Reading: Middlemarch

[white_hart]

I've been surprised, since mentioning that I planned to re-read Middlemarch over the Christmas and New Year break this year, how many people have commented to say that they disliked it and struggled to get through it. I'd only read it once before, and that was while I was at sixth form (so probably 1991, though it may have been early 1992), but I very much enjoyed it then and the only reason I haven't re-read it before now (including when I was supposed to read it at university) is because of the difficulty of finding the time to read a 900-page book through all the years when I was reading painfully slowly; it took the combination of having managed to build up my reading speed to the point where I can confidently expect to read an average-length book in a week, and having a clear fortnight with very little to prevent me reading, to feel confident enough to attempt a re-read.

Even at a distance of nearly 30 years, I was surprised how clearly some scenes and phrases had stayed with me (including a surprising number of things that I could have sworn belonged to a completely different canon), although there were other things (the whole Raffles subplot, just for starters, and Fred Vincy's choice of career) which I had completely forgotten. Eliot's wonderful moments of narrative snark, which are what appealed to me the most as a teenager, are as wonderful as I remembered them, but the adult me also saw and loved her boundless compassion for all of her characters, despite their faults and follies, and delighted in the beautifully detailed picture of a community, and the various ways in which well-meaning people can move beyond the mistakes of early adulthood to find, if not always happiness and never the life they originally envisaged, at least a degree of contentment. It's a brilliant book which absolutely deserves its reputations as one of the great classics of English literature, and I hope that it isn't another 30 years until the next time I re-read it.

Comments

[kaberett]

I shall add it to the pile of things for me to read; I think I quite possibly haven't read it at all.

[alithea]

I'm going to read it this year!

[girlyswot]

I think I read it when I was 20, so that's almost 25 years ago. I loved it, especially the way the different parts of the community interact and overlap. Mr Casaubon has, however, been a spectre over my entire academic career - I deliberately chose a topic that would not require me to read lots of German because of him!

[white_hart]

He is definitely a warning to academics everywhere!

[sartorias]

I love that book, and reread it every few years. I think the ending is among the top best endings of any book written in English. It is not without its flaws--Ladislaw is very much a female wish-fulfillment male, rather flimsy, especially compared to the much more complex male characters elsewhere--but I cut major slack for Elliott because I like seeing Dorothea get her reward of happiness after all the self-sacrifice.

[white_hart]

I don't like Ladislaw much - he's nice enough, but very shallow, and I could easily see him turning out to be a Nice Guy (TM), but he makes Dorothea happy and she deserves that. I think the "perfect" marriage would have been Dorothea and Lydgate, which is never floated as more than the faintest of could-have-beens (by the time they meet Dorothea is already engaged to Casaubon, and Lydgate is too concerned with appearances to realise it anyway), and then Eliot spends the rest of the novel showing us how things turn out more or less OK for both of them despite this (and Dorothea is still the person who turns Lydgate's life round for him).

[sartorias]

Yep. I agree.

[mountainkiss]

Oh I love the book! It is one of my favourite classic novels ever. I court controversy by saying I think it's far, far better than anything by Austen, though other tastes may differ.

[white_hart]

I honestly don't feel able to compare it with Austen - I know they get lumped together as nineteenth-century women writers, but they're so different it makes the comparison meaningless.

[mountainkiss]

Fair comment. I suppose I'm comparing impact on my thinking and emotions rather than the books per se.

[white_hart]

I love both of them and it really just depends what I'm in the mood for. Middlemarch is on such a grand scale it can be hard to find the time and space for it, whereas Austen is much easier to read, and they both tell a lot of really significant truths about how people are.

[cosmolinguist]

I agree with this!

[cmcmck]

I know what you mean!

I grew up with Dickens, coming, as I do, from his home town and there are bits of his work that remain with me fifty plus years on, crystal clear.

[white_hart]

I haven't read as much Dickens as I probably should have done, because I always get really annoyed by his female characters. The only one I really like is A Tale of Two Cities.

[cmcmck]

I know what you mean although there are some (though not enough) immense female characters- Nancy, in 'Oliver Twist', for example.

[oursin]

I think I am due a re-read.

[el_staplador]

I'm going to reread it this year. It's so good.

