Visions of Ordinary Today's entry was written by Jill Carattini.
Please note the views expressed here are those of the author,
not necessarily of The BioLogos Foundation. You can read more
about what BioLogos believes here. “Visions of Ordinary” by Jill
Carattini Middlemarch is the epic novel by Mary Anne Evans,
better known by her male penname George Eliot. The work is
considered one of the most significant novels of the Victorian
period and a masterpiece of English fiction. Rather than
following a grand hero, Eliot explores a number of themes in a
series of interlocking narratives, telling the stories of
ordinary characters intertwined in the intricate details of life
and community. Eliot's focus is the ordinary, and in fact her
lament, in the form of 700 pages of detail, is that we not only
so often fail to see it, but fail to see that there is really no
such thing. There is neither ordinary human pain nor ordinary
human living. "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all
ordinary human life," she writes,