Though there are perhaps many St. Theresa metaphors actively working in Middlemarch, I feel Eliot’s prelude refers to any whose ambitions and lofty goals are dispersed by the mundane commonalities of life. There is perhaps no greater example of this…
Each epigraph illuminates the passage in a different way; sometimes these aphorisms are homemade, coming from George Eliot herself; however, often they are selected from the geniuses who peopled the years before Eliot became a writer.