Status Updates From My Life in Middlemarch

Eliot accomplishes what D. H. Lawrence gave her credit for doing before any other novelist: “It was she who started putting all the action inside.”

The loss of books, at least, was compensated for by new ones sent from home. “We should be miserable without books, and our old lot has been read and reread times out of number,” Thornie wrote to Lewes, in thanks for a shipment. “I can tell you that good novels bear rereading.”
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A book can also be where one finds oneself. And when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life, so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we seem to comprehend them, or even more…This kind of book becomes part of our own experience. And part of our own endurance.