You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

hannah_shiff's profile picture

hannah_shiff 's review for:

Middlemarch by George Eliot
4.0

This book spans so much of life that I don't know where to begin in reviewing it. Eliot begins with a slew of seemingly unrelated characters and seamlessly weaves them together into an inseparable and inevitable web. I'm not surprised that Eliot served as a literary mentor for Virginia Woolf -- the complexity of "Middlemarch" celebrates the psychological, emotional, and absolutely human growth in every character. Eliot leaves no character flat.

On another hand, "Middlemarch" is 900 pages long and slugs a little bit in the middle. The book mimics the slow movement and focused personal relationships of the small town of Middlemarch. Each conversation is given importance, but the necessity for detail does slow the pace of the book. "Middlemarch" follows regular lives at a regular pace, but finds worth in just that -- it gives excellence to normalcy.