George Eliot - Middlemarch

A vast cast of characters in an English town and its surrounding countryside cope with the challenges of love and marriage, as well as politics, propriety, and money. Past misdeeds come back to haunt the characters and illusions are shattered.
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No... just.. no. This is a Huge book. The page and print quality are crap.

I personally didn't like the story (the bit I read), but that's more personal taste and I won't judge it beyond saying that... but there are better editions... as in all of them.

A great work of a master pen that shows life in an imaginary little town in England . Here the reader is able to travel in time and be part of that town , learn about uses and prejudices .
A work that deserves be read , wonderful use of the language

I'm amused by the store's four questions about this novel. "Middlemarch" is, to my mind, the greatest novel ever written. (And I've read a good many ;-). I'm a Ph.D. lecturer in English at a large public university who has been teaching for 25 years.) Just read the thing.

"Middlemarch" gives the reader an in-depth study of the culture and personality types one finds in England of the early 1800s -- along with a fascinating story and themes appropriate for the that day and ours. However, the book is overwritten and could use heavy editing, particularly where older English usages and expressions dominate descriptions.

An insightful review of English life and manners in the era immediately preceding the reign of Queen Victoria. Customs of the time are portrayed so well that the reader can easily imagine himself participating in this colorful time. But the author's insights into the characters' personalities, although wordy, are truly remarkable and have a universality applicable to all human behavior.

First of all, it's ABRIDGED. It arrived in a shattered case, and inexplicably included a ruined Jane Eyre disc 1; I threw both away. But Middlemarch plays, and it was cheap, so I kept it. Hope to avoid this vendor in the future.

The book arrived and had no copyright or publishing information inside. The font changes throughout the text are distracting. The binding came undone when a quarter of the way through the book. Very disappointing presentation of this renowned author's work.

YOU ARE NOT RECEIVING A COPY OF MIDDLEMARCH WHEN YOU BUY THIS! This is trash, and bordering on fraud. printed when ordered apparently from a pdf or something. NOT EVEN THE FULL BOOK! Not made by any sort of publisher. Move along!

judged as one of the best books ever written in English, I have no reason to disagree. Perhaps a bit 'slow' for contemporary readers but so muti-layered that it merits a second read.
This particular edition has a few typos.

I can't give a complete review because the book is too boring to finish. The writing is old-fashioned and grammatically correct, but the content of the sentences varies greatly from philosophically brilliant to trivially annoying. The author's characters seem to be caricatures of people she looks down on in some way, and to prove how silly she thinks humanity is, she goes on and on about the most mundane things. There is an interesting plot in there somewhere, but it's really hard to find. I'm just going to read a summary of the plot somewhere, and have done with it.

I had already read a library copy of Middlemarch and was looking for a beautiful edition for future rereading. This particular edition is so tightly bound that it is hard to hold it open as you are reading and the problem increases the closer you get to the middle of this great tome. It takes both hands to hold it open, and then you notice that the block of pages is crookedly aligned with the cover while you're trying to read it. A well bound book should lay flat when open.

This review is of the 2011 edition published by Simon & Brown. I got this edition from the store and was completely shocked at the atrocious editing. There are numerous typos and transpositions, so numerous and egregious that they are completely distracting and make the book unreadable. Furthermore, the chapter headings are completely mangled. Eliot began each chapter with a quotation or poem, or piece of a poem (many of which she wrote herself), and in this edition, the lines of poetry are all run together so you don't even know it's a poem! I ask you! Avoid, avoid, avoid. Wonderful novel, read it in ANY OTHER edition. Edition to avoid is: Middlemarch

Still working my way through it...(it's on my Giant Novels list along with Vargas Llosa 'War of the End of the World', and 'Ulysses' and Celine's 'Death on the Installment Plan')...so far I can second the comment (can' recall whose) -- that this is an adult book...we don't have enough adult art/entertainment in America...

I am sure I will be happy if I ever get around to reading it. I bought it by mistake but find I cannot not read it on other than my Kindle because of DRM. I have an unannotated version already on my my most used other computer. I only read my Kindle when traveling.

I love this book (I have read it before) and thought I would get it on Kindle since it is one of my favorites. Unfortunately the Kindle version must have been slapped quickly into digital format via optical character reader or something similar, with no quality check done on it. It is full of typos that would have been easily caught with a simple spellcheck, for example instead of the word "call" it said "cal:" There are numerous examples of this and it is very distracting.

This novel by Mary Ann Evans - nom de plume, George Eliot - who lived with a man out of wedlock for most of her life and who throughout her adult life was a confirmed nonbeliever - or "nullifidian" as she would say - proved a difficult one for me to spend a week rereading. I am, no doubt, overly impressionable about literature and oversensitive to the world in which I inhabit whilst in an author's grasp. But I was clinically depressed through, say, the last few hundred pages of the book, and then felt my eyes tear in tender exultation through the final thirty. Those few hundred pages are necessary, I see again now, for making this book into a true work of art rather than a soap opera or soap box speech, but the strain on the reader - or this reader - is well-nigh unbearable. What Ms. Evans does here is to build up a moralistic universe in her provincial Middlemarch filled with humbug and cant and then bring it crashing down around the sometimes tawdry cast of characters which she deftly creates.

For, make no mistake, the true heroes of this book are Dorothea ("Gift of the gods" in Greek) and Ladislaw (an obviously somewhat domesticated version of the poet Shelley). They are the hub of the wheel around which all the other spokes revolve. They are, with their ardent natures and spiritual longings, the characters that linger - at times like guttering candles - in the back of the reader's mind all through this heavy weave of a novel. We are conscious all along of the "real" life going on as it does in the "pallid quaintness" of Dorothea's "blue-green boudoir":

"Nothing had been outwardly altered there; but while the summer had gradually advanced over the western fields beyond the avenue of the elms, the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an inward life which fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels, the invisible yet active forms of our spiritual triumphs or spiritual falls."

In the meantime (i.e., through the greater part of the novel) Ms. Evans painfully yet deftly guides us through what she at one point calls "the irony of events." So immersed do we become in the tedious banalities of the inward lives of the characters, the human misery and spiritual stolidness of these village worthies that the entire world comes to seem a very washed-out realm indeed. So that when things finally do come around for Dorothea and Ladislaw, the cosmos of Middlemarch is turned upside-down in a wondrous moment:

"The wind was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind: it was one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle pause with a certain awe."----For Lo! The two soul-mates of the novel have - the ultimate taboo in a world ruled by class, money fears and concerns, petty gossip and scandal that can ruin one - tremblingly, kissed!

The reader can have no idea how breathtaking and world-shattering this moment is from this review. It comes after hundreds of pages in which the one has been dragged through the spiritual wasteland of Middlemarch, in which men and women have had their souls and livelihoods crushed by the mundane and quotidian, described by Ms Evans with Inquisitorial detail. One has begun to wonder if love, yes love, exists at all in the world.

For, again, it is exalted, Romantic love with which Ms. Evans is primarily concerned, thrown into sublime relief by her detailed, plodding description of the drab world. To lift a phrase from the last sentence in the book, it is for those who have "lived faithfully a hidden life" - much as Ms. Evans did - which the rest of the world scorns, for whom this book is written.

Middlemarch is one of my favourite books but the experience of reading it on Kindle is marred by poor formatting. When looking at the sample on the the store store the bad formatting is not obvious. Why is it the kindle editions of books give no contents pages. I am uncertain whether I want to buy an edition of this book because I cannot tell if the formatting will be any more worth it in the paid for editions. If I did not know the book really well I am not sure if I would be able to follow it with the often confusing format. The quotations at the beginning of each chapter are presented just as part of the text and their is no space between chapters which is really very bad.

The print is ridiculously tiny and skewed relative to the page; it has the appearance of being photocopied. There is neither information about the publisher nor the copyright information that you'd normally expect to find in the front of a book. The only clue about the publisher is a notice on the final page: "Made in the USA, San Bernardino, CA, 13 March 2014" (the date is after the date of my order, so the book was clearly printed on demand). Is there a reason the publisher is hiding his identity? I'm grateful that the store is giving me a refund without requiring me to return the book; it's going straight into my recycle bin.

I loved 'Mill on the Floss' when I was in high school . " Middlemarch' has received a lot of attention recently . I had not read it before but could have seen something on TV as seem to remember some of the plot . I find reading it somewhat tedious at my age [72] . I've only read the first few chapters so far, and it may get easier to appreciate later on .

