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Middlemarch

George Eliot

Start date: July 1, 2018

Finish date: September 30, 2018

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May 05, 2013 Cleo rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, chunkster-over-800-pages, 2013-back-to-the-classics-challenge, 2013-a-classics-challenge, english-literature, 2013-tbr-challenge, 2013-european-challenge, 2013-chunksters

First read 2013: 4 stars

Second read: May 2, 2025 5 stars

What a magnificent creation of a whole town, which Eliot managed with a believability that was truly special. Once again, it was difficult for me to put the book down and I found myself always wanting to pick it up again, a true testament to a story well-conceived and well-written. I found myself living in Middlemarch and being part of Dorothea's struggles and triumphs, feeling as if I wanted to help Dr. Lydgate and wanting to be part of th First read 2013: 4 stars

Second read: May 2, 2025 5 stars

What a magnificent creation of a whole town, which Eliot managed with a believability that was truly special. Once again, it was difficult for me to put the book down and I found myself always wanting to pick it up again, a true testament to a story well-conceived and well-written. I found myself living in Middlemarch and being part of Dorothea's struggles and triumphs, feeling as if I wanted to help Dr. Lydgate and wanting to be part of the Garth family.

One can see in the marriages in the novel, there was a distinct pattern. While in the marriage between Rosamond and Lydgate, a selfish, unsacrificial woman made a good man much worse, the marriages of Dorothea (to Ladislaw) and Mary Garth (to Fred) were examples of where good women could make immature and unreliable men much improved.

Commenting on the book as a whole, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren have noted that there are issues with the work. They say that Eliot's creation of a whole town is a stunning achievement but that her plot bumps and creaks along. While I don't necessarily agree with them wholeheartedly, there are certainly places where the pacing is off and, where we have been given lots of information on some characters initially, their finale is tied up rather quickly. I do like the way Eliot gives historical information on many of the characters at the end; it's interesting to learn what she envisions as their life stories.

The last two paragraphs are perhaps the best ending in literature, at least for me:

"Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But 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, myself, was once a Dorothea, and I can only hope that I can keep her spirit of love for her fellow creatures which turned a possibly common life, into a faithful and great one. ...more

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