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fishky 's review for:
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
It took me a while to get into the spirit of the book, and I found the last fifth or so to be a bit disappointing. Closer to 3.5, but I think for the time especially it was very daring and funny.
It was fun to read after "Shame" because it followed the tone of grandiose-vocabulary-hiding-satire with occasional innocent and yet even more cutting remarks from the 1st person narrator that both made the text quite dense and also made understanding the humor more satisfying because of it. I think it could be compared to Austen, but the characters are much more flawed and the ending was much more complicated. There's also a stronger class and gender analysis, as well as droll and still timely observations about the politics of the time.
Reading about the author made the book more interesting: Mary Anne Evans was much braver than her characters and lived a very interesting life that included an openly nonmonogamous marriage and second lover, with children from both. The digs about marriage, monogamy, and useless rules-for-rules-sake felt much richer from the point of view of a polygamous feminist and made me wonder all the more how she did it.
It was fun to read after "Shame" because it followed the tone of grandiose-vocabulary-hiding-satire with occasional innocent and yet even more cutting remarks from the 1st person narrator that both made the text quite dense and also made understanding the humor more satisfying because of it. I think it could be compared to Austen, but the characters are much more flawed and the ending was much more complicated. There's also a stronger class and gender analysis, as well as droll and still timely observations about the politics of the time.
Reading about the author made the book more interesting: Mary Anne Evans was much braver than her characters and lived a very interesting life that included an openly nonmonogamous marriage and second lover, with children from both. The digs about marriage, monogamy, and useless rules-for-rules-sake felt much richer from the point of view of a polygamous feminist and made me wonder all the more how she did it.