Whoever printed this edition has clearly never read a book! The font is miniscule -- completely illegible -- the chapters all run into each other and there are no margins. I have never seen anything like it. Order another edition of this classic work.

This book was great and it took me some time to get up to page 746 where I found 30 PAGES MISSING!! The book was defective but, since it has been longer that the return or replace window, I cannot get a replacement. I am very disappointed in the quality of this product and now have a book hat I just have to throw away!!
I have gone to the library am waiting for a copy of the book to come in so I can finish it.

I have only read through page 9 of this edition, received it yesterday, but the sentence that endeared me to this book, why I purchased a hard copy to continue reading, is different than that on my Kindle, and doesn't provide the inward chuckle that I felt. The last sentence of the second paragraph on page 9 in my Kindle version reads: "Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them." This new Penguin Classic reads, "Some people did what their neighbours did so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them." I prefer the comma after "did" in my Kindle version as well. I do love the cover of the book but am concerned that I'll be reading words the author did not write or intend.

The story was too much about the social system in England at the time and the plot twists due to that, and the story wasn't interesting enough to make me care what happened to most of the characters. I did finish it, to be fair to this classic, but I was not satisfied as a reader. It was nothing like the Jane Eyre or Woman in White or Pride and Prejudice.

When George wrote this, apparently no one had ever written a work that looked at the repercussions of bad choice of mate; no one ever wrote beyond "And they lived happily ever after" and offered it for female consumption. This book was outrageous in its time, but not timeless. Good ghod, the author is trying to make her point with bombarding the reader with perpetual pontification... just make your point and let your readers draw their conclusions. Because the subject matter is not timeless, the book has become pointless. If it were well-written, we might get something from the historical application, but it was not. I don't have to like characters to appreciate good writing, but I do have to feel a believable connection.

Because this was a "first", some people have decided you should read it for your own good. Enjoyment is should not be a factor, here. A very Calvinistic approach; you must suffer before you are allowed enjoyment, not in this lifetime, of course. I suppose it's called "literature".

And then there is the BIG, FREAKING PLOT HOLE.

The book itself is fine. However, the font style and formatting used by the Oxford press is really unattractive, and there is no way to change the font style. You can change the size of the font but not the actual font style itself. It is a very old style and looks like something from the 1800s. I'm sure this was fine for printed books in the 1800s, but it looks horrible on a Kindle 2 screen in the 2000s. Come on Oxford, when you convert your books to an e-reader format, you need to put some thought into how the work will be displayed on e-readers. When given a choice, I always use the Oxford edition of classics, but for this book I switched over to the Penguin edition just because of the way the work is displayed on the Kindle 2 screen. Horrible job Oxford!

I love classics but I had never read George Eliot. I saw many people praising this as one of the greatest books of all time so I bought it and was excited to get into it. In all honesty, I had a hard time keeping awake. The story line was good. My problem was with the writing. I LOVE descriptive writing. Thomas Hardy is one of my favorite authors. He takes me to the village and I become part of it. I never cared about Middlemarch. I was disappointed with the character development. I only cared for a few of the main characters. There was too much philosophy, excessively LONG sentences and filler that distracted my interest. I found it very odd that in this lengthy book three weddings took place but she never wrote about even one of them. One chapter the wedding was close and the next chapter it was a month later. But we got details of medical theory, politics and went through the bidding process of many items at an auction (when only one item had a connection to the story), etc. I also found it interesting that each "book" of the book was 100(+/-1) pages long. Did she get paid by the word? I think an editor could shorten some of the sentences, take a couple hundred pages of filler out and make it much better.

These are a super hot item! Not only are they classic books that everyone should own but they are a beautiful addition to any bookshelf! The whole collection is a definite statement piece. The covers are a soft linen, not leather so they have an old fashioned feel. The remind me of the books I used to love to read at my grandparents house as a kid! Looking forward to completing my collection!

First off, there might be some minor spoilers, because this is like a review/discussion hybrid. But you'll forget them by the time you get stuck into Middlemarch.

When I was 19 and read this classic for Uni, I thought it was the best English novel on the syllabus. Years have passed and now that I've returned to it, I think it might well be the best English novel ever written. My husband said, 'But isn't it just about people living their country lives without much happening?' Some readers might answer yes, which makes the thickness seem incredible. But I love it because it's all about attitude. This book is like a magnifying glass George Eliot holds up to us, because we keep bumping into our own buried attitudes when we see them mirrored in the characters. We can't read it without wanting to make course corrections or set good thinking habits in place.

Basically, two poor marriages take place between couples who go into them assuming that what they see is what they'll get. Young Dorothea Brooke wants to make the world a better place for others, and believes it will be a step in that direction to marry Edward Casaubon, a crusty scholar twice her age, who is working on a comprehensive book in which he hopes to reveal the meaning of life. But instead of being a valuable helper to a great man, she discovers too late that he's a hopeless pedant, snuffling around in research which is already antiquated.

Meanwhile, Tertius Lydgate, the new young medical man, is seduced into marrying local cutie, Rosamond Vincy. He believes she'll support him in his genuine cutting edge research, but discovers too late that she's not remotely interested in any part of his life that doesn't concern herself. Rosamond has simply latched on to Lydgate to boost her own lifestyle. When things don't happen the way she expects, her contagious misery infects him.

Lydgate is the poster boy for those of us who may claim, 'There's no way in the world I'd ever do (fill in the blank)' But until you've tried walking in somebody else's shoes, there's no predicting how you'll react. It's wise not to throw around the word 'never' because you might end up with egg on your face. And while you're at it, it's a hard lesson to learn not to look down on those who do things of which you don't approve. I really loved Lydgate, and reading his humbling experiences was hard.

Casaubon reminds me a bit of Owl from Winnie the Pooh. He tries to project an image of himself as lofty and important, but gets rumpled feathers, because the hardest person to convince is himself. He's middle-aged with the bearing and attitude of an 80-year-old, which finally catches up with him. Lydgate's professional advice shows he's too far gone to be told in effect, 'Hey man, lighten up and smell the roses,' but maybe we readers can take it on board, in case we ever need cobwebs blown off us. Poor dude. Imagine coming to the end of your life with the fear that you might've completely wasted your time. But setting ourselves the task to know absolutely everything is just too big a goal. We can learn the lesson of this guy who tried it.

Rosamond is a princess in the most negative sense of the term. She doesn't realise that her mind filters out anything that doesn't put herself at the centre of everyone else's world. She's too well-bred to throw a complete Veruca Salt style hissy fit, but she's got the passive-aggressive sulk down to a fine art. And every disappointment is magnified to a disaster, because it adds to her challenge to get her own way. Truth be told, I thought back to some of my own melt-downs I remember in the light of Middlemarch and thought, 'Yep, I'm afraid that's Rosamond.' If you can relate too, there's no better incentive to stop the next time you might be tempted to react that way.

Dorothea is like a breath of fresh air, even though she has moments of deep depression, bursts into tears, finds herself stuck in bad moods and sometimes makes dumb decisions. In fact, the mistake she starts off with is a real doozy, but she wins our hearts easily, because her attitude of wanting to relieve the pain and discomfort of others is such a sound compass. She even tells Will, the true love of her life, 'Even if we had lost our own true good, other people's good would remain, and that is worth trying for,' and means every word. You can't get to the end of the book without wanting to adopt Dorothea's habit of seeing the best in everyone. Eliot shows through her intriguing heroine that it's not an attitude of naivety or idealism, but the healthiest way to inoculate yourself against the gossip, cynicism and disillusionment that's all around you.

Virginia Woolf famously called Middlemarch 'a novel for grown-ups.' It's hard to miss this quote if you ever want to read the book, because it's splashed around every discussion, website and on the covers of many editions, without anyone really threshing out what she might have meant. Lest you get the wrong idea, it's not an 'adult' novel as some might understand the word. It's exemplary and squeaky clean without any X-rated content. I think 'grown up' in the sense Woolf meant is more to do with the way we handle disappointments.

'Happily ever afters' are low key in Middlemarch, because characters haven't lived up to what they considered to be their full potential. It's not for lack of investing lots of toil and tears. Hopes and dreams have crashed and burned everywhere, because the chokers and creepers of real life have strangled them, as they often do.

The wrap-up chapter tells us that both Lydgate and Dorothea considered themselves fall-shorts who never achieved a fraction of what they hoped. Lydgate never makes a major medical discovery, but finds simply paying the bills and providing for his family is a major drain for him. Dorothea never helps bring an amazing book to the public, or start a colony, but she encourages others in all the small, low-key ways she can. She's basically in the gentlewoman's trap. You're technically free to do as you please, but can't do any of the the good things that fall into your head because of society's restrictions.

