Where to begin? This novel has it all and is a great read. Eliot takes on a very broad scope in Middlemarch and creates a wonderful description of life in a 19th century English town, while at the same time prefetching psychological insights from the 20th century. Her novel is rich in intricacy both in its characters and its plot, but at the same time it does not get mired in complexity or become difficult to follow. Someone asked me what Middlemarch was about when he heard I was reading it and again, where to begin? Some highpoints:

- The novel for me anchors on three women: Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary, each of whom are wooed by multiple suitors. I loved the reality in the difficulties of the marriages that transpire, and the inevitable comparisons to what might have been better matches. There are some great chapters in the later books on the relationships as they've developed over time; these are very satisfying and come as crescendoes.

- The struggle in coming of age, evidenced in Ladislaw, Lydgate, and Fred; two of whom struggle to "find themselves", and all of whom face life-changing decisions for careers or partners in "small moments".

- The portraits of the elderly, from the mellow (Farebrother, Cadwallader) to the crotchety (Featherstone), and the memorable scenes of death and last wishes.

- Scandal. Honor and dishonor. Dark histories (obviously Bulstrode, but also revealed in Lydgate's first marriage). The evil Raffles, a character that seemed channeled from the best of Dickens.

- The rest of Eliot's flushing out of "real life", from banter between siblings (Celia/Dorothea, Rosamond/Fred) to rivalries (within both groups of clergymen and doctors), to politics, gossip, children, the railroad as the beacon of progress to be both embraced and feared, etc etc

At the time she wrote Middlemarch, it is clear that Eliot had become very wise about life and people through her own experiences, and had also matured as a writer. The result is an outstanding book.

Quotes:

On youth:
"If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new."

On courtship:
"Young love-making - that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to - the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung - are scarcely perceptible; momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust."

On marriage:
"The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same."

"In her snowy-frilled cap she reminded one of that delightful Frenchwoman whom we have all seen marketing, basket on arm. Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry - the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy - 'Such as I am, she will shortly be.'"

"How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side - himself in fact a subject - while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better!"

"Those words of Lydgate's were like a sad milestone marking how far he had travelled from his old dreamland, in which Rosamond Vincy appeared to be that perfect piece of womanhood who would reverence her husband's mind after the fashion of an accomplished mermaid, using her comb and looking-glass and singing her song for the relaxation of his adored wisdom alone. He had begun to distinguish between that imagined adoration and the attraction towards a man's talent because it gives him prestige..."

"There as a gathering within him an amazed sense of his powerlessness over Rosamond. His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on every practical question."

On growing into middle age, and giving up the dreams of youth. This one hit home:
"For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as they ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change!

On misperception of meaning in events; I found this very profound:
"Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent..."

On Christianity:
"I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest - I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much."

On the enjoyment of life:
"For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self - never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted."

On death:
"When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness, 'I must die - and soon,' then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwords, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first."

Lastly, there are many quotes that highlight the hypocrisy of men's view of women (enough to fill a book for feminists), and this is probably not the best example as it's a bit more oblique, but it stuck out for me in a Victorian novel:
"The remark was taken up by Mr. Chichely, a middle-aged bachelor and coursing celebrity, who had a complexion something like an Easter egg, a few hairs carefully arranged, and a carriage implying the consciousness of a distinguished appearance.
'Yes, but not my style of woman: I like a woman who lays herself out a little more to please us. There should be a little filigree about a woman - something of the coquette. A man likes a sort of challenge. The more of a dead set she makes at you the better.'
...
'Ay, to be sure, there should be a little devil in a woman,' said Mr. Chichely, whose study of the fair sex seemed to have been detrimental to his theology. 'And I like them blond, with a certain gait, and a swan neck. Between ourselves, the mayor's daughter is more to my taste than Miss Brooke or Miss Celia either." ( )

(a very few spoilers) How does one really go about writing a review for a novel like Middlemarch? There’s just so much here, a great cast of characters, good story, beautiful--if difficult--prose, preternaturally acute observations about human and individual nature, philosophy, politics, religion, art, science, family relations, marriage… and the list goes on. I enjoyed this novel immensely and place it among my top 3 favorite novels. I finished it over a week ago but haven’t stopped flipping back through it yet.

The action of the novel takes places from 1829 to 1832, about 40 years before the writing of the novel. This was a time of great change in England that must have been very disorienting—the Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the death of George IV in 1830, the spread of the railways, the outbreak of cholera in 1832, and the domestic unrest leading up to the First Reform Act of 1832 (the novel closes in the spring of 1832—the Act was passed in the summer).

Against this backdrop of uneasy change we find a number of characters who yearn to do great things, though they don’t all know exactly what, and to establish a sense of order and meaning in their lives and the world around them. Mr. Casaubon works on his “Key to All Mythologies,” a scholarly volume which will elucidate the universal principles that lie behind all religions; Tertius Lydgate wants to find “the one primitive tissue” that makes up all living things; Dorothea wants to find a way to connect her life in the present with the great scholars of the past, and to connect here and now with people who need help. In reading of their quests, I was reminded of a dear professor who used to speak of a search for unity (in all its various guises—we were speaking of music theory) in connection with a search for God and ultimate meaning. This is the feeling that I get when I read about the characters’ struggles, and when Dorothea tells Will, “I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl.”

