Will I love Middlemarch?

I love this novel's timelessness. Seemingly every page has a memorable line such as this: "Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything..."

Reading what Eliot wrote more than 150 years ago endlessly amused me as I matched the follies of her world to the pettiness, mindlessness, and garishness of today's world.

Last year one of my best books was published in 1959 but this year I’ve gone all the way back to 1871. Despite having majored in English lit, I managed to get through university without reading Middlemarch. I don’t imagine I would have enjoyed it much at that point, so it’s just as well. This year, I finally decided to read it (well, listen to it) and, at last, I was ready for it. I found it beautiful, funny, compassionate, clear-eyed, and entirely satisfying. It’s about life, ambition, loss, discovery, folly, and wisdom. Some things are worth waiting for.

This book, published in the 1870s, is sometimes considered the best English novel ever written.

It is a monumental work, and while I found it very impressive, I have to admit that reading the long and detailed text felt heavy going at times.

Set in a provincial town with a large cast of characters, it depicts a middle-class way of life very different from that of today, and addresses various social and political questions of the time. One major theme is the psychology of marriage as analysed through the relationships between two ill-matched couples.

To my mind, Dorothea is the original and quintessential embodiment of a smart, insightful woman struggling to belong to herself, which, for me, is a strong value.

And in 19th Century England, when claiming oneself was no small feat. I have held Dorothea in my heart ever since I read the book as a 20-year-old. Along with Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady. Both of them were heroines and pioneers.

In this book, George Eliot’s novel of provincial life in 1830s England, nearly everyone marries the wrong person. Even the future happiness of its heroine, Dorothea, when she finally unites with her true love, Will, is questionable. And yet it stands for me, not only as one of the finest novels ever written but one of literature’s greatest romances.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that it is a novel “for grown-up people.” I believe it is essential reading because it reflects real life where couples are mismatched, love goes unrequited, and ambitions are thwarted. It illuminates the small ways our better… show more.

I am recommending George Eliot’s novel (published in parts 1871-72) because I believe it is as good as any of the great Russian novels and probably the best novel written in English. Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) was herself a revolutionary person. In 19th century England, she worked as an independent woman, lived with a married man (she eventually married him), and later married a man a lot younger than herself. Her novel is set in the early part of the 19th century when the aftereffects of the French Revolution were strongly felt in England, and there was even… show more.

I took up Middlemarch after reading from various sources that it is many people's favorite book of all time—high praise, indeed! As a friend commented on social media: "I love Middlemarch. She gets inside people's heads so well it's embarrassing sometimes!" That is one thing I love about it.

Eliot's characters are each so distinct; they even speak differently. They come from such different backgrounds and perspectives: aristocracy, upper middle class, working class, professional doctors and lawyers, clergy. Some are deeply religious and ethical, others superficial and vain.

One important character is a young doctor with new medical ideas who… show more.

After more than 50 years as an English prof, I confess I remain leery of long novels and am inclined to explain my disinclination to embark on epic fiction by saying I’m a ponderously slow reader, which poky pace I blame on my love of poetry, which demands utmost concentration. 

Accordingly, only four summers ago, after three false starts scattered over many years, did I at last conquer Brothers Karamazov, a boast-worthy achievement for me. Last year my major conquest—a vastly easier, pleasanter read than Dostoyevsky, was George Eliot’s deservedly famous Middlemarch, which ran to 600+ pages in… show more.

This is another of my go-to books in time of trouble.

Writing in 1871-72, Eliot goes back to the Midlands of her youth at the time of the Reform Act, 1832. So far, so dry as dust, I you say. But Eliot writes so well, creates such wonderful characters and deals with problems that still vex us today, not least the speed of change when you’d rather things stayed the same. But no one could not love the idealistic Dorothea, the frustrated Dr. Lydgate and the poet Will Ladislaw who becomes a great social reformer.

It’s one of the longest… show more.

As was the fashion of the time, George Eliot took on a male pseudonym, replacing her true name, Mary Ann Evans. Typically she extended her subterfuge by writing about male characters whose names figured into the titles of her novels, e.g. Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Felix Holt the Radical, and Daniel Deronda. She had strong female characters, too, but it wasn't until her penultimate novel, Middlemarch, that she granted a female character, Dorothea, the center stage. There are male characters in this book, too: Dorothea's husband, the pedantic scholar, Casaubon, the physician, Lydgate, and of course the… show more.