E Author

Middlemarch by George Eliot

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Few novelists have ever attempted so broad a canvas as George Elliott in her masterpiece, Middlemarch. Portraying every level of social life in a provincial Midlands town called Middlemarch, she interweaves several intensely dramatic stories of love and death, betrayal and reconciliation, into one of the finest pictures of nineteenth-century England ever created. Its acute psychological penetration makes it also an exceptionally modern work, particularly in the romantic idealism of Dorothea Brooke, who often resembles George Eliot herself, and in the disastrous marriage and thwarted career of the young reformist doctor, Lydgate. Virginia Woolf called it 'one of the few English novels written for grownup people' -- and it is truly great literature that ranks among the best novels in the world."
~~back cover

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! The author has a very sly sense of humor, and an understated way with it, so that you might miss all the innuendos and rapier thrusts if you read too fast, without thinking about what's being said. The story is reminiscent of the formulaic plots of Victorian English life, but it's only a surface resemblance. Characters behave as real, ordinary people, generally -- people who must make their way in the world, people who must weigh their principles against their need to earn a living. Even the deux ex machina denouement is enjoyable, and believable.

I don't understand why I waited so long to read it!