The novel also has its share of people slogging away at jobs they wouldn't have necessarily chosen, because that's just what we have to do. Mr Farebrother knows he would have made a better biologist than clergyman, but life wasn't designed for a middle-aged man supporting dependent females to make a sea change. Then there's Fred Vincy, who at the start of his working life, grumbles that he would have made a great gentleman of leisure, but has to either pull something out of the bag, or keep sponging off his struggling parents. He decides estate management and agriculture is as good as anything else. (I feel for him because I've got a 'Fred' in my own household right now. It's my elder son, who's almost finished Uni and hasn't a clue what to do next. Even their surnames are similar. Vince or Vincy, you've got to love 'em.)

Mary Garth appeals to me because she understands all this from an early age, putting her in a strong position. We are told, 'She had good reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, and wasted no time in astonishment or annoyance at the fact.' That helps Mary leap ahead of the entitled Vincy kids in her outlook. She's not one to be taken in by her current versions of the 'whatever you believe you can achieve' sort of messages we still wade through in modern times. I'm sure George Eliot wouldn't be surprised that even by the 21st century, we don't really grow up until we learn to handle disappointment graciously.

I didn't get all this out of Middlemarch the first time through. But back then, I was still the teenager who aspired to write the great Australian novel, earn a fortune and go on world tours. When Farebrother tells Lydgate, 'I have paid twelve or thirteen years more than you for my knowledge of difficulties,' I probably shrugged it off just like Tertius. Virginia Woolf was right, in some ways, this is very much a book for grown-up retrospection.

But even though she gives us this dose of reality, Eliot still presents a world where wonderful surprises can catch us off guard, and refresh us to keep smiling.

A middle-aged vicar, disappointed in love, can help his young rival win the girl's hand, for the sake of her own happiness.

A young man who's been diddled out of two rightful inheritances can keep bitterness at bay, and claim that his goal is to see the good and beautiful in everything. All he wants is good friends and a soft rug to stretch out on. (We love you, Will Ladislaw.)

A couple madly in love can say, 'Stuff this mean codicil, let's get married anyway.'

A wife and mother who's been used to the good life can whip off her bright clothes and jewellery and resolve to stand by her disgraced husband through thick and thin. (Harriet Bulstrode, you're a hero.)

A young doctor who has suffered major blows, including those inflicted by his nearest and dearest, can look in the face of an angelic benefactress who tells him, 'You'd be taking a great burden off my shoulders if you'd accept this hand-out.'

Middlemarch is dense and thick, and sometimes takes lots of concentration, but is well worth the time it takes to read.

If I told you that my obsession with Middlemarch began with a standing Kitchen Aide mixer, you’d expect me to elaborate. It started one summer day when I was a teenager. My friend had invited me over to her house for a movie night and sleep over. Though our families had known each other since before either of our births, my friend and I had just recently reconnected with the help of a graduation party and AOL. The joys of dial up Internet.

When I arrived, I was shown into the kitchen where my friend was in the midst of baking a batch of cookies with her mother. Her dad sat at the kitchen table reading an economics book, throwing in teasing remarks about our childhood antics while we all got reacquainted. It all seemed so…perfect. I was uncomfortably envious of my friend and her family. Two things in particular heightened this feeling. The gleaming navy blue standing Kitchen Aide mixer enshrined on the granite countertop. It was a recent gift to my friend, Gabby from her parents, since she was the glorified baker in the family. The other was an enormous, well-loved tome called Middlemarch, not far from the mixer, with a small scrap of paper protruding from the center of the spine, no doubt a thoughtless book marker.

I had heard about this book from a few English teachers. It was said to be “the quintessential British novel” but that it was overly long, had too many characters, and was overall a political novel. This too was said of other books like Anna Karenina and War and Peace (not the English novel part, but the other stuff). It was such a discouragement! Comments like these made the books seem almost beyond my reach and comprehension.

I asked about the book, wondering if Gabby was reading it for her advanced English class, and was relieved when her mom, Linda said that it was she that was reading it, and for the fifth time nonetheless. It was her favorite book, she said, and I learned that she was also a high school English teacher. When we started discussing it, and my love of Thomas Hardy, everyone else just disappeared. She took me into her study, and I had a look around her library. I was overwhelmed that Gabby could have parents that loved reading and encouraged their children to read too. Not only that, but they loved classic literature right along with Danielle Steel and James Michener.

Looking back now, I realize it was probably the first bookish discussion that wasn’t penned in an essay for my teachers’ eyes alone or some other assignment. It was refreshing. From that day on, I vowed to myself that I too would one day own a standing Kitchen Aide mixer (because what kitchen is complete without one?), and I would undertake the reading of Middlemarch.

It’s essential that you know this back story because it would explain why I own three Hardcopy editions, two kindle editions, and an audio edition of the book. It’s almost as if I wanted to prevent any excuses I might have for putting it off, and I have for fifteen years. That that I’ve finally read it feels like such a huge accomplishment!

I can say with certainty that up to today, this is my favorite book. I adore Dorothea. She is such a unique character, often described as an odd type of woman; one the is both reverenced and respected as a man. I also admire Mary Garth and her father, Caleb, my two other favorite characters. The rest of the townsfolk that round out the novel create a tasty gumbo of gossip and family histories. While politics and reform had a bearing on many of the storylines, it wasn’t difficult to understand with the help of a few online tools.

On the whole and in my humble opinion, this is a novel of marriage–its disappointments, challenges, and triumphs. It’s about the sacrifices people make and the mistakes they make in choosing suitable mates. Having made a poor decision in my previous marriage, so much about this book touched me deeply. Not that one has to be married, unhappily married or divorced to appreciate the book. So many of the genial characters where singletons, and served as a sort of control group, who although having their own share of difficulties, were still quite happy.

“Marriage, which has been bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic–the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.”

A friend’s review urged that one should really take their time in reading this book, because once finished, the characters would be greatly missed. I’ve already felt a strong twinge of sadness at saying goodbye, even if only temporarily. Like Gabby’s mom, Linda…I’m sure I’ll revisit this book quite frequently. As for the Kitchen Aide mixer? I’ve never been able to excuse the purchase because I don’t bake a lot…but it’s still up there on my bucket list, along with “Become a finalist on The Great British Baking Show.”

Every time I read Middlemarch, it seems wholly new, yet familiar, like a new day. For a college teacher like me, it can seem the greatest English novel because Marian Evans /"George Eliot" has written about idealism and scholarly aspiration. Casaubon's scholarship, which attracts the bright, idealistic Dorothea, turns out to be a chimera. Yet the novel does not condemn Dorothea's aspirations, her desire to live beyond the propertied lesser aristocratic life assumed for her if she married Sir James.
Beyond this major love plot there are several others, including another idealist, the classic reformer physician Lydgate who wishes to write. (At least half the physicians I have known, many from college days, aspire to writing, and several of them do, a couple very well. Both medicine and writing can challenge mortality, though medicine never wins, and writing does very seldom--though it can.) Lydgate's idealism attracts less than his connections, attracts the daughter of the town's religious financier and philanthropist Bulstrode.
In fact, there are few "minor" characters in the novel, each character full: Dorothea's hearty uncle Mr Brooke runs for Parliament without success, the parson Farebrother, the wealthy Featherstone, Bulstrode's niece Rosamund (who snags Dr Lydgate) and her brother Fred Vincy, and Dorothea's second love Will Ladislaw, whom she again surprises her family in choosing despite losing her inheritance through her choice.
There are more, including the blackmailer Raffles. All fully drawn.
Yet this novel may disappoint the 21st C reader. Where are the murders? The chase scenes? The drugs? (Even the first long novel, Clarissa, had drugs.) And where are the excruciating psychological portrayals, the humorless, "serious" prose. Well, Evans/Eliot is plenty serious, though there is much amusement here, too. A tragi-comedy like Shakespeare's best, the tragedy is human aspiration versus
delusion; the comedy is often that of character, interior divisions that are almost laughable, if they weren't so profoundly true. I feel I know people just like Dorothea and Lydgate-- maybe myself.
One cannot understand Middlemarch until one has lived, been disappointed, recovered one's ideals, and yes, even--to have failed. So if you haven't done all these yet--and who would wish to have--read it again in your 30s or 40s or 50s. It gets better.

