chunk: Middlemarch is written as a third-person narrative, centering on the lives of the residents of Middlemarch, a fictitious Midlands town, from 1829 onwards â the years preceding the 1832 Reform Act. The narrative is variably considered to consist of three or four plots of unequal emphasis: the life of Dorothea Brooke; the career of Tertius Lydgate; the courtship of Mary Garth by Fred Vincy; and the disgrace of Bulstrode. The two main plots are those of Dorothea and Lydgate.  Each plot happens concurrently, although Bulstrode's is centred in the later chapters.