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Middlemarch by George Eliot | 1871–1872 | Barnes & Noble Classics | Paperback $9.99
George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories entwine, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’.
Well, if this is a novel for ‘grown-up people’ I don’t even want to grow up.
Middlemarch by George Eliot is on my list for Classics Club. (That’s a list of 50 classic books I intend to read within 5 years.) I gave it a good shot, but the time has come for me to give up and move on with life.
It’s just so damn boring.
The problem is twofold. First, I struggle with Victorian “social” literature generally. I try to appreciate it for what it is, but this genre is just not my forte. The thing is, I knew going into the novel that this is a particular failing of mine, and in an effort to get more out of the book I chose to read slowly, take notes, and divide up my reviews by book (Middlemarch is actually made up of multiple volumes).
This might have worked, if it hadn’t been for my other problem: I am easily bored by stories that reflect my own boring life back at me. Or rather, the boring parts of my life — I have to say, my life overall has not been entirely devoid of adventure, tragedy, and excitement. My breaking point came when I was trying to read through the section in the second book on the hospital board voting for the chaplaincy during my lunch break after a particularly long, drawn-out meeting with my fellow librarians. It was as though all the mind-numbing yet necessary political minutiae I’d just waded through for the past couple of hours was being replayed on the page, and it made me want to rip the damn book in half.
I soldiered on through the rest of this part of the story and even partway through Book III, but the novel had lost all charm for me. The lovely prose and little flashes of Eliot’s humor and insight were drowned out by constant thoughts like: “I don’t CARE about these people and their petty bullshit.”
I should clarify that I don’t think that Middlemarch is objectively a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad book. It’s just a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad book for me.
Links:
- Available from Project Gutenberg
- “Why Middlemarch is the greatest British novel” article from the BBC
- “Wit and wisdom” article from The Guardian
- “15 Intriguing Facts About George Eliot” from Mental Floss
Publication information: Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 2003. Print.
Source: Personal library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
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