"Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted upon." --George Eliot, Middlemarch

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Mary Ann Evans published Middlemarch in 1871, but the events in the novel take place much earlier in the century: in the late 1820s and early 1830s--and not in smart-set London but in the provincial Midlands, where local sensibilities reach back toward the 1790s. To put this authorial choice in perspective, compare Eliot/Evans to Alice Munro, writing now but choosing to set her stories in Depression-era provincial Ontario, with characters who have little connection with Toronto but complex ties to the nineteenth century.

I am fascinated by how writers work with setting: the ways in which time, climate, geography; the transmission of information; the making of money; the structures and substructures of class, race, religion intersect to create place. It interests me that Eliot/Evans and Munro overlap so closely in how they address setting, even as they remain markedly different writers.

And both, it seems to me, deal again and again in their work with the complications of "the woman problem," set forth so ambiguously and succinctly in that line at the top of this post. If you remember that their lives are separated by more than a century, you might find yourself getting pretty gloomy.