This article uses George Eliot's Middlemarch to model a new strategy for reading chapter epigraphs, suggesting we understand them as shrunken, subsidiary structures subsumed within a vast novel. Focusing on questions of epigraphical size and scale reveals a multifaceted examination of gender in which canonical male authors are miniaturized and unattributed epigraphs express empathy for women who, like Dorothea, leave "no great name on the earth." Epigraphs enable Middlemarch to construe problems of gender in terms of textual proportion and to translate these issues of proportion into an argument concerning the importance of the incrementally influential female life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]