TELEVISION: Middlemarch Madness?

AS FANS OF MASTERPIECE THEatre well know, adaptations of great books sometimes make for less than great viewing. Anyone out there in favor of some Bleak House reruns? All the more reason to cheer, therefore, when one of public TV's bundles from Britain elegantly packages a literary classic.

Middlemarch is a six-part rendering of George Eliot's monumental novel that premieres on Masterpiece Theatre this Sunday. The mini-series, which cost some $10 million to make, was a recent critical and popular success in Britain, leading to lectures and even debates on the novel. As a result of the show, a Penguin paperback of the novel topped best-seller lists for five weeks, and is still doing well. The town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, where exteriors were filmed, is preparing for a summertime influx of tourists.

In America, PBS is hoping for at least a mini-hit, and Random House has issued a handsome new Modern Library edition of the book. But can the series' success at home be duplicated here? It's hard to say. As Masterpiece Theatre host Russell Baker wryly suggests, many Americans, like himself, developed a terminal aversion to Eliot's writing after having to read Silas Marner in ninth grade. That is a shame. Middlemarch is truly among the greatest books ever written and is, as Virginia Woolf put it, "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Its author, whose given name was Mary Ann (later Marian) Evans, was a Victorian feminist who lived openly with a married man and pursued a career as a writer and editor.

Middlemarch was published in installments in 1871 and '72, but the action of the book, which the mini-series dutifully reflects, takes place in the troubled 1830s. Railways have begun to girdle (and befoul) England's green and pleasant land, and the Industrial Revolution has brought new wealth to towns like Eliot's fictional Middlemarch. The passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, which enlarged the franchise, has created fear of revolution among reactionaries while holding out the promise of democratizing a corrupt and elitist Parliament.

Middlemarch is a moral tale, but one told with frequently mordant wit. At the novel's center are two altruists whose yearning to serve others is frustrated in large measure by ill-advised marriages. Dorothea Brooke (Juliet Aubrey) is ward of her eccentric uncle Arthur (Robert Hardy), who is known as "the worst landlord in the county" for the shabby way he treats his tenants. Dorothea's desire to improve the lot of others leads her to wed the Rev. Edward Casaubon (Patrick Malahide), a scholar and cleric more than twice her young age. She is enraptured by his dream -- to write a book proving that all religions stem from the same source.

Casaubon, as Dorothea soon discovers, is a pious monster. He rejects both her love and her offer to help with his work. He is uncontrollably jealous of attentions paid her by his impoverished cousin Will Ladislaw (Rufus Sewell), a handsome would-be artist turned political journalist. After Casaubon's death, Dorothea discovers that he has added a humiliating codicil to his will: she will forfeit his estate if she marries Ladislaw -- which, at Middlemarch's end, she does anyway. (In an unconvincing final chapter, which the series summarizes in a voice-over, Eliot assures readers that the marriage is a happy one.)