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

[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!