Word: tertius
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Dorothea's male counterpart is Tertius Lydgate (Douglas Hodge), a young doctor who sets up practice in Middlemarch and agrees to run, for free, a research hospital funded by the town's grasping banker. Lydgate also makes a disastrous marriage -- to Rosamond Vincy (Trevyn McDowell), a flirtatious ninny whose spendthrift ways soon bring the couple to the edge of bankruptcy. Burdened by debt, Lydgate abandons his dreams of reforming medicine to take a conventional but lucrative practice in London...
...token of Eliot's genius for realism that most of it rings truer than some of the words concocted by Middlemarch's capable scenarist, Andrew Davies. In a bodice-ripping love scene that is not in the novel, Rosamond tells her smitten husband, "You must be gentle with me, Tertius, now I am with child." Even on her worst day, George Eliot could never have written a line as precious as that...