A friend of mine once said: "Some books you judge; other books judge you." It is with a positive bias that most lovers of literature pick up the monuments of the Western canon: _Don Quixote_, _War and Peace_, _The Brothers Karamazov_, _Moby Dick_, _Les Misérables_, _Middlemarch_. When reading any of these immortal works, I may be led to think that there's something wrong with me, not with the book, if I do not enjoy it; this is what is meant by the book judging the reader. _Middlemarch_ (1871-1872) is one of these "judging books". One may not like it, as one may not like _War and Peace_ ("what's all this philosophizing doing here?"), _Moby Dick_ ("is this a novel or an essay on whaling?"), or _Don Quixote_ ("what do these novellas within the novel have to do with the plot?"), but if one fails to recognize its greatness, that's one's own fault. Here's my confession: it was only when I finished reading _Middlemarch_ that I realized I had just read one of the best novels ever written, and yes, perhaps the best novel ever written in English, as many people describe it.

The first thing that will strike the reader about _Middlemarch_ is that it does not have a single protagonist. Sure, Dorothea Brooke is a central figure (so is Natasha Rostova in _War and Peace_), and the novel opens and closes with her, but to call her the protagonist would be to diminish the importance of many other key characters, such as Tertius Lydgate, Rosamond Vincy, and Will Ladislaw. The novel is subtitled "A Study of Provincial Life," and that is exactly what it is. The protagonist, then, is Middlemarch, the town itself. The novel is an x-ray of life in a provincial English town in the early nineteenth century. More universally, it is a depiction of human discontent brought about by (1) misguided choices and (2) negative attitudes.

Not much can be said about the characters without spoiling the plot. A romantic young woman marries an older, more serious man. A rather austere, idealistic young man marries a woman of his age who is used to luxury and worries too much about appearances. An idle, lazy young man is not good at keeping his money; another one has artistic inclinations, and has trouble finding his place in the world. _Middlemarch_ is, as my title for this review indicates, a tale of mismatched people and missed opportunities. As you read the novel, you'll find yourself thinking, "If only X had married Z instead of Y...." But one should focus on the motives that lead to the choices, and these motives speak volumes about the society of that time and place.

That said, _Middlemarch_ is ultimately not bleak. The novel is realism at its best, and while it may be conservative in content when compared to, say, _Madame Bovary_ (1856) or _Anna Karenina_ (1873-1877), George Eliot's novel is more formally experimental than those, and represents a realist tradition that had not yet become tainted with the excessive pessimism characteristic of the naturalist movement. _Anna Karenina_ presents three marriages: a disastrous one, a reasonably tolerable one, and a good one. _Middlemarch_ is less formulaic and allows for more nuances when it comes to human relationships. Tolstoy may be a more satisfying narrator, but when it comes to dissecting souls, Eliot has the keen eye and the precision of Jane Austen. It is in fact Austen's tradition that Eliot continues, a tradition that would later be carried on by Henry James and John Galsworthy, among others. I like to think that it was this tradition that the Swedish Academy was recognizing when it awarded the Nobel Prize to Galsworthy, mainly for _The Forsyte Saga_ (see my review).

Why is _Middlemarch_ considered to be the best English novel ever written? Usually, when critics (or whoever it is that makes this type of decisions) look for The Great [insert demonym] Novel, they look to the nineteenth century, the age of the so-called "national novels". Given that time span, _Middlemarch_ competes, basically, with the novels of Jane Austen, the novels of Charles Dickens, and _Jane Eyre_. (_Wuthering Heights_ is well written too, and engrossing, but no nation would choose as its representative a work that portrays such neurotic characters.) Against the works of Austen and _Jane Eyre_, _Middlemarch_ would win because of its larger social scope: it is a panoramic novel. Dickens' works may be said to be panoramic too, but Eliot's prose is more polished than that of Dickens, and _Middlemarch_ is not marred by the structural and plot deficiencies that one finds in most of Dickens' works (let me mention, for instance, the unrealistic role that serendipity plays in _Oliver Twist_). I love Austen, and Dickens, and the Brontës. In fact, I enjoyed reading their works much more than I enjoyed reading _Middlemarch_; I'm just offering my thoughts on the coronation of Eliot's great novel.

It is needless to say that _Middlemarch_ displays an amazing understanding of women that is beyond the power of a male writer. (Here's a great line from the novel apropos of this: "Men know best about everything, except what women know better.") What is amazing about Eliot is how well she understands not only the plights of women, but also those of men. As an example, let me cite the character of Will Ladislaw, who feels more than any other male character the pressure of a society in which a man must "become someone" or face ridicule and isolation.

As I said above, I had trouble with _Middlemarch_ initially. I kept comparing it to _Anna Karenina_ and to the works of Dickens. I wanted more action, more scandalous content, more colorful characters. When I reached the second half of the novel, however, I began to read compulsively, eager to know whether the characters would manage to find happiness after all. Give _Middlemarch_ a chance. It may take a while for some to connect with it, but once they do, they'll be thankful for investing their time in this great novel.

My next Victorian novel will be _Bleak House_ (1852-53), by Charles Dickens.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the book!

George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) was a novelist of serious skill. Not only is she able to shape a big, sprawling novel about a provincial English town, but she can balance out and really delve into the psychology of 3-4 major characters as well as the numerous secondary characters surrounding them. Everyone gets a fair shake in Middlemarch; even bit players get their pathos-filled moments in the sun. The ability to pull off an 'ensemble-cast' novel that is as well focused as this is rare in any literary period.

But the thing about Middlemarch that really makes it tick, I think, is its willingness to traffic with disappointment and failure. There's no 'happy ever after' or clean and tidy resolution here the way some other British lit from this period has. Sometimes, you marry the wrong person. Sometimes you have to give up a lot to be with the person you love. Sometimes, you won't have the same economic opportunities or wealth that your parents did (that one should ring true to anyone under 35 today). Sometimes, you go broke. Sometimes, rumors and slander ruin good people. Sometimes, there is no reward at all for being the bigger man (or bigger woman).

Eliot doesn't shy away from those sorts of experiences, nor does she simply wallow in them. She weaves them into the everyday lives of her characters, just as we experience them in our own flawed, everyday lives. Middlemarch is an impressive literary achievement, and absolutely worth reading.

George Eliot is one of a few women who can write men convincingly. Here we follow the detailed lives of six male characters from different social classes in Middlemarch: the aristocrat, an academic, the businessman/politician, a doctor, artist and farmer ('farmers without landlords, one can’t tell how to class them'). Indeed, the impact of social class is a strong theme – ‘the low people, by whose interference, however little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined.’

Dorothy, the heroine, is a plain woman and no doubt based on George Eliot's own lack of beauty. She moves in circles of pretty women admired by men from the various hierarchy, but her intellect prevails.

There is so much wit and wisdom in this novel, I could quote endlessly:
‘Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored;’
‘If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial.’
‘Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating.’
‘But a prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.’
‘When a conversation has taken a wrong turn, we only get farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness.’
‘The weavers and tanners of Middlemarch had never thought of Mr. Brooke as a neighbour and were not more attached to him than if he had been sent in a box from London.’
‘Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact.’

Last week, I read of research that found sitting for long periods is as bad for you as smoking, yet George Eliot, writing in 1870, and who constantly interjects the novel with her views on the world, tell us that ‘colick, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases are caused by over-much sitting.’

I enjoyed Dr Lydgate’s journey and the insights it gave me into the medical profession at that time – the political intrigues at the hospital and patients’ fears of Lydgate’s wish to cut up dead bodies for investigation.

This story, which gives a brilliant look into English rural town life in the 1830s, needs to be read slowly like sipping a glass of warm sherry.
Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa

George Eliot is one of a few women who can write men convincingly. Here we follow the detailed lives of six male characters from different social classes in Middlemarch: the aristocrat, an academic, the businessman/politician, a doctor, artist and farmer ('farmers without landlords, one can’t tell how to class them'). Indeed, the impact of social class is a strong theme – ‘the low people, by whose interference, however little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined.’

Dorothy, the heroine, is a plain woman and no doubt based on George Eliot's own lack of beauty. She moves in circles of pretty women admired by men from the various hierarchy, but her intellect prevails.

There is so much wit and wisdom in this novel, I could quote endlessly:
‘Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored;’
‘If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial.’
‘Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating.’
‘But a prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.’
‘When a conversation has taken a wrong turn, we only get farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness.’
‘The weavers and tanners of Middlemarch had never thought of Mr. Brooke as a neighbour and were not more attached to him than if he had been sent in a box from London.’
‘Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact.’

