The Coronation Street of the mid nineteenth century. Only better written. ( )

Wilde, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Hardy, Eliot. What was it about the Victorian era that produced so many great authors? Was it something in the water or in the air?
Middlemarch is exactly what it says it is - A Study of Provincial Life. It follows several great characters, each with there own flaws and naivete and it goes into many personal issues such as idealism and hypocrisy. Don't let that scare you though because, just like other great classics of the era, the use of the English language is beautiful and you long for several more chapters after you read the last. ( )

Many happy hours of studio work and long walks passed in the company of this original set of characters. I still want to shake Lydgate before he proposes to Rosamund, and open Dorothea's eyes before she accepts the odious Casaubon — no doubt because Eliot makes one care so much for each of them.

Personal character, family obligation, independent thought, influences for good, and one's duty to self and others play out in a small town on the stage where friendship and marriage, their reality or possibility, shape destinies. ( )

A Book You Were Supposed To Read In School But Didn’t

I'm not sure Middlemarch is actually the George Eliot book I was supposed to read in college. Eight hundred pages seems overly long for an undergraduate Brit Lit survey class. Regardless, I didn't expect to enjoy reading it any more than I would have had I identified the novel from that long-ago syllabus.

Then I started reading.

And kept reading.

And ripped through this tale of a bucolic English village in less than a week, sandwiching reading between my fulltime job and binge-watching two episodes of Better Call Saul every night.

Middlemarch is the story of Dorothea Brooke, a young woman who marries a much older man under the mistaken impression he will enlarge her world by including her in his intellectual pursuits. It is also the story of Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor who marries an attractive, self-centered woman whose refusal to face financial realities threatens to heap emotional misery on top of their financial difficulties. Woven around these two tumultuous relationships are a host of Middlemarchers searching for happiness in the midst of everyday life. Eliot narrates an entertaining tale that teeters on the brink of disaster yet manages to provide a happy ending for most of those deserving of one. Among the timeless themes she explores are sons disappointing their fathers, pious men hiding scandalous past behavior, jealousy, innocent husbands and wives harmed by their spouses' actions, ignorant strangers believing the worst about an innocent man, and acts seemingly harmful to a character turning out to be best for him after all.

My only criticisms of Middlemarch are that Eliot sometimes intrudes into the story where she would be better off letting her characters lead us to the wisdom she seeks to impart, and that several tedious scenes could be cut out of the novel and leave it none the worse. These are small complaints which shouldn't influence your decision to read this grand story, which Virginia Woolf accurately referred to as an "English novel written for grown-up people". ( )

I started reading this book with absolutely no idea what it was about, and I loved it so much that I don't want to spoil that innocence for prospective readers. So what I'll try to do is to explain some of the things I love about George Eliot's writing.

Firstly, the characters are so brilliantly drawn. They all have inner lives which motivate their actions and which are complex, contradictory and relatable. Eliot has a very sly way of describing a character in the terms in which they're seen by the rest of the world while hinting that another interpretation is available. So she might relay the general contempt that the character is held in by the Middlemarch community, but eventually you notice that the narrator herself only describes the character in neutral terms. Thus a character who could have easily become a cartoon villain has some hinted-at depth, which will invariably be fleshed out later.

Then there is the prose, which is so witty and so full of quotable lines. OK, as was the fashion at the time, there are a lot of double and even triple negatives, but otherwise the prose is very engaging. And Eliot is so clearly in control of what she's doing, and using style to deliver her message with perfect clarity. For instance, every now and again, out of nowhere, Eliot will refer to the reader in the second person, or in the first person plural ("we") and the effect on me was so profound that I laughed out loud and shook my head when I read it. It's not always a major point she's making, but it always has a perfect impact.

The dialogue is wonderful, with each pair of characters having their own way of talking to each other. Apart from a bit of rendered vernacular, which always irritates me, the dialogue isn't overdone. Yes, Mr Brookes is ridiculous, and a source of comedy, but he consistently speaks the same way and his mode of expression is not beyond the realms of my experience.

And, although there's much more to praise, the politics, history and wisdom that pervade the book add so much to the experience. The introduction of the edition I read (which I read after reading the novel, of course) casts some question over Eliot's status as a feminist, but to me she is clearly a feminist in the sense that she is carefully recording women's conditions at that time. The narrator doesn't cast judgement, to my eye, but simply states the field of action that was open to women at that time and explores the consequences of this.

OK, one point on content: I think this is a novel about decisions, but what makes it wonderful is that each decision is carefully motivated and explained. Eliot provides so much insight into each character's ideas and feelings that I often found myself momentarily convinced of the merits of even the worst decisions that characters made. Then, with a similarly sympathetic eye, Eliot follows through on the consequences of those decisions and the character's continued attempts to justify them.

So, it feels absurd for me to pass my judgement on such a brilliant piece of literature, written almost 150 years ago, but it touched, moved and entertained me in a profound way. ( )