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 | | Middlemarch (Oxford World's Classics) by George Eliot, David Carroll (Editor), Felicia Bonaparte (Introduction) ISBN-10: 9780199536757 ISBN-10: 0-19-953675-9 ISBN-13: 9780199536757 ISBN-13: 978-0-19-953675-7 Paperback 2008-09-01 Oxford University Press, USA Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description This panoramic work--considered the finest novel in English by many critics--offers a complex look at English provincial life at a crucial historical moment, and, at the same time, dramatizes and explores some of the most potent myths of Victorian literature. The text of this edition comes from the Clarendon Middlemarch, the first critical edition of the novel. | ||
Reviews | ||
Review of Middlemarch Finally. Finally after four weeks of reading I finish this novel. So, in summary, this is what I gathered from the book. This is a story about three couples - Fred and Mary, Dorothea and Ladislaw and Rosamund and Lyndgate. These six people live in a town called Middlemarch - and Eliot does not build a vague fictional town here, she details every last little thing down to pages upon pages of motives behind elections, decisions made and fainting spells. Every bit of gossip is laid out and every substantial movement of a main character dissected and looked at from all angles. In short, this was the longest book I've ever read. And I'm sad to say I just did not like it all that much. I often remarked to my family as I was trudging my way through this novel that, at times, it felt as if I was sitting and watching a snail decide which direction to move in. Now, don't get me wrong - the characters were vibrant. They could have sprung off the page, full of life if Eliot (to borrow a Tolkien term here) had not the patience of an Ent. So. Much. Detail. Ugh. I cannot get over how long this book took to read. I loved the Epilogue though (and for more reasons than it just signifying the end!) and I'm proud of myself for sticking it through and for grasping the story and understanding the significance of why she wrote it the way she did. It had to be done that way - the actual "action" in the book would have been disappointing on its own without all of the build-up. But instead of feeling a triumphant release at the ending I felt more a calm sigh of relief and had a "thank God" moment (both for it being the end and for getting what I wanted at the end of the book). I would not have read this book if I hadn't been involved in the 1001 Books to Read Before you Die challenge. And honestly, I'm dreading the next George Eliot I pick up, but at least I've armed myself with some knowledge and know how to approach it now. Bits at a time with plenty of action-filled books in between. | ||
Don't be intimidated--it is truly transcendent I must admit that I was intimidated for years by this novel. It sat on my shelf for ages, neglected in favor of "easier" books to read. Once I started it though, I couldn't put it down. I generally read really quickly, but you really should take your time with every word of this novel. Otherwise you miss sentences like the following: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." !!!!!!!!!!! AMAZING. Not to mention a lushly romantic plot that really tears you apart. I couldn't believe how breathless I was during the interactions of two of the main characters. Deeper messages aside, this was an emotional experience. I read Middlemarch like I read novels that will not be in print more than 10 years. So don't be intimidated by the density of the prose like I was! | ||
A Faithfully Hidden Life This novel by Mary Ann Evans - nom de plume, George Eliot - who lived with a man out of wedlock for most of her life and who throughout her adult life was a confirmed nonbeliever - or "nullifidian" as she would say - proved a difficult one for me to spend a week rereading. I am, no doubt, overly impressionable about literature and oversensitive to the world in which I inhabit whilst in an author's grasp. But I was clinically depressed through, say, the last few hundred pages of the book, and then felt my eyes tear in tender exultation through the final thirty. Those few hundred pages are necessary, I see again now, for making this book into a true work of art rather than a soap opera or soap box speech, but the strain on the reader - or this reader - is well-nigh unbearable. What Ms. Evans does here is to build up a moralistic universe in her provincial Middlemarch filled with humbug and cant and then bring it crashing down around the sometimes tawdry cast of characters which she deftly creates. For, make no mistake, the true heroes of this book are Dorothea ("Gift of the gods" in Greek) and Ladislaw (an obviously somewhat domesticated version of the poet Shelley). They are the hub of the wheel around which all the other spokes revolve. They are, with their ardent natures and spiritual longings, the characters that linger - at times like guttering candles - in the back of the reader's mind all through this heavy weave of a novel. We are conscious all along of the "real" life going on as it does in the "pallid quaintness" of Dorothea's "blue-green boudoir": "Nothing had been outwardly altered there; but while the summer had gradually advanced over the western fields beyond the avenue of the elms, the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an inward life which fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels, the invisible yet active forms of our spiritual triumphs or spiritual falls." In the meantime (i.e., through the greater part of the novel) Ms. Evans painfully yet deftly guides us through what she at one point calls "the irony of events." So immersed do we become in the tedious banalities of the inward lives of the characters, the human misery and spiritual stolidness of these village worthies that the entire world comes to seem a very washed-out realm indeed. So that when things finally do come around for Dorothea and Ladislaw, the cosmos of Middlemarch is turned upside-down in a wondrous moment: "The wind was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind: it was one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle pause with a certain awe."----For Lo! The two soul-mates of the novel have - the ultimate taboo in a world ruled by class, money fears and concerns, petty gossip and scandal that can ruin one - tremblingly, kissed! The reader can have no idea how breathtaking and world-shattering this moment is from this review. It comes after hundreds of pages in which the one has been dragged through the spiritual wasteland of Middlemarch, in which men and women have had their souls and livelihoods crushed by the mundane and quotidian, described by Ms Evans with Inquisitorial detail. One has begun to wonder if love, yes love, exists at all in the world. For, again, it is exalted, Romantic love with which Ms. Evans is primarily concerned, thrown into sublime relief by her detailed, plodding description of the drab world. To lift a phrase from the last sentence in the book, it is for those who have "lived faithfully a hidden life" - much as Ms. Evans did - which the rest of the world scorns, for whom this book is written. | ||
And after Middlemarch... George Eliot hasn't yet gained the modern pop success of Jane Austen or Edith Wharton, but I think its only a matter of time before she catches on in a big way and we see a big. lush movie version of Middlemarch. For now, dont be put off by her novels of great Victorian size. If you are used to the broad comic brushstrokes of Charles Dickens, you will find Eliot a much subtler artist. She paints very subtle shades of emotion and morality. If you have already read Middlemarch, you should seek out Virginia Woolf's essay on Eliot in her book, The Common Reader. Also, Eliot figures highly in Sandra Gilbert's study of Victorian literature, The Madwoman in the Attic. | ||