A review by alison_kinney
Middlemarch by George Eliot

5.0

I wish it were possible to give 6 or 7 stars, just to show how far off the charts this book goes. In 1997, Middlemarch was my favorite book. By 2000, I'd started to worry that maybe I'd loved it so much because my critical apparatus wasn't yet fully formed; I had a couple disappointing experiences rereading old favorites. Then I read Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda and was so dreadfully chagrined! Such sentimentality and bad prose and blehhhhhhhhh! I lost all faith in George Eliot. But three days ago I started rereading this one, which now ranks as #3 in my all-time favorites list (after To the Lighthouse and Lolita. And maybe I love it even more now, in my thirties, now that I, like ***SPOILER*** Lydgate, Dorothea, Casaubon, Rosamond, Fred, Bulstrode, Ladislaw, Brooks, Farebrother, and Caleb Garth, have had a taste or two of failed ambition. The novel is a love song to really good people who don't know how to run their own lives, really good faith in other people that gets betrayed, and really, really good ideas that go really, really wrong--with perfect characterization, plotting, prose, self-deprecating humor, and even a good dog joke.