Middlemarch in Around the World in 80 Books

Apr 25, 2015 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it it was amazing

Shelves: the-classics-club

I started Middlemarch on January first and lingered over it for weeks, months, before finally finishing it off during the twenty-four hour readathon. It really wasn't until mid-book that I grew to love it, the characters, the plots, the intrigues, the small-town gossip that fueled so many difficulties. I came away with a new appreciation for the power of acting out of interest for the benefit of others, bravely, despite the possible consequences. So happy I read this book. ...more

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Jan 26, 2023 Linda Martin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics, romance, historical-fiction, geo-england, fiction, 2023

This book is monumental in more than just page length. The author was an absolute genius and master of the English language and written word. She offered a plethora of wise aphorisms to ponder and created characters that will stay with me a long time, no doubt.

This is one of those books I should have taken notes on as I was reading. The vocabulary lessons alone are priceless.

Middlemarch is the name of an English village with a variety of middle to upper class families we get to explore, visit, This book is monumental in more than just page length. The author was an absolute genius and master of the English language and written word. She offered a plethora of wise aphorisms to ponder and created characters that will stay with me a long time, no doubt.

This is one of those books I should have taken notes on as I was reading. The vocabulary lessons alone are priceless.

Middlemarch is the name of an English village with a variety of middle to upper class families we get to explore, visit, eavesdrop on and make judgments about as they go about their somewhat dramatic fictional lives. The drama does get more intense near the end of the novel, but all along we see people making difficult decisions that will greatly alter their lives.

A young doctor arrives in town with innovative ideas that spark suspicion in the minds of Middlemarch residents. With such a promising career ahead, what could go wrong?

The two teenage marriageable maidens we meet at the start of the book will stay with us through many chapters so we get to see who they marry and how that turns out, for each of them.

In Middlemarch we witness pregnancies, old age, insane egos, pretentious hopes, and the finality of death. We also occasionally see compassion and charity - a light in the darkness. These characters reveal themselves in their attitudes and actions. Some change for the better and some for the worse.

It is hard to name just one theme for the book. Is it money, health, human kindness or the lack of it, wisdom, or just plain life in all its permutations? Whatever you want to learn about, there could possibly be some key advice lurking in the pages of this long-loved novel. George Eliot had plenty of good ideas and wise observations about humans and their relationships.

I read this with both a Kindle version and an audiobook. I received the audio version free of charge through Audible because I subscribe to their service. It was a great narration by Juliet Stevenson. I recommend it. The Kindle version I downloaded from Project Gutenberg - also free of charge. It has wide margins but otherwise is a perfect copy. It includes the epigraphs (poetic chapter headings) but the audiobook did not.

It is a long book, between 650 and 900 pages depending on the publisher. There are 86 chapters divided into 8 books. It took me almost a month to read and three chapters daily felt like a good speed for most of the month. I started reading more than that toward the end because I wanted to know what happened next! It helped that I read this with a friend. Her participation encouraged me to keep going. ...more

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Feb 20, 2018 Lindsey Z rated it liked it

**3.5 stars**

Since this novel is going to be a feat for me to read, I thought I'd try an "as I go" reaction style review for this one in order to keep me more interested and engaged. Feel free to respond, especially if you've already read Middlemarch.

Page 31 (2/20/18): What is even going on in this novel? I think I'm too stupid to read this. So Dorothea wants Mr. Casaubon but Mr. James wants her. And her sister Celia and she spend a really long time looking through their dead mother's jewelry. M **3.5 stars**

Since this novel is going to be a feat for me to read, I thought I'd try an "as I go" reaction style review for this one in order to keep me more interested and engaged. Feel free to respond, especially if you've already read Middlemarch.

Page 31 (2/20/18): What is even going on in this novel? I think I'm too stupid to read this. So Dorothea wants Mr. Casaubon but Mr. James wants her. And her sister Celia and she spend a really long time looking through their dead mother's jewelry. Most of these sentences make no sense to me. I'm really trying to get excited about this one, so I hyped myself up reading 5 star reviews on Goodreads. I tried to pretend like the "I'm lost in an insufferable hell" reviews didn't exist. It's also really depressing when your Kindle reading time counter keeps going up in "time left in the chapter" as you read. This one is going to be a long haul. My Kindle estimates that I have 20 hours left in the book. Yikes.

I am starting to catch on to Eliot's snarky humor in regards to gender issues, though, and I'm appreciative of that. Here's a gem so far in the opening pages: "Certain these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very useful members of society under good feminine direction, if they were fortunate in choosing their sisters-in-law!" OK, Elliot, I'll keep reading.