Last week, I read of research that found sitting for long periods is as bad for you as smoking, yet George Eliot, writing in 1870, and who constantly interjects the novel with her views on the world, tell us that ‘colick, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases are caused by over-much sitting.’

I enjoyed Dr Lydgate’s journey and the insights it gave me into the medical profession at that time – the political intrigues at the hospital and patients’ fears of Lydgate’s wish to cut up dead bodies for investigation.

This story, which gives a brilliant look into English rural town life in the 1830s, needs to be read slowly like sipping a glass of warm sherry.
Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa

Originally published in eight parts from December 1871 to December 1872, it is ultimately a story about change and how deeply it is resisted by inhabitants who cling to the polite rules of society and social mores of their time. It is also about relationships and just how archetypal they can be.

Dorothea is so young and hungry for knowledge, unlike her more superficial peers, including her own beloved sister, she cares deeply for humanity and wishes most of all to be of service. Levelheaded but still refused her due by her male associations. Her agreement of marriage to a much older, learned man becomes her biggest misstep in her ideological world.

Lydgate is a young idealistic doctor, just starting his practice in a new town. He is singularly focused and rigid in his views on women until he meets the beautiful Rosamond and learns what it is to be dismissed as the master of her wishes and behaviors. Rosamond is only concerned with her petty wants and needs and the discord in hers and Lydgate’s marriage resonates loud and clear through the years.

Bulstrode is the disgraced religious banker whose shady past comes back to haunt him in his present day ministry and threatens to upend the respectful persona he has come to perfect.

Mary and Fred are young lovers who dance around each other though they have long ago declared their love and preference of one another. Fred suffers from a severe lack of confidence and must grow to prove his worthiness to Mary.

These are the major players in a beautiful, well rounded, and heavily referenced story that is full of flawed characters acting out their lots in life in the only ways they know. All are victims of their circumstances and the time. When change does inevitably overtake them, each character sits at a crossroads of their own making. Some recognize the need to act and others do not.

Eliot finishes her masterpiece with a satisfying finale and reminds us all that what we think we know may be the furthest thing from the truth. The town of Middlemarch and its inhabitants are a microcosm of civilized society, the very one many of us live in today.

Recommended to anyone with maturity and a strong sense of commitment. This is one for your book collection but makes sure it gets read.

BRB Rating: Own It

Eliot, George. Middlemarch

Like her contemporary, Charles Dickens, George Eliot’s novels are essentially focussed on money and material possessions. The good people are those who are either already well off like Dorothea Brooke or generous-hearted, like the Garths. The bad ones are avaricious, tight-fisted like Peter Featherstone or calculating like Bulstrode.

Middlemarch is an extremely morally aware book. It is centred on money, which in 1831-2, wher the action tales place, meant, as it means today, power. The morally good man works, like Caleb Garth, with his hands or his brain, like Lydgate. If he is moneyed, like Sir James Chettam then he must do good with his wealh, and not merely indulge himself. Fred Vincy, a pleasant but idle youth who has been indulged from birth, has to become worthy of Mary Garth before she accepts him. Family ties and a strict profession are essential for the upright man. It is the moral obligation of those with money to assist those less well off.

George Eliot is not as throughly appreciated today as she was in her lifetime. This is mainly because of her compulsion to sermonise. She associates love with religion; thus in one paragraph towards the end of Middlemarch we find ‘baptism,’ ‘consecration,’ ‘rectitude,’ ‘purity,’ ‘pure belief,’ ‘sins,’ ‘sacrifice,’ ‘altar,’ and ‘sacrilege’ all linked with Dorothea, the first character in the book, who is thematically paralelled with sainthood of another era.

Like Dickens in his finest novel, Gret Expectations, George Eliot, while offering us a happy ending in the somewhat unconvincing union of Dorothea and Ladislaw, presents us with a failed relationship betweeen Rosamond and Lydgate, where ultimately he sacrifices his profession for material benefits.

That’s right, it’s all about money. And love of course and the relationship between the two. This character is in debt (I’m trying to avoid spoilers) and ruining his life, that one is overspending, the other can’t marry his love because he doesn’t have a sufficient fortune, etc etc etc. Every event and love relationship in the novel is conditioned and caused by money or want of it. It’s about the idle rich who aren’t always quite rich enough to be idle, or have too much money and can’t spend it the way they want, didn’t inherit what they expected and had already counted on, etc. (Money, inheritance, and debt today don’t seem to play the same kind of crucial role that they did back in Middlemarch in 1832, because it is no disgrace now to work for a living, for women to work and earn well, etc.)

Middlemarch the novel was heavily influenced by Trollope. Indeed I would say it is Trollope taken to the next level of literary greatness. Trollope’s novels are also often mostly about money and the travails related to debt, inheritance, and income. (So also are Austen’s novels.)

Middlemarch is darker and more depressing that most of Trollope. In fact, almost nobody in Middlemarch is happy—they are all frustrated, unhappy, stunted, and fearful. Nothing is working out the way it should—(well there may one or two minor exceptions). But for all the main characters life is a dismal challenge due to financial, social, and personal conflicts and restrictions.

Having said all this I consider Middlemarch by George Eliot to be one of the best novels of all time. It is a literary masterpiece and I found it absolutely engrossing. And worth rereading—and I consider that the highest praise I can give a book.

“Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making him happy.”

“A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men. But nature has sometimes made sad oversights in carrying out her intention.”

“Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in certain circles as a wife and mother.”

It’s surprising that George Eliot did not consider herself a feminist. These lines and all her novels I’ve read argue otherwise.

In Middlemarch, Eliot rotates between classes in a small town. Dorothea Brooke is of the higher class and far superior in intellect and grace than any other person in the novel. Everyone is disappointed when she marries Mr. Casaubon, a man far older than she, a man she married hoping he would help her intellect grow. Mr. Lydgate, a new doctor, marries Rosamond, a charming and beautiful daughter of a manufacturer. But scandal and unfulfilled hopes mar their marriage. Mary Garth, the daughter of a poor but honest family, is courted by Fred, Rosamond’s brother. But without any prospects, how can Fred expect to win Mary’s affections?

Eliot is a masterful writer of psychology. Novels just aren’t written like this anymore. She often takes entire chapters to probe at a character’s psychology and motivations, building the tension slowly and carefully. This is a plot of what’s unsaid, what’s hidden. I had a nightmare while reading that I was having tea with someone and needed to tell him something, but social etiquette wouldn’t allow me to say anything, but it was of the utmost importance that he know, yet there I was, silent, playing with the handle on a teacup! (No, I have no idea what was so important.) There are so many scenes where the characters fail to speak what needs to be spoken, and this leads to some of the worst marriages I’ve ever read. Yet, unlike other Victorian novels, these weren’t forced marriages. The characters chose who to marry, but under the social restrictions of the time it seems nearly impossible to make a good choice in marriage.

Though this is a wonderful novel, The Mill on the Floss is still my favorite Eliot, and one of my favorite Victorian novels. I thought Middlemarch might take it’s place, but Dorothea is too perfect, and I love Maggie Tulliver’s waywardness and honesty. Also, Middlemarch seems like a terrible town to live in, yet I understood the loveliness of Dorlcote Mill, despite the pettiness of the townspeople.

***This review may contain spoilers, and is based on the 1977 Norton Critical Edition Edited by Bert G. Hornback.***

Back in 1987 I earned my Masters in English Literature from Northeastern University. Naturally, one of the curriculum courses was 19th century British literature and one of the course’s texts was “Middlemarch” by George Eliot (literary pseudonym of Mary Anne Evans). Probably because the class had to wade through so many other 19th century British novels, I got through the course without having to crack open this acclaimed masterpiece. At the time, I was not heartbroken because Middlemarch’s length (nearly 600 pages, although other the store.com reviewers claim the novel is at least 800 pages) and the miniscule Times New Roman font daunted me. Therefore, for about 28 years, Middlemarch sat in my bookcase, pristine but neglected.

Now, at age 52, I have started to rifle that same bookcase to read or re-read works of literature whose importance confounded and eluded me for so long. For example, I re-read Moby Dick with a far more comprehensive grasp of its themes than ever before and posted an the store.com review of this sea-faring classic. Buoyed by this accomplishment, I determined to return to “Middlemarch” and peruse it, if for no other reason but to claim the honor of having read it completely through.

