But there’s a not-so-obvious reason that the 19th-century novel may have felt newly relevant for 2020 readers. On the face of it, this surge of interest in Eliot’s best-known work might seem unremarkable. Since the start of the pandemic, it’s felt to me as though everyone has been reading Middlemarch. But regardless of whether Taylor had Eliot’s provincial character on her mind when she named the track, our reaction to it encapsulated the novel’s uncanny ubiquity in recent months. A little sadly for us, the lyrics of “Dorothea” don’t support the connection we quickly drew to Dorothea Brooke, fictional heroine of George Eliot’s Victorian novel Middlemarch. When Taylor Swift first released the track list for her latest cottagecore album, a certain corner of literary Twitter lit up over the title of its eighth song.
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