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3.64k reviews for:
Middlemarch: (Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions) (Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Classics)
George Eliot
4.06 AVERAGE
3.64k reviews for:
Middlemarch: (Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions) (Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Classics)
George Eliot
4.06 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I love so much about this book I hardly know where to start. It seemed that not a single page went by that I didn't gasp in wonderment at some perfect sentence. I loved the vocabulary, with so many rich words that we don't seem to use any more (our loss). The characters were so rich and vibrant and funny that I was sad when the author's viewpoint moved away from them. I want to have the whole lot of them over for dinner! To me, this book is unfortunate proof that people are (no way to sugar coat it) getting dumber. I have been ruined for other books.
In most books I am slightly annoyed when the author interjects statements about the human condition or the character's lives. My thinking is that the author's job is to show those things in the characters, not to state them. However, in Middlemarch, the author's thoughts are so insightful and deep, I welcomed them. Here are some random examples:
"But what we call our despair is often the painful eagerness of unfed hope." "He married care, not help." "And in his [Will's:] presence she felt that agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama that Lidgate's presence no longer had the magic to create."
In most books I am slightly annoyed when the author interjects statements about the human condition or the character's lives. My thinking is that the author's job is to show those things in the characters, not to state them. However, in Middlemarch, the author's thoughts are so insightful and deep, I welcomed them. Here are some random examples:
"But what we call our despair is often the painful eagerness of unfed hope." "He married care, not help." "And in his [Will's:] presence she felt that agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama that Lidgate's presence no longer had the magic to create."
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
On my first read, I got halfway through and was sad because that meant I only had 400 pages left, and that felt like I’d reach the end much too soon. Elliot weaves so much together that the book is impossible to describe, but one thing it is, is a meditation on the different forms of love — of people, of ideas, of versions of ourselves
there's not much i can say about middlemarch that hasn't been said a million times, but for me the standout element is the characters. the people of middlemarch are both endearing and awful, full of freaks and weirdos and also the dullest people alive. they bring the drama to life in such a fun and real way.
also the ending— it's so strong it made me forget completely about the boring bits in the middle.
also the ending— it's so strong it made me forget completely about the boring bits in the middle.
I read the ?unabridged version of this, which was probably a mistake. Virginia Woolf said "Finally, a book for adults." We have plenty of books for adults these days, so this seemed old hat to me -- however, the truth is that this book was at the forefront of that "how many pounds a year" formula.
Emily Dickinson: “What do I think of Middlemarch?’ What do I think of glory—”
Virginia Woolf: “...the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
There were chapters where I felt like I experienced a whole lifetime of emotions within the space of several pages. Sometimes cited as the greatest novel written in English; I don't think I could possibly disagree.
Virginia Woolf: “...the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
There were chapters where I felt like I experienced a whole lifetime of emotions within the space of several pages. Sometimes cited as the greatest novel written in English; I don't think I could possibly disagree.
I have not taken a bribe yet. But there is a pale shade of bribery which is sometimes called prosperity.The afterword to my edition compared one of its many cruxes, this one dealing with the slow grave robbing of sin, to the machinations of Macbeth. I will raise those stakes from plot device to the narratology of equivocation: Shakespeare, previously under investigation for suspected connection to the Gunpowder Plot, currently in the thrall of absolutist witch hunter King James, is made to write a play. Antigone is not Dorothea as Shakespeare is not Mary Ann Evans, but the ideal that spreads through science and reform and literature still bumps up against colonialism and antisemitism and orientalism with nary a flickering of the critical gaze. Blink and you'll miss this amongst the much, much, much else of the quotidian world there is to see, but when such a humanitarian intellect has its tropes, therein lies equivocation.
Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettantism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.I start with the lackluster to demonstrate how one may take in all without losing one's shit over the people whose differing personal stakes means taking this book at the usual level of academic would mean a sacrifice in their realm of the physiological. This work is great because of the effort, because of the reach, because "the sign of the times" wasn't used as an excuse to stick to the safety of domestic over here, politics over there, skimming the surface of the banal and forgoing pulling up the roots for generating the Other. If you want to assure me all's well and good in the land of canonical English literature, bring me the likes of this and Lear and Canterbury, where the existence of said Others does not preclude a lack of bashing one's skull into the rock in order to get at its maser, meaner, more equivocating instincts. Doctors do the devil's work, riots couldn't possibly fulfill an ethical purpose, the matters of politics must always be off limits cause no one died by keeping mum. You can't talk gender and class and heretical leanings in any way other than the prescriptivist in the halls of classical literature, let alone discomfort without offering an answer. It would be weak. It would be vulgar. It would be too close a demonstration of the author's own sleepless nights spent wrestling over the questions of the realities of women, the violence of poverty, and the part God plays in all of it.
Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.Does Evans succeed? Does Eliot succeed? The world succeeds in calling her the latter, until I remind myself that my "world" is a tiny fraction of the population that has only been on top for an even tinier fraction of oblivion-exploded time. Then it, as it always will be until we've cracked the mathematical code of brain waves, fear chemicals, and the fabric of those apocalypses we like to pretend we've tamed into natural disasters, is natural selection. Write long enough of a tale that interweaves as many of those systems of order we fragile humans tuck ourselves to bed under as does Middlemarch, and you'll get a inkling what we've lost by splitting it into facts, then fields, then categories, then major requirements, then job description, then experience, then a way of putting food on the table. We may not yet be able to calculate the random to the point that purity or supremacy or hierarchy on the human level is intrinsically understood and may be taught from grade school to be the surest way to annihilation, we may still pay those to demonstrate understanding without an ability to transmute the most "difficult" concept to the grasp of a ten-year-old, but connection. But voice. I am not one of the ones who believe that a death of the old guard will guarantee the eradication of bigotry and all its cries of "rationality" (try reclaiming the mad and the crazed and the insane in the halls of the Millennials and see how far you get), but one who knows what it's like to live in a state where the smallest comment in the smallest corner of the Internet justifies the world entire. As Dorothea said, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know.
Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within as the first traceable beginning of our love.Quality is running close to a thousand pages and finding it too short.
---
7/19/13
"No dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know."A week ago, I had been having a fruitful discussion with a dear friend about the wide reaching parameters of social justice (my favorite), when I noticed a reoccurring theme. Boil all the difficulties down into the components of society, then humanity, then the mind, and you get a single word of surprising power: perspective. It was an idea that I had never seriously considered in its fullest capacity, and it is a coincidental fortune that I had been reading Middlemarch at the time, a book that exemplifies this curious construct that belongs to all and as a result holds a mighty sway over the complexities of daily life.
-Dorothea
Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.
-Anton Chekhov
There are many books that choose an event of deep and bone-quaking significance and extrapolate, playing out through the combination of imagination and reasoning a story of coping with such and such disaster, crises of faith, function, and physical form. The severely destabilized environment offers a fireswept soil for fertile thoughts, which coupled with the reader's attempt to grapple with whatever disaster is in the pages makes for a powerful method of delivering lessons to a receptive mind, should they find them agreeable. However, the issue lies in the fact that whatever diabolical happenstance the author chooses, it is something that is not frequently encountered by the majority of audience, and the learning is less likely to stick if the occasion never arises. This is where books like this one, trenchant in the daily life and seeming mundanities with a concern no less piercingly compassionate than those who find success in concerning themselves with the more vicious calamities, become incalculably valuable.
The grand experiment of life. You are as a result, as am I, and countless others. Many are collected in this book concerned with the English provincial life of the 1830's, a time long gone in a country that I for one have never lived in. What all these human beings hold in common with I and you, dear reader, are the rules by which they live, and the selves by which they are alive. What they may not have in common, or at least they do not with me, is the sensitive web of information that runs through their community, and the ways by which the inhabitants treat this information, their perspective of things. More often than not, if the title of Middlemarch been replaced with that of Vanity Fair, the implications would be no farther off from the story told.
Men, women, and the disparate channels by which it is "proper" for them to run. Noblemen, farmers, and the methods by which those of different classes see fit to formulate their interactions. Priests, scientists, and the surprising paths faith will make itself known along the lines of knowledge both blessed and dissected. Youth, age, and the impossible question of determining who knows "best", and for whom. Intelligence, integrity, and the definitions of such valued institutions that choke on pride as quickly as they culture it. The character of hope, the calumnies of coincidence, and all the stories spawned out of a breath that breed as fast as flies and leech opportunities for triumph into broken faith and resignation no less despicable or undeserved than the severest injustice. Your sense of self, your lot in life, two dice that fall in an infinity of possibilities where success cannot define itself by the standards of society alone, no matter how much it may beg and plead.
Then went the jury out, whose names were Mr. Blindman, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, Mr. Implacable, who every one gave in his private verdict against him among themselves, and afterwards unanimously concluded to bring him in guilty before the judge.There is a power in seeing the story behind each and every one of these individuals, as great a power in seeing and accepting that the compatibility of one's self varies with each and every of these souls, by dint of the facts of their existence as much as one's own. There is a power in judgment in light of the fair and the true, as great a power as reserving said judgment in light of the lack of the fair and the true, despite the judge's inexperience with said lack of the fair and the true. There is a power in the viewing of the great events with careful consideration, as great a power in the viewing of the small highs and the small lows with as careful, perhaps even moreso due to the increased resonance one's own life may have with said small highs and lows. There is a power in resignation to the woes of tragic realities, and an equal power in acceptance of the small coincidences whose resulting happiness does not lower the possibility of their happenstance in the slightest.
-Pilgrim's Progress
There is a power in saying that the author of this book is Mary Ann Evans Cross, and an equal power in saying that it is George Eliot, although this particular writer prefers the former for reasons fully reconciled with their being. As there is as great a power in saying, read this, and wipe all thoughts of soap operas and petty tales of petty concerns from your assumptions and standards of judgment. There is a voice here that occupies itself with empathy as much as it does with truth, with hope as much as despair, with faith in humanity as much as deep insight into the human condition. And she will not be denied.