Make no mistake, “Middlemarch” is a dense, intricate, extensive, challenging work eminently unsuited for a high school, or even undergraduate college, English class, unless the class members happen to be “Masterpiece Theatre” (and especially “Downton Abbey”) fans. The novel’s subtitle is “A Tale of Provincial Life”, and that it certainly is as it explores the intertwining social, religious, financial, political, medical, and aesthetic lives of the rural inhabitants of the English town of Middlemarch during the early 19th century, an era of reform. As you progress through the novel, one discovers that the word “Middlemarch” is practically synonymous with the term “provincial” in its most negative connotation. Eliot depicts the majority of the inhabitants as unduly reactionary, unimaginative, philistine, chauvinistic, sexist, and unprogressive. However, even though the novel’s structure is mainly episodic, Eliot spins out several narrative threads involving the main characters’ attempts to rise above the intellectually stagnant atmosphere and improve themselves and others.

The prominent proponent of this attempt is Dorothea Brooke, a naturally beautiful, upper-class (but not aristocratic) lady who is paradoxically disdainful of the ostentatious trappings of wealth. Not content with her status, Dorothea wishes to use her cleverness, her energy, her fierce independence, and her empathy to make a positive contribution to humanity. The primary obstacle to that, of course, is the prevailing gender discrimination of the time that believed women lack the capacity for higher intellectual pursuit. Her uncle and guardian, the farcically opinionated know-it-all, Mr. Brooke, personifies that chauvinism to some degree, but is nevertheless accommodating to his niece’s ambitions.
Despite her ambitions (and her architectural design abilities), Dorothea is not exactly the prototype of an iconoclastic feminist. Instead, she is rather pious, modest, and well aware of Middlemarch’s strictures. She may, like Belle of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”, secretly wish to shake off the shackles of provincial life, but she realizes that realistically she must be more covert and gradual about it. To truly rise, she must attach herself to someone who will nurture her intellectually and aesthetically, someone like a professor or scholar. Perhaps the learned Reverend Mr. Casaubon will do.

Despite Mr. Casaubon’s erudition and respectable income, many typical Middlemarchers disapprove of Dorothea’s intense desire to marry Mr. Casaubon, including Sir James Chetham, who has an unrequited ardor for Dorothea, and Dorothea’s more conventional, pragmatic, sardonic younger sister Celia, who addresses Dorothea by her pet name “Dodo” whenever she feels her older sister is not being practical. They disapprove primarily because Mr. Casaubon is too “elderly” (he’s 45!), sickly (his eyesight is failing and he has cardiac issues), and too engrossed in his studies to be sociable. Nevertheless, Dorothea prevails and is eager to assist Casaubon as a literary partner, proofreader, and scribe in his grandiose efforts to compose his magnum opus “The Key to All Mythologies”. But, contrary to her wishes, will she actually be more of a compliant, passive secretary to him?

The novel shifts abruptly from Dorothea’s problematic marriage to a potentially aloof academic to two other characters with their own lofty goals. The less lofty, more prosaic goal belongs to the handsome, rakish Fred Vincy, son of Middlemarch’s mayor. Despite his wit, university education and fey charm, Fred has actually flunked out of university and is considered irresponsible, aimless, and devoid of occupational prospects by the locals. Besides, his sensual indulgences and taste for the good life have incurred some sizable debt that, he hates to admit, he prays he can eradicate with a future will bequest from his manipulative old uncle Peter Featherstone. Featherstone suspects that Fred may be using his “insecure” inheritance to secure his debts and compels Fred to get a written statement from banker Bulstrode attesting to the contrary. Fred’s dim occupational prospects also threaten his courtship of “plain” but sensible Mary Garth, Featherstone’s nurse, who finds Fred “unsteady” and thus undesirable, especially if he plans on becoming a clergyman. Fred doesn’t want to be a clergyman, but can think of no other profession to enter. He feels thwarted and trapped.

The more philanthropic, seemingly altruistic goal belongs to Dr. Tertius Lydgate, a progressive physician who has come to Middlemarch to advance, discover, and employ new, better medical treatment to both help the locals feel better AND enhance his fame. Although poor, Lydgate is not primarily focused, at least initially, on augmenting his income, he does wish to preserve some social respectability. He is also not focused upon marriage, although he is somewhat attracted to Fred’s sister Rosamond as the epitome of submissive harmonious, (literally) musical womanhood and an oasis from daily work strains. For her part, Rosamond is unequivocally attracted to Lydgate precisely because he is NOT an insipid Middlemarcher, but instead a man of taste, good pedigree, and class connections. Therefore, Rosamond wishes to rise above the provincial, too, but for potentially calamitous status-conscious reasons. Notwithstanding these impediments, plus the Vichy family’s futile opposition and its insufferable Middlemarch manners, Tertius Lydgate does wed Rosamond Vincy.

Even at a glance, regardless of its perceived erratic, episodic structure, “Middlemarch”’s intersecting familial and social relationships maintain the narrative integrity. In particular, one person’s relationship extends to practically all of Middlemarch’s denizens because of his financial influence. Thus, we are introduced to yet another aspiring “riser” in the novel, the banker Bulstrode. Bulstrode confers with Lydgate about setting the physician up as manager of a new hospital in Middlemarch. However, surprisingly for his material profession, Bulstrode also fancies himself as a spiritual practitioner and believes that he can reconcile his financial dealings and his desire to serve God by “charitable work” (i.e. loans) that nevertheless demand strict adherence and compromise from its recipients. For example, he makes Lydgate’s managerial hopes contingent on the doctor’s support of Bulstrode’s choice to replace the hospital’s cleric. Such an ultimatum hints that the “devout” Bulstrode is actually a sanctimonious hypocrite. Bulstrode’s reluctant production of that exculpatory statement for Fred through Fred’s father, due to Bulstrode’s wife and Mr. Vincy’s sister Harriet’s urging, also underscores that hypocrisy, since he callously condemns Mr. Vincy for nurturing a shiftless son.

Yet another up-and-comer emerges for our contemplation – Will Ladislaw, second cousin to Mr. Casaubon and a bit of an aesthetic dilettante. Will comes from mixed Polish ancestry and, although not fond of him, harbors a begrudging obligation to Mr. Casaubon for his earlier beneficence. Having met Dorothea fleetingly at her estate in Middlemarch, Will sees her again during her Rome honeymoon. Seeing the comely, radiant Will stirs some latent desire in Dorothea, even though, as is common in 19th-century romance novels, each strenuously “denies” their mutual attraction, because of course Dorothea is spoken for. Another reason for this denial is Will’s needy circumstances and his proud refusal to get acquainted with a well-to-do woman lest he be considered a golddigger. Will won’t court anyone until he is “established” in a worthwhile profession. Yet another obstacle to Will’s professional and social ascent is Mr. Casaubon’s thinly veiled contempt of his former charge’s apparent aimlessness (paralleling Featherstone’s contempt of Fred Vichy).

One prominent theme in “Middlemarch’ is that practical, material, physical, and social obligations and obstacles usually hinder any attempt at spiritual/intellectual/social improvement. Fred’s nagging indebtedness to Mary Garth’s parents and his nagging failures to raise money to pay them have severely lowered their estimation of him. Fred cannot even count on the deceased Featherstone’s will bequest to help him because the obstinate coot altered his will at the last minute. Fred’s troubles leave him bedridden. Even after he recovers (with Lydgate’s help) and succeeds in graduating from tuniversity –mainly for Mary Garth’s sake- Fred is still unfit to get almost any job to pay off his debt and thus marry Mary. The only job he qualifies for is clergyman which both he and Mary certainly don’t want. Mr. Garth graciously offers to train Fred to help him survey and administrate his lands to help allay the debt, but Fred is an exasperatingly slow study. As an extra straw to Fred’s heavy load, Farebrother the vicar is a formidable rival for Mary’s affections.

Mr. Casaubon does indeed prove to be more of a pompous, patronizing pedant than an attentive husband. Despite her ardent efforts to please him, Dorothea harbors subtle second thoughts about her marriage and partnership. She feels increasingly marginalized. She realizes Mr. Casaubon’s heedless obsession with his fruitless scholarly research has weakened his already frail heart and constitution, but she cannot convince him to reduce his workload, even with Lydgate’s recommendations.

