Vincy, Rosamond

The mayor's beautiful daughter, later Lydgate's wife. "Rosamond Vincy, who had excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure blondeness which give the largest range to choice in the flow and color of drapery. But these things made only part of her charm. She was admitted to be the flower of Mrs. Lemon's school . . . Mrs. Lemon herself had always held up Miss Vincy as an example; no pupil, she said, exceeded that young lady for mental acquisition, and propriety of speech, while her musical execution was quite exceptional." "Rosamond was not one of those helpless girls who betray themselves unawares, and whose behavior is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of being steered by wary grace and propriety . . . Rosamond never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blonde loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date . . . She was not in the habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements were no direct clew to fact, why, they were not intended in that light— they were among her elegant accomplishments, intended to please. Nature had inspired many arts in finishing Mrs. Lemon's favourite pupil, who by general consent (Fred's excepted) was a rare compound of beauty, cleverness, and amiability." She holds herself above the young men of Middlemarch, but is attracted by Dr. Lydgate's superior breeding and connexions, falls as much in love with him as her self-centred nature will permit, and marries him without having the slightest understanding of his nobility of character and mind, and with no sympathy with his high aims in his profession. Worldly success measured in terms of income and social prestige is the only ambition which she can understand; she demands to be kept in luxury, refuses to yield to any of Lydgate's wishes, and to all of his attempts to explain to her his needs and his professional aims she opposes a gentle, inflexible obstinacy before which he is helpless. In the end he has to sacrifice his high ideals and scientific ambition and move to London in order to make the money necessary to give her the social position she craves. She never understands the ruin which she has made of his life, and continues to regard him as a person of mistaken ideas who needs the balance of her common sense.

<em>Middlemarch</em>

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