Ah! I agree that's a better read on Lydgate! Lydgate + women-as-a-class just wasn't the aspect that spoke most strongly to me (or, more realistically, wasn't the aspect I wanted to speak most strongly, eee), but that read is...aha, a very familiar attitude.

And thank you for additional Eliot recs. I hadn't, actually, realized how many other books she'd written besides Middlemarch and Mill on the Floss, so off I go to Project Gutenberg.