As for Lydgate, he endures societal disapproval and jealousy because of his operation of a new hospital and successful use of radically new medical techniques to heal his patients. Middlemarchers also feel Lydgate is arrogant and unsociable. Lydgate’s wife Rosamond finds her husband’s profession distasteful and ghoulish. To make matters worse, Lydgate, like Fred, has gradually sunk into debt because of his selfless penchant for treating patients unable to pay him, and because spoiled Rosamond insists on expensive furniture and other trappings. Lydgate frantically tries to pay the debt, even going so far as to putting his and Rosamond’s things up for security and even gambling. Rosamond’s petulant prima donna attitude does not help matters.

Will Ladislaw’s ambition is also not exempt from Middlemarchian scorn and obstacles. Even his simple wish to see and adore Dorothea is thwarted by Mr. Casaubon’s peevish and adamant refusal to allow Dorothea to meet with Will. Will’s material improvement, through Dorothea, is thwarted by Mr. Casaubon’s refusal to even listen to Dorothea’s proposal that Will receive ½ of her will inheritance due to her husband’s cruel denial of financial aid to Will’s grandmother because of her “low” marriage to a poor man. Even after Mr. Casaubon’s death by stroke, his will stipulates that Dorothea will lose her inheritance if she marries Will. Even when Dorothea’s uncle Mr. Brooke eventually employs Will as an editor for a militant newspaper, the business dissolves when despite Will’s efforts to groom Mr. Brooke as a pro-reform parliamentary candidate, Mr. Brooke dashes those efforts with a scatterbrained speech that gets him and his effigy splattered with eggs. Dejected, Will resolves to leave Middlemarch, but Dorothea’s presence keeps him there.

Never popular with Middlemarchers because of his financial influence and perceived self-righteousness, Mr. Nicholas Bulstrode faces further disapproval and disgrace from a past shameful act. Scruffy and penniless Mr. Raffles, locates Mr. Bulstrode and uncomfortably reminds him of their former business relationship. Both of them worked for a Mr. Dunkirk, a married pawnbroker. Bulstrode served as an accountant. Although he suspected that some of the goods customers hawked had questionable ownership, Bulstrode kept silent. The Dunkirks had a daughter, Sarah, who ran away from home to seek a theatre career. During her absence, Sarah had a son, who happened to be Will Ladislaw. In that same period, Mr. Dunkirk died and Mrs. Dunkirk became quite fond of Bulstrode. However, she would not marry Bulstrode until Sarah and Will were found. They were, and Bulstrode knew it, but did not divulge this information to Mrs. Dunkirk because he did not want to share any of her property with Sarah and Will. Convincing her that they were forever lost, Bulstrode married Mrs. Dunkirk and inherited everything once she died.

Raffles blackmails Bulstrode with this sin of omission: pay me to keep quiet or I’ll reveal it to all of Middlemarch. Bulstrode acquiesces, but feels a sting of remorse about defrauding Will. He tries to make financial amends with Will, but the young man refuses his penitential generosity, fearing it would stain his honor. Anyway, before dying of alcoholic poisoning, Raffles blabs to Middlemarch townsfolk, who soon ostracize Bulstrode. Unfortunately, Lydgate inadvertently shares in that ostracism when he innocently asks Bulstrode for a loan to pay his mounting debt. Bulstrode grants the loan, which convinces the townspeople that Lydgate was complicit in Bulstrode’s sin.

Dorothea, Fred, Lydgate, Will, Bulstrode – all had noble, idealistic hopes to rise above their stifling surroundings and make a better living for themselves AND a lasting contribution to the world. Yet sadly, it seems that stubbornness, poverty, debt, greed, hypocrisy, oppression, and pride, in one form or another, have quashed those dreams. Nevertheless, Eliot reassures us that in spite of the interconnected, intertwined ruins these main characters have created, things still can be made right. You can better yourself and the world, but you don’t need a complicated, elaborate scheme to do it. Kindness and the belief in the goodness of others is more than enough. Dorothea alone seems to realize this, as she resolves to intercede on Lydgate’s and Will’s behalf to show these dense Middlemarchers that they are indeed honorable, good people worthy of help. Can she restore Lydgate’s reputation? Will she finally acknowledge her concealed love for Will? As for the other main characters with whom Dorothea doesn’t interact, will Fred find his true calling and prove himself worthy to Mary? Will Bulstrode redeem himself? In other words, will they all achieve their dreams in spite of everything? “Middlemarch”’s epilogue illustrates that some of the main characters rise above provinciality and others don’t, and that some rise serendipitously, that is, not the way they intended.

As some the store commenters indicated, author Virginia Woolf considered “Middlemarch” a novel exclusively for grownups. I agree, especially if these grownups have abundant leisure time to devote to this vast novel, and are willing to annotate their book copy. Regardless of the novel’s superficial, melodramatic façade, and its occasional verbosity and maddeningly recondite sentence structure, “Middlemarch” has a plethora of observations about rationalizing and justifying human motivations, emotional nuances and shifts, the true meaning of personal fulfillment, and the clash of baser, carnal needs and more abstract, idealized, exalted aspirations. The main characters embody these and do so not only empathetically, but sympathetically, because none of them, not even Bulstrode in my opinion, is truly reprehensible. All DO have the potential, realized or not, to be better people.
I think Eliot encapsulates “Middlemarch”’s predominant theme thusly; it is “…the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.” However, a more profound, uplifting theme lurks in this saga: “…[T]he 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.” In other words, much of the world’s good –not to mention self-fulfillment- does not come from grand, sweeping gestures, but from small, unassuming good deeds that accumulate to make the world a better place.

George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch, a fictitious town in England, set in the late 1820s, reveals several interesting, strong female personalities. Two appear somewhat familiar in another context, such as from Margaret Mitchell’s book, Gone with the Wind.
Main character, Dorothea Brooke Casaubon, in Middlemarch, is similar to Melanie Hamilton, a secondary female character to Scarlett O’Hara, in Gone with the Wind.
Like Melanie, Dorothea appears kind, capable, and loyal to friends and family.
However, in Middlemarch, as main character, newly married, Dorothea, is altruistic and a nurturer who needs to be needed. She finds satisfaction in the care of others. She discovers Mr. Casaubon, a wealthy, much older man, is “set in his ways.” He doesn’t require assistance with his book research and only asks that Dorothea read to him.
Dorothea soon finds herself trapped in a marriage with an infirmed, jealous, rigid, pompous and mistrustful man. Her husband dislikes the friendship Dorothea develops with his second-cousin, young Will Ladislaw. He forbids Will to visit their home. Will, who appears more or less an angry rebel, is enamored with Dorothea.
Dorothea’s flaw is being idealistic and too self-sacrificing, but she lives in an era when it’s expected for a wife to acquiesce to her husband’s wishes. Another great flaw is she worshiped what she thought Mr. Casaubon’s worldliness and knowledge. Instead, he appears quite pretentious.
Secondary female character in Middlemarch, Rosamond Vincey, is considered malicious and selfish, and similar to Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara. Rosamond is newly married to Dr. Tertius Lydgate.
A new physician in Middlemarch, to please his new wife, Lydgate went into debt. However, to pay off their debtors, Lydgate decided they would sell some of their furnishings and live without extravagance in reduced quarters.
The manipulative, feisty Rosamond continuously thwarted her husband’s attempts to downgrade their living arrangements.
Unlike the yielding Dorothea, Rosamond refuses to promise she will obey her husband. Undaunted, she will not bend, even during Lydgate’s fits of verbal abuse.
Lydgate is a proud, honest and distinguished physician. Frustrated and not wanting to borrow money, he suddenly finds himself controlled by Rosamond’s whims. Rosamond urges him to borrow from her uncle, the banker, Bulstrode, to pay off their debts and relocate to London.
To get out of debt, Lydgate becomes involved in a shameful situation involving Bulstrode, who is burdened with surprising skeletons in his closet. The banker has secrets that threaten to destroy his own, as well as Lydgate’s future in Middlemarch.
There are surprising elements and some of the writing concerning the characters’ emotions is very moving, especially Mrs. Bulstrode’s feelings concerning her husband.
Instead of malcontent, Mrs. Bulstrode, Rosamond’s aunt, shows love and forgiveness toward her husband.
Refusing to work with her husband to solve their problem, Rosamond shows her fury and almost hatred for Dr. Lydgate, whose flaw was loving her to the point of making them insolvent.
Middlemarch could be any small town in America with its secrets and quirks.
There are numerous characters that I enjoyed, but the most notable characters for me are Dorothea, Lydgate, Rosamond, and Will Ladislaw.
Although long on sentences concerning people that were not main characters, I enjoyed reading this book.