[callmemadam]

IMO you can never reread Middlemarch too often! I think it's wonderful and agree with you completely about it.

[antisoppist]

I love it but I've only read it once in my 20s. I want to re-read and see how it reads two decades later because it's that sort of book, but haven't yet been able to face people's terrible marriages.

I am reading Mansfield Park for the first time instead, after being unable to get through more than two chapters in my teens.

[white_hart]

There are a lot of terrible marriages in it, it's true.

I re-read Mansfield Park about 18 months ago and liked it a lot; it's not as immediately accessible as some of the others, because Fanny is harder to love than a Lizzy Bennett, but it definitely rewards the effort.

[antisoppist]

At about 17 I decided all Fanny Price did was mope about and I couldn't be doing with her at all and everyone else was horrible. Now re-reading, I realise I must have given up at chapter 1. I loved Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion so it wasn't that I bounced off Austen entirely at that age.

[white_hart]

Fanny is not easy to like; these days I have a huge amount of sympathy for her, but as a teenager I'd have thought she was a total drip (handily ignoring just how much her anxiety and insecurity mirrored my own) and dreadfully pi to boot.

[antisoppist]

As a teenager I thought she was insufficiently stoically cheerful in adversity, like everyone obviously has to be all the time.

[girlyswot]

Mansfield Park is now my favourite Austen and although I wouldn't say I love Fanny, I admire her enormously.

[perennialanna]

I had to brace myself, and there were moments that were rather painful, but Eliot's generosity carried me through.

I had to read Mansfield Park for A-level, and I was the only person that year (40ish of us doing A-level English) to like Fanny Price at all.

[white_hart]

I am not entirely sorry that I was left to discover Austen myself, rather than studying her at any point prior to university, but that did mean I had the delights of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying for A-Level instead.

[antisoppist]

I was the only person in my class arguing that Anne Eliot was a much better heroine than Cathy and Heathcliff.

[white_hart]

But Cathy and Heathcliff are terrible!

[oracne]

I need to read this one someday.

[hilarita]

I might give it a try now I'm a bit older. Silas Marner was rather wrecked for me as a book by doing it in class for GCSE, which didn't incline me to read other Eliot. I quite liked it when I first read it, but was incredibly fucked off with it after dragging through it for nine months. And aged 15 I was not at all interested in anything remotely romantic (unless possibly it was very Gothic and doomed), but I appreciate it a lot more now, when I can also see the comedy of manners and the social stereotypes that are being skewered or otherwise.

[white_hart]

I'm not sure I did anything pre-20th century for GCSE apart from some Shakespeare, but that kind of months-long chapter-by-chapter study would kill anything. (On the other hand, doing an English degree and being expected to read three or four books a week, at least some the length of Middlemarch, didn't do much for my ability to read for pleasure either!)

I was listening to the Galactic Suburbia podcast last night and they were talking about Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing, and one of the things they mentioned was the tendency to regard writing by/about women as being less universal than writing by/about men, and the tendency to pigeonhole writing by women as being "romance" and then dismiss it because of that, when actually a focus on marriage and relationships doesn't make a book a romance. (Jane Austen Never Wrote A Romance In Her Life is a hill I will die on.)

[cosmolinguist]

I stumbled on like a ten-part omnibus Radio 4 version of Middlemarch one day when I was sick in bed and I was absolutely captivated by it. I had to read a different Eliot for a lit class like ten years earlier and really liked it (The Mill on the Floss), enough that it was one of the novels I didn't sell back to the bookstore at the end of the semester (though I'm not sure I've re-read it since, oops!), but that was all I knew about her writing before I heard this radio version.

I did read the book two years ago: as with a lot of long or difficult books I want to read but struggle with, I got it as an audiobook (free from librivox.org) and that worked really well for me. I remember being at the gym on a treadmill listening to this story, and that kind of thing. :) I absolutely loved the book.

[white_hart]

Radio 4 classic serials are such a good way to discover things!

I can’t do audiobooks - I’m terrible at auditory processing and just end up getting distracted and losing track of the narrative, but I can see that if they work for you that would be a great option.

[maia]

I need to read it!

(I love your book reviews, by the way. I don't always comment but I always read. Thank you for posting.)