Middlemarch (Signet Classics)

I can't believe that I've never read this and wouldn't have except for a read along that I participated in. It is such an expansive novel that it defies a brief description, so I will just say that it concerns the inhabitants of Middlemarch and their interactions, but is so much more. It is very much worth reading. Don't be intimidated by its length. I found it to be easily read despite its having been written so long ago. If you like the Brontes or Jane Austen, you will like this book.

I like George Eliot a lot. I needed to finally tackle the big one though and I am very glad I finally did.

I love her for the same reason I like Forster - she has a tremendous sympathy for her characters. And like Forster she will use that sympathy as a means to examine how philosophical and ethical ideas show up in every day life. Lots of authors sacrifice their characterization for philosophy and ideas (e.g. Camus) or vice versa (e.g. most modern authors who appear to have no ideas at all - Franzen comes to mind). Eliot does an amazing job, better than Forster, and not cutting corners.

Of course that also means she tends to overwrite some of her characters. There are numerous paragraphs explaining in far too much detail every atom that moved in a thought process or manifestation of emotion. This is sometimes good - for example when explaining the psychology of Rosamund, Bulstrode, Casaubon, Lydgate, Farebrother (one of my favorite people of all time), Caleb Garth. And some instances of Dorothea's thought process. However, she also spent a bit too much time with some of Dorothea's dark nights of the soul - I realize she wants us to empathize, but it is hard to sit through several pages of internal thoughts that feel totally wrong headed. Dorothy just makes some really bad decisions for really good reasons. I realize a lot of that is due to the difference in modern values and society. No one would ever expect her to sacrifice herself to support an old pseudo-academic obsessive to that degree. And the resolution she eventually reaches with respect to the will codicil just seemed so obvious that it made no sense she didn't arrive at it hundred and hundreds of pages earlier. So spending 3 or 4 pages of insanely long sentences going through somewhat repetitive vague abstract sentiments just to explain really silly decisions ... just lost me for a bit.

However, Eliot always recovered from these episodes with some great bit of plotting or a truly beautiful piece of prose.

I will say that it felt like 3 or maybe 4 novels that are in the same series but sort of interleaved and stapled together. Or a modern TV drama. However, it did start to feel more about a community as a whole, as opposed to the story of a few separate marriages, once the rumors start being a major plot focus. In other words, I'm not sure 800 pages were needed, but that's a product of the times I suppose. And they were much better than any 800 pages would have been from Dostoyevsky, for example - he would have characters repeating the same thing over and over and over again just to fill space. Eliot doesn't do that.

Any way, it's worth the time. Great book.

I turned 25 recently and I couldn’t have asked for a better novel to kick off my developed frontal lobe years lol. It’s an understatement to say that Middlemarch is fiction that invites introspection; introspection is its very fabric. It’s as slow as it gets and you get very little plot progression from its near-thousand pages. But here each character’s consciousness feels as vast and deep as any ocean; consequently the small town of Middlemarch feels just as large, until there is little room for narrative and much room for reflection.


“She was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts. For now the thoughts came thickly.”

Much has been said about Jane Austen’s use of free indirect discourse- that is, third person narration that adopts a character’s tone and thoughts. As Austen’s clearest successor, George Eliot, aka Mary Ann Evans, follows suit but amplifies the melancholia and strips away much of Austen’s irony. For me, the technique is so effective partly because it gets at the heart of what literature does better than any artform- splintering consciousness, specifically into the act of feeling and the act of reflecting upon feelings. If today, like Dorothea, I were to find myself in grief, I’ll probably write down my feelings not necessarily because I want to quell them, but because I want to materialize them as if my feelings were my own companions; flimsy, shapeless, sometimes obtuse, but companions nonetheless.

“Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina. I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly.”

Who is sorry? Presumably the abstract being that is the omniscient third person narrator, but almost no line of omniscient narration has hit me as hard as this one (especially in the narrative’s context). If I had to explain why, it’s something like the narrator, in its capacity not just to know everyone’s grief but have a grief of its own, becoming an embodiment of sorrow itself, the cloud that hangs over the town of Middlemarch and glides through everyone’s broken selves. Perhaps most importantly, that imposing voice of narration is always there to remind us that behind every gesture, every simple motion, every brush between two arms, there’s a sea of feelings, memories, regrets, and aspirations. Very much the type of novel that teaches you to find beauty in all things quotidian.

“Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not?-- How can we live and think that any one has trouble--piercing trouble-- and we could help them, and never try?"

I hope I can become more like Dorothea Brooke. Like her, I’ve had lofty ideals that inevitably withered away and left me retracing my steps. In the past I could partly afford to be an idealist because, like her, I don’t live a particularly difficult life. I have more blessings than I can count, but my life is increasingly becoming punctuated by a sense of guilt over it. There is so much suffering in this world and it’s so easy to freeze and retreat into our own corners, especially when you can afford to. But Dorothea becomes compelled to think what I’ve now come to suspect: that meaning is found in fragments, in simple but unwavering steps that may or may not add up to a general good. Though it may be that no image is beautiful which does not crack and wither with time, doing something within our means is essential, the smallest act of kindness being capable of feeling cosmic and grand. I hope I can become half the person Dorothea is and do whatever good I can with the blessings I’ve been given.