Middlemarch

Your browser does not support HTML5 video. So disappointed. I just opened my books, including this one. The book pages a tethered at the edges, and the middle hand full of pages are CUT at the top (see video) and at the bottom where sentences were missing. I did not mind the top being cut, but I am not up for guessing what sentences are missing.

This is a very great edition that would be even better if annotated. But the introductory essay by Francine Prose almost makes the price worth it alone. The Norton edition is annotated very well with supplementary essays, but the font used in it almost makes Eliot\’s fine work unreadable. Solution? Read this Edition and keep the Norton edition close by for the footnotes and essays.

Much has been written about MIDDLEMARCH since its publication in 1871-1872. It is considered by many to be the greatest English language novel ever written, a “cathedral of words.” What more could I add? The Victorian prose style and historical references aside, MIDDLEMARCH, at its core, seemed to me a perfectly modern novel. The predominant themes of marriage, gossip and rumor, debt and finances, chance and self determination, prejudice, pride, and conformity run through the novel, as they do our lives today. Reading MIDDLEMARCH, one realizes how little we\’ve changed over the last 146 years. Dorothea and Casaubon marry for the wrong reasons, trapped in misery. Banker Nicholas Bulstrode\’s past deeds return with a mysterious man with catastrophic consequences. Calumny ruins physician Lydgate, even as his wife, Rosamond, schemes behind his back to retain her lavish style. Will Ladislaw wants what he cannot have. And so it goes for the inhabitants of MIDDLEMARCH amid the larger events of the time, cholera epidemics, political and religious upheavals, and the rapid English industrialization. Some might think this an unlikely comparison, but MIDDLEMARCH is much like Joyce\’s ULYSSES in the manner in which Eliot, like Joyce, gives us a novel of epic proportions, not around kings and heroes, but around those of the provincial life, the ordinary folk, something that is echoed in the final line of the novel, in Eliot\’s brief Finale: “… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” [838] Unlike most novels, there is no single protagonist: MIDDLEMARCH itself, the communal web, holds everyone fast, in all their varied interconnectedness. I won\’t pretend that it’s a quick read. It\’s not. But I enjoyed MIDDLEMARCH so much more than I expected I would. Five out of five stars.

As a much older person rereading this classic that I had supposedly \”studied\” as a student, I can only marvel at its brilliance and elegance. George Eliot was at the top of her form: her insight into the foibles and motivations of a wide range of characters, her awareness of the intellectual and scientific cross-currents of her time, subtleties of subcultural differences in society, mastery of plot and dialogue are to be wondered at. Of course, the ornate weave of her sentences takes effort to absorb, especially to a modern reader accustomed to clips of meaning. Her writing remains as fresh today as it was in her time; the crafty aphorisms, so much admired in Victorian times, still thrust themselves into memory.

This Harper Perennial edition is the paperback version to buy of this enduring classic of 19th-century English literature (published: 1871-72). Like most Great Literature, this isn\’t an easy-breezy book to read. But if you immerse yourself in it, you\’ll be rewarded by its very human and sensitively drawn characters, and their frequently interwoven lives and stories. Eliot\’s beautiful writing sensitively portrays deep – and intelligently perceptive – insights into the human condition and relationships: the errors in judgment; the strivings, losses, and gains; the tempestuous loves and hates; the complex motives, longings, and machinations; the strengths and weaknesses; the politics and power-plays; the hopes, disappointments, aspirations, and hearts of her finely and vividly etched characterizations. This is a hefty, well-made tome (838 pages), but easy to read on excellent, quality paper, with a helpful Introduction by Francine Prose. (Reading it, I almost think of it as the \”English \’War and Peace\’ \”!) Very highly recommended. An excellent, and proud, addition to anyone\’s library. 5 STARS

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