Reading: Middlemarch
Jan. 2nd, 2019 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI'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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 06:15 pm (UTC)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.)