In Middlemarch, George Eliot gave a revealing picture of sordid and ugly things. She gave the reader a masterly and, indeed, a great psychol- ogical analysis of human nature and motive. She presented her individ - :als enmeshed in their cruel struggle in an unjust society, trying to achieve their aspirations and realize their noble aims. She dramatized man's vari- ous attempts, often fumbling and frustrated, to shape his destiny in a world deeply swayed by the random tides of chance and contingency. The accu- mulation and interaction of countless choices, of insignificant actions of minute and subtle pressures, of invicible motives and unforeseen consequ- ences all these create a field of decisive factors which act, now with and now against, the individual will. The psychological and spiritual develop- ment of her protagonists reveals a process of painful and bitter struggle to break free from the prison of egoism and grudge into a life of sympathy with their fellow men. On the other hand, she gave acute studies of spiri- tual degeneration and petrifaction of the corrupted soul as it creates its ewn private hell