A review by jobly
Middlemarch by George Eliot

2.0

I have no doubt that academically this is an extremely important novel and were I studying it at university I might well find much in it to interest me, but I really can't say much in favour of it as a 'good read'. Elliot's written style feels rather flat to me; there's little here in terms of striking imagery or stylistic flourish, and her sentence construction and syntax are positively labyrinthine. Of course the endless sentence is a feature of a great deal of Victorian writing, but here the lack of stylistic substance lays it so bare that it simply feels inelegant and prolix. Her characterisation and dialogue are certainly the best features of the novel, but the cast of secondary characters are often rather tedious in terms of their contributions and many of her principals are pretty unbelievable as real people - especially Dorothea, whose saintly representation stretches credibility and leaves her feeling too simplistic to be credible as a genuine human being.

That said, there's the odd good acerbic authorial aside (very much in the Austen tradition) and when the novel is actually focussed on genuinely moving the narrative forward the reader is left with enough narrative suspense to want to keep on reading (but only just).

Hard work and certainly not worthy of being credited as the greatest novel in the English language!