None, I daresay, of the characters reach the true heights of the good that they want to do in the world. Very few of us do. But in Middlemarch, this doesn’t come off as tragedy. George Eliot, describing herself, said that she was neither an optimist, nor a pessimist, but a “meliorist.” She believed that humans were making progress toward a better, more equal society, and that the world could be improved through human action. Though our (and their) individual lives may not seem to add up to much, Eliot writes of Dorothea, “…The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” I find this to be a great consolation.

I’ve tried and so far failed to wrap my head around the structure of the novel. But I can say that the whole thing appears to be a big, criss-crossing web of relationships. Any given character can be tied to most of the other characters in the novel—sometimes practically all of them. The “diffusive” effect that Eliot describes in speaking of Dorothea applies to the other characters as well; a single action often travels along the threads of the web and affects multiple characters. The idea of unity is expressed by making each character and group a part of a greater whole.

Eliot clarifies the moral aspect of each individual as a single part of a whole by juxtaposing selfless characters against self-centered characters. The finest characters in the novel are fine not because they are perfect, but because they are clear-eyed about themselves and sympathetic toward others. The characters who suffer most often bring their pain on themselves through their egoism and lack of self-perception. One character is so egoistic that she can’t imagine that she is ever in the wrong; another character believes that God Himself sanctions all his actions and breaks into a panic (with drastic moral consequences) when it appears that his moral failings may be revealed to the town. Dorothea and Edward Casaubon’s marriage is ruined in great part because of his fear that she is inwardly criticizing him and his jealousy of another man; as well, he has lived by and for himself for so long that once he marries Dorothea, he finds that he simply doesn’t have room for her in his life. The tragedy of this marriage is all the more maddening because Mr. Casaubon so needlessly drives a stake between himself and Dorothea—you sense that if he could just get outside of himself, the troubles would be over.

Speaking of marriages, I very much enjoyed reading about the different marriages in Middlemarch. The novel doesn’t end in weddings, like so much 19th century Brit Lit—the weddings are only the beginning, and then the real work happens. The marriages aren’t all bad, either; for one, I found very much to admire in Mr. and Mrs. Garth’s marriage. They complement each other well; they accept each other’s faults cheerfully, and they never speak ill of each other to their neighbors. The Garths, including their daughter Mary, may well be my favorite characters in the novel. (But it’s so hard to choose!)

Middlemarch ranks with Les Misérables as the finest moral fiction I’ve read. When Dorothea speaks of finding out her religion, she says that the belief that comforts her is this: “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower." Later, she will say, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” The self-examination and struggle for meaning that many of the characters go through is truly inspiring, and there’s much to learn from this novel. Eliot writes during one scene (bless the intrusive narrator!), “Some one highly susceptible to the contemplation of a fine act has said, that it produces a sort of regenerating shudder through the frame, and makes one feel ready to begin a new life.” Fred Vincy felt it, and so did I. And Eliot’s finely-tuned and finely-timed sympathy always shows up just when you are ready to pronounce a final judgment on a character—just as you’re about to say, what a bad guy!, her intrusive narrator intervenes and says, but hey, look at what he has going on inside him—don’t you sympathize?—and really, are you sure that you’re the one to judge him? Don’t you do the very same thing sometimes? And you have to say, well, by gum, I do.

And to add to all the above (seriously, if you haven’t read this novel, just stop reading my review and go read Middlemarch instead!), there is a magic to George Eliot that transcends character and plot. Just one example: each chapter has its own epigram. One chapter is preceded by a lovely bit of verse (written by Eliot) describing the sympathetic resonance of a bell. To determine the pitch of a bell, Eliot explains, one need not strike it directly; one can instead play a flute into the bell, and when it hits the right pitch, the bell will vibrate in unison with it. The chapter then describes how one character ends up falling with another quite instantly. He has up to this point flirted with her but resisted any serious attachment; but at the falling of her tears, his heart is touched, and it “[shakes] flirtation into love.” I read this scene with the idea of the sympathetic resonance in mind, and the power, the thrilling awe and beauty of the integrated experience has been burned into my brain forever.

Read Middlemarch. Read it now. ( )

http://englishmajorjunkfood.blogspot.... ( )

This is a FREAKIN MASTERPIECE. I was expecting a very Jane Austen-ish sort of thing, but it's very different. She has kind of the same wry, ironic, witty voice, but this is no romantic fairy tale. It's realism- it's what happens after the wedding, it's hardships and relationships and some happy endings and some not. It's life. Five stars. Bravo. Standing ovation. ( )

Now THIS is what a novel is supposed to be like...the first 100 pages led me to believe it would be a more intellectually rigorous Jane Austen, focused around the life of Dorothea Brooke and her ill-advised betrothal to the ancient scholar Casaubon. Then George Eliot widened her lens to explore dozens of people in Dorothea's 19th century English village, and although for a while I cried "Stop introducing new characters already!" by page 400 I was wishing the book would never end. The author explores marriage, the life of the mind, the workings of society, the meaning of real virtue, the absurdity of vanity...human character generally. She doesn't spare her characters, but she's compassionate toward them, sees their limitations but does not (quite) condemn them. Thus she is able to create Dorothea as a modern saint, a second St. Theresa, and make her convincing. Read this -- it will teach you what a novel can accomplish...