Middlemarch

In 1871, the British author George Eliot wrote an eight-part novel, Middlemarch, in which a young woman agonizes over how to live a good life that has maximum benefit to others. 

In 2025, the Dutch author Rutger Bregman wrote a nonfiction bestseller, Moral Ambition, that provides specific guidance about how to live a good life that has maximum benefit to others.

And yet, despite the clear pathways offered by Bregman, the doubts raised by George Eliot’s protagonist still plague many of us who are considering how to apply Bregman’s philosophy.

First, the drama of Middlemarch.

Dorothea is a kind, beautiful, and uncommonly generous young woman, mostly raised by her uncle after the death of her parents. Dorothea yearns–aches, really–to do something Good with her life.

She’s smart. She’s ambitious. She wants very little materially for herself. It’s clear to her that the best thing she could do with her time is help others. But how?

Initially, Dorothea fantasizes about building houses for the local peasants. She loses herself for hours drawing blueprints. Her earnest passion charms a neighbor, handsome and slightly dull Sir James, to build the houses on his own property. 

But, there’s one big problem. Sir James only does the good deeds to win Dorothea’s heart and hand in marriage. He feels completely neutral about the welfare of the peasants. He’d be equally happy to help her bake a French pastry or any other project that would cause her beautiful cheeks to flush so endearingly. Dorothea is grateful for Sir James, but sees him as a much better match for her sister, Celia, who is also lovely, but more lighthearted than herself.

Instead, Dorothea falls for Mr. Casaubon, whose name is never mentioned without the descriptor of “shriveled,” or “old” or “dry.” But, he’s so deep! He’s writing “The Key to All Mythologies,” and has filled a library with notes from his studies of texts in Greek and Latin. He’s committed to a life of the mind. 

Dorothea falls in love. Sure, there’s an age gap, but Casaubon is so different from the Sir James’s of Dorothea’s world who are satisfied with riding horses, tinkering around their properties, and gossiping. The Good that Dorothea can do with her life is to help Casuabon! Though he’s only ever published a few pamphlets, his constant intellectual strain is causing health problems. Dorothea cannot wait to read to him when his eyes are tired! She’ll even learn Latin and Greek in order to help him with his notes! And in return, she’ll get to absorb his knowledge. She, too, will get to understand what the greatest minds have thought about God, Goodness, the Soul, and maybe, even how to live a good life.

Nobody likes this idea (especially not Sir James). Though her friends and family acknowledge that Mr. Casaubon is rich, he’s just so old and extremely boring. Why would beautiful and vibrant young Dorothea throw herself away on this guy who is clearly going to keel over and die any minute?

Dorothea marries him anyway. 

And guess what? He’s not at all generous with his intelligence, he doesn’t let her into his exciting life of the mind, and the boredom of her married life is utterly crushing. 

We readers all rejoice, then, when her friends and family turn out to be right, and Casaubon croaks!

Dorothea inherits a ton of money. She still yearns to do something Good with her life. But she’s no closer to knowing what that Goodness should be than she was before she married the learned Mr. Casaubon. Her wealth actually just adds a lot of pressure. She knows she CAN make a big difference somehow, but how?

She considers building more housing. But maybe she should give everything to the new hospital? She gathers all the books she can find on political economy, “trying to get light as to the best way of spending money so as to not injure one’s neighbours, or–what comes to the same thing–so as to do them the most good.”

Yet, before she’s come to any firm conclusions, another man enters the scene: Mr. Ladislaw. Dorothea actually met Ladislaw, Casaubon’s young cousin, before she married Casaubon, and while nothing untoward ever happened, the chemistry was strong. So suspiciously well did Dorothea and Ladislaw get along, in fact, that the late Mr. Casaubon's will expressly–and humiliatingly–forbade Dorothea from marrying Mr. Ladislaw after his death. Defying his wishes would revoke her right to his inheritance.  

After about six hundred more pages of drama, Dorothea abandons her money and social status for love of Ladislaw. She moves to London with him, and we never find out much more about her new life except that she almost died during childbirth but didn’t. We don’t know what happened to all of her abandoned money.

But apparently, her life was perhaps more fulfilling than it would have been had she remained a wealthy change-maker. George Eliot closes the book this way.

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” 

While Dorothea’s grander ambitions toward helping the poor were thwarted, according to George Eliot, her contributions to a long-term betterment of the world remained valuable, noble even.

I doubt a utilitarian like Rutger Bregman would agree. In terms of maximizing a measurable benefit to the world, it would have been better had Dorothea accepted the pain of unrequited love in order to maintain the inheritance and invest it in directly improving the lives of the poor.

Of course, Dorothea isn’t a direct analogy to the audience of Bregman’s Moral Ambition. Essentially, Bregman is encouraging ambitious young people who are trying to decide between careers in finance or consulting to use their talents to solve the world’s most pressing problems instead. That seems like a clear moral win.

But I suspect that many considering their own moral ambition have or will face similar conflicts to those of Dorothea. Perhaps we will work for a time in a highly-effective charity but with toxic colleagues (a Casaubon situation, in other words). After enough of this, a less statistically effective, but more pleasant opportunity comes along, say working on a local street outreach team. Some of us may abandon our utilitarian ideals in favor of a higher quality of life.

Or alternatively, we’ll plug diligently away at our highly effective charity work when suddenly we fall in love or have a baby or an elder falls ill. While these life events certainly don’t always conflict with our high-impact careers, sometimes they do. Sometimes being with Ladislaw requires we quit our jobs (abandon our inheritence) and move to London. Or we realize that our baby will only be a baby for a few short years, and why wouldn’t we spend as many of those moments with the baby as possible? Or, more sadly, when a loved ones health is failing, perhaps the only real option to reorganize your work days. Sometimes the time required for humble care-taking or quality relationships simply reduces the time available for solving the world’s most pressing problems.

If we commit to our new priorities with kindness and generosity, we aren’t quitters in the movement to make the world a better place. Instead, we’re taking the Dorothea approach. And according to George Eliot, our quieter form of Goodness may have incalculable ripple effects long after we’re gone.

So is Eliot making the case for us all to simply be our best Dorotheas?

Not exactly.

 “For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Yes, George Eliot is absolutely praising the localized kindnesses of Dorothea. She’s also doing so within the context that the bigger, more historic–morally ambitious–acts mattered as well. 

So. Some of us may choose to spend only a part of our time on a high-impact solution to a global problem and reserve an equally important part of our time doing small good deeds–tending to our neighbors directly, befriending the lonely, providing quality care for our children or elders. Or we may divide that time in life phases, some years focusing more on one than the other. 

Or we may remember that not all people can do all things. We can expand the boundaries of who we consider to be part of the movement of addressing the world’s largest problems. Some of us should work on the quiet work of Good Personhood and some of us should work on crunching numbers and negotiating policy changes that reduce infant mortality in Nigeria. 

The wisdom of Middlemarch is that we must–within and between ourselves–honor both.