helped by the “tangled circumstance” of society. This tragic sort of woman in the modern world has no channel for her life force, but only a “vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood.” She is a swan among ducks and finds no fellowship.
Analysis
Eliot’s famous Prelude to Middlemarch could be the outcry of the Victorian woman, or women of any age, who have no outlet for their talents or direction for their spiritual lives. They are like the child Theresa, who nevertheless, even in a man’s world, grew up to reform a religious order. Eliot sets up an epic question: what sort of heroism is possible in the modern world, especially for women? Her main character, Dorothea Brooke, is such a modern St. Theresa.