that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Dorothea is beautiful, but not vain. She is also "spoken of as being remarkably clever." However, her wit is not mentioned until her beauty has been described. It is not a necessary attribute of a Victorian heroine, even in a George Eliot novel.

Dorothea is well-born, with appropriate manners and morals for a Victorian lady. She is altruistic to the point of self-sacrifice, and more than usually idealistic. This idealism leads her to see some nobility in Casaubon and his scholarly endeavors, and to care for him even when she does not love him. This virtue and purity of heart are entirely characteristic of idealized Victorian womanhood.

If Dorothea is the heroine of Middlemarch, Lydgate is generally regarded as the hero. They both have unhappy marriages to unsuitable spouses, and their lives barely intersect. However, when they do, Dorothea's purity and sincerity make a deep impression on Lydgate, as she asks what she can do to help her husband:

"Oh, you are a wise man, are you not? You know all about life and death. Advise me. Think what I can do. He has been laboring all his life and looking forward. He minds about nothing else.— And I mind about nothing else—"

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal—this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully illuminated life.

At this point in the novel, Dorothea is clearly the unselfish, devoted "angel in the house" (to use the phrase popularized by Coventry Patmore in his 1854 poem) and certainly appears to Lydgate as not only the conventional but the ideal Victorian heroine.

There are many different sorts of female protagonists in Victorian novels from a wide variety of social and economic backgrounds. The phrase "conventional Victorian heroine" in many ways indicates an overly simplistic and limited reading of the upwards of 40,000 extant Victorian novels—in all their richness and diversity.

If one reads the phrase in terms of the reception of the Victorian female as she is portrayed in twentieth-century popular culture, one might say that Dorothea conforms only partially to the model. She is typical in being young, beautiful, and from a wealthy family. The plot of the novel casts her in one sense as a "conventional" heroine (as it can be described) in her first marrying the wrong man and then the right man. In other words, her main plot line is about seeking happiness through marriage.

She also has a romantic view of love, which can be seen as conventional. She also sees obedience to her husband as part of her duty as a woman, although she in fact has a rather strong will and strong preferences of her own. Eliot herself, however, was deeply concerned with changing the role of women in her society and was quite unconventional in both her writing and personal life.