Page 117 (2/21/18): I finished Book 1 and things are really picking up for me in this novel. After taking about 30 pages or so to adjust to 19th century syntax and diction (I've been reading way too many contemporary novels lately), I've started to really enjoy the story. And Eliot's humor is on point. I can see that she's setting up all of the relationships and love interests--and even though there's a lot of falling in love swiftly or at first sight (in conventional Victorian fashion), I have actually started to care for these people and their relationships. Some quote gems from Book 1: "pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty." and "A woman dictates before a marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards." and "If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?" Eliot has an incisive perspective about the world: how society works, human nature (our vanities and simultaneous desires to do good), and the station of women in early 19th century England. I also learned that "oh, fudge!" was in vogue back in the 1870s. Yes, there are some sections of excessive droning but Eliot's wit and writerly intellect help to temper and often outshine those moments. Reading on excitedly...!

Page 218 (2/25/18): I can't say that I loved Book 2. In fact, I found most of it quite tedious, especially all of the stuff about Lydgate (who dominated most of the book) and his political dealings with the hospital and clergy crew. Honestly, all of that bore me. But towards the end we get back to Dorothea and her new marriage and things start getting more exciting. Eliot seems best when crafting conversations between people and so her lengthy descriptions and musings in between actual human encounters in this book weren't nearly as appealing to me.

Page 308 (3/4/18): The second half of Book 3 picks up with much more love and family drama. Some of the more interesting characters reappear, like Mary Garth. And Eliot nails her depiction of our selfish human tendencies when someone we might inheret money from dies. Her narrator says, "The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots."

Page 409 (3/11/18): HALFWAY DONE! Book 4 was a mixed bag for me. Sometimes it was brilliant and witty and I was drawn to the developing character relationships but other times it droned on about Middlemarch politics which, if I haven't stated this clearly enough yet, I honestly don't care much about. In fact, I had to look up a couple of chapter summaries and characters because people flitted in and out of the chapters so quickly that I had no clue who they were, who they were related to, or why they mattered. So that was a bit of a challenge. I know all of the inheritance and backstory stuff will prove to be important but right now it's just bothersome to me. Eliot continues to be deftly aware of our really terrible human tendencies, like being completely selfish and getting in our own way in our goal to be happy. For example, here's a great observation in Book 4: "Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self." I sense that the "setting up" is nearing the end and that the various threads will intersect and create a remarkable tapestry of literature, like everyone says will happen. Am I being too hopeful here?

Page 637 (3/24/18): This novel is starting to pull at my heart strings a lot more. The entire section in Books 5-6 between Rosamond and Lydgate was breathtaking. Wow! Eliot so brilliantly traces the complexities of a marriage, including its power dynamics as a result of gender roles and its full emotional spectrum. I was blown away by this section of writing. One critique from the last bit of reading that I've noticed over the course of the novel: the pacing is a bit off for me. She spends long stretches of time on a single situation but then all of a sudden a character has a baby and the baby just appears. And because of those long stretches of time spent on single situations, we are away from characters for equally long stretches of time. For example, I want to know so much more about Mary Garth but she doesn't appear much at all in these pages. Maybe in the final pages she will. I only have 160 pages to go!

FINISHED! Some final thoughts: Eliot is brilliant at articulating human tendencies, the restrictions yet beautifies of marriage, and the unfortunate gender roles and expectations in 19th century England. I loved many of her characters and she develops their interior landscapes with a lot of attention and care. I also appreciated her clear feminist snark and she had me laughing a number of times. She is expert at creating tension in character relationships, too. The downsides of this novel for me were numbered, however: I mostly enjoyed picking this one up and spending an entire month savoring it, but it was a lot of work, from looking up translations to the non-translated epigraphs she includes with each chapter (many are in English but many are not) to deciphering the political landscape of Middlemarch, I often felt a bit lost. I think studying this in a class would have made my reading experience much richer and would have made me a more competent Eliot reader. Her pacing was also off for me (as I mentioned in my last check in); some of the stretches of relationship development simply shone but there were many (and I mean many... it is an 800 page novel) of stretches that droned on and that the story simply could have done without and still had the same force at the end. Some of the minor characters and story lines I didn't care for and the big "twist" with Bulstrode didn't have as much effect on me because I didn't care too much for him. Fortunately, the ripple effects of the twist were momentous and propelled the plot forward to a climactic place. I read the last 200 pages or so of this novel with much anticipation, so Eliot is pretty masterful at building towards a climax. I honestly wavered between 3.5 and 4 stars on this one. I want to recognize Eliot's masterful craft and dissection of the emotional and social layers of humanity but I also have to recognize that there were many pages I read just to get to the parts I enjoyed. I'm really happy to have read this classic, though I'm not sure I'd read another book by Eliot. And that choice is not as much about any dislike for Eliot as it is about my lack of propensity for enjoying Victorian literature. ...more

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