TV REVIEWS : BBC Brings George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ to PBS

George Eliot, the great Victorian novelist, comes to PBS Sunday with the first of a six-part dramatization of her teeming, passionate, psychologically rich novel “Middlemarch.”

The study of provincial life in 1830s England, the miniseries reasserts what the BBC does uniquely well--the re-creation of classic English novels. “Masterpiece Theatre” has done Eliot before (“Adam Bede” and “Silas Marner”) but “Middlemarch,” which took 30 weeks to film in locations from Rome to Lincolnshire, is the most costly production the BBC has attempted.

As host Russell Baker says in one of his concise introductions, “Humdrum Middlemarch is not as simple as it seems.”

Indeed, the town of Middlemarch is big enough to offer up a picture of a whole society. The production, in its bruising depictions of idealism clashing against materialism, is the antithesis of an antique costume picture of merry olde England because it mirrors jealousy, hypocrisy and greed in any age.

Autobiographically speaking, the title stands for Coventry and that part of England from which the early feminist Mary Ann Evans fled (and took the name George Eliot because she felt she would be taken more seriously as a novelist if she adopted a man’s name).

Like her fat 1872 novel, the miniseries dovetails two stories that are central to the sprawling tapestry. One is that of the idealistic, well-bred young Dorothea Brooke (Juliet Aubrey), who marries an aging bachelor (Patrick Malahide); the second is that of the earnest, reform-minded Dr. Tertius Lydgate (Douglas Hodge), whose life is compromised by a shallow, greedy wife (Trevyn McDowell) and his own weaknesses.

Adapter Andrew Davies and director Anthony Page underscore what Baker aptly calls Brooke’s “velvet cage,” as our heroine strives to free herself of the Victorian ideal of womanhood (although she never ventures as far as did Eliot herself, who openly lived with a married man for 24 years).

* “Middlemarch” premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and at 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24; it begins April 10 at 8 p.m. on KOCE-TV Channel 50.