Disappointing to reread as an adult and discover that Eliot’s characters are overdrawn and unconvincing puppets, designed to communicate their author’s personal vendettas and political agenda. Great authors are motivated by a genuine interest in human society and the human heart. Eliot is interested in the ideas in her head and how she can embody them on paper.

Eliot’s considerable literary talent in drawing characters is used for the author’s agenda, and are none of them as realistic as they seem. For this reader, there was no character to identify with and root for, very little insight or interest real people and real classes of society, and not much wisdom. So while it is easy to be drawn in by Eliot’s writing talent, the fictional experience proves empty and unsatisfying, emotionally and intellectually.

I did some research on Eliot and it explained for me the frustrations I felt as a reader. She was a famously smart but very ugly woman, who lived in a menage a trois, and unsuccessfully ran after the one of the greatest brains of the age (Herbert Spenser, who developed the idea of evolution applying to human society, who never married). She broke with her Evangelical family, rejected religion, joined London’s bohemian, leftist and even Marxist circles (as in Karl Marx himself). She lived openly with a married man who allowed his wife to live with another man. In fact, she wrote Middlemarch on his urging to try and earn them some money to live on.

Eliot is much praised for portraying the different classes of society in her fictional provincial city. I found the praise unmerited. All the characters are exaggerated and carry a message. Servants and actual laborers are minor, barely walk on parts. The few aristocratic characters are clichés, in which she again has no interest. Like intellectuals today, Eliot loves to pillory the middle class. Successful, bourgeois characters are all venal and stupid and social climbing. Bourgeois bad, working class, good. Real people? Not so much.

The characters she portrays as entirely admirable are the honest farm manager (her father’s occupation) who works with his hands and disdains money. This family is 100% good – not lifelike, therefore not engrossing and not touching .

One of the major, sympathetic, characters is the son of a wealthy bourgeous father, an industrialist. The father’s work is left entirely out of the book, except we are told in an aside that he sells shoddy goods and thereby ruins someone. Eliot has no interest or respect for any successful activity except farming and helping the poor. This father has the added sin of being ambitious for his son – very bad values to the bohemian, leftist Eliot. His son, Eliot wants us to believe, choses instead to marry a servant (unconvincingly presented as an educated girl who could have been a teacher but chose to be a servant), abandon his Oxford education and become a farm manager working with his hands – utterly phony, tho’ Eliot portrays it with all the power of fiction at her disposal.

The horrible Mr. Casaubon, the sterile writer and cold, sexless first husband of our heroine, starts as a vivid, interesting character but also becomes so exaggerated he turns into cardboard. I suspect Casaubon is Eliot’s nasty payback to her first love, Herbert Spenser, who rejected her and remained a bachelor.

The idealistic heroine we are supposed to admire rebels against society – as Eliot did - first by marrying Casaubon and then, we are to think so gloriously, by marrying the bohemian, penniless cousin, and supporting his reformist political career. Eliot works hard to make us believe in and admire her heroine, clothing her in a superficial layer of Victorian idealism and desire to help people. In fact, the character lives in world of ideals, longing for a just society. She disdains and rejects all the ordinary people around her. She does very little for the actual poor individuals in her small community, who Eliot refers to but does not make into characters or give any scenes in the book.

An initially interesting sub-plot of a crusading doctor whose life is ruined by marriage to the local beauty also becomes exaggerated and hard to believe. It made more sense when I learned how ugly George Eliot was: the beautiful character is portrayed as thoroughly selfish and heartless and cold and mean and silly, and destroys her husband’s happiness – take that, all you lovely women.

It’s funny how an author like Eliot gets a label – realism – which fits so poorly, but everyone goes along with it.

If you could sum up Middlemarch in three words, what would they be?

True love hurts.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Dorothea Brooke Casaubon. She really grows on you. When the story begins you think "what a little nun" but after all she goes through you really want her life to turn out well. She chooses an older religious man because she wants to help him with his work. However, Mr. Casaubon is so selfish and unworthy of her love that he twists everything she does into something false and shameful. It's very painful to listen to.

As the story goes on Dorothea changes into a strong and vibrant woman that everyone respects. A true heroine!

Which scene was your favorite?

I think my favorite scene was when Dorothea goes to talk to Rosamund Lydgate again and explain to her how much faith she has in her husband's skills as a doctor. Rosamund, unfortunately is so selfish and silly that poor Dr. Lydgate has to give up his dream of scientific discovery in order to make money so his vain wife will be happy. But the scene with Dorothea was wonderful.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

So many characters in this book were so filled out. My favorite couple in the book was Mary Garth and Fred Vincy. I am so happy they end up together.

Any additional comments?

This is one my favorite books now! I have never read any George Eliot before, but I will be sure to read more now! Highly recommended!
If you could sum up Middlemarch in three words, what would they be?

True love hurts.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Dorothea Brooke Casaubon. She really grows on you. When the story begins you think "what a little nun" but after all she goes through you really want her life to turn out well. She chooses an older religious man because she wants to help him with his work. However, Mr. Casaubon is so selfish and unworthy of her love that he twists everything she does into something false and shameful. It's very painful to listen to.

As the story goes on Dorothea changes into a strong and vibrant woman that everyone respects. A true heroine!

Which scene was your favorite?

I think my favorite scene was when Dorothea goes to talk to Rosamund Lydgate again and explain to her how much faith she has in her husband's skills as a doctor. Rosamund, unfortunately is so selfish and silly that poor Dr. Lydgate has to give up his dream of scientific discovery in order to make money so his vain wife will be happy. But the scene with Dorothea was wonderful.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

So many characters in this book were so filled out. My favorite couple in the book was Mary Garth and Fred Vincy. I am so happy they end up together.

Any additional comments?

This is one my favorite books now! I have never read any George Eliot before, but I will be sure to read more now! Highly recommended!

This is one of my all-time favorite books. I am an avid reader, and I enjoy many books from so-called trashy airport novels to acknowledged masterpieces. A food-connoisseur probably is most happy when eating the finest delicacies in a Michelin-starred restaurant, but can also enjoy a lowly cheeseburger from time-to-time. This book is the equivalent of the Michelin-starred restaurant. It is wonderfully written and complex. It is not an easy read, and for all its length is not a page-turner, but is a book where the language must be savored and the technique in writing is almost a constant marvel. The main characters and sub-characters all seem to breathe and have life and dimensions. The interconnected plots all fit together and are interesting. I think the one sort of weakness is that Will Ladislaw is too bland to be a compelling hero, but overall that is forgiven in the quality of the novel. If you really get into the book, the main climax (which admittedly consists of two English ladies talking in a drawing-room) is one of the most rewarding and emotionally charged moments in all of literature. And this is only one of the interconnected story lines that run through this novel. George Eliot is a masterful realist and this is my favorite novel by her. It lacks the sort of simplistic morals of Adam Bede or Silas Marner, and feels like a very real portrayal of life in a midsized town in England during Eliot's lifetime. Anyways, sorry to gush. I rarely award 5 stars to a book but this one definitely deserves it.

I am reviewing Juliet Stevenson's reading of the entire book, over thirty hours. She captures the nuances of expression in George Eliot's ruminating, satiric, painful, and idealistic visions as filtered through an omniscient narrator who creates a chronicle of this small English town's families. You get, this being a high-Victorian novel about the years just before the Queen ascended her throne, an immersion into the gentry. The poor tend to be backdrops, and the goings on of a doctor, a banker, a scholar, and their wives comprise the stories.

My favorite character is Causabon, who attracts Dorothea early on. Their relationship is fraught with sadness as well as dreams. Eliot pins down the lure of learned lore in an unforgettable way, even as she lets us see the folly of the grand scheme the couple follow.

This is one of the most famous novels in English, so the summaries of the plotlines and interspersed chapters examining the protagonists can be found easily. Stevenson captures the varied accents, male and female, deftly. A woman's voice open to emotion but steeled by intellect fits Eliot's own outlook well. This novel, true to triple-decker form does go on, and modern readers may need more patience than that of audiences long ago for such steady attention to the intricate observations Eliot conveys.

Hearing this, one gets caught up in the flow. The immense detail may or may not be lost on a listener rather than a reader. The various languages of the quotes opening each chapter are communicated faithfully and Stevenson and Eliot match each other in terms of the tone this novel takes, sometimes arch, sometimes sensitive, sometimes impassioned. It's a lot to follow.

But as one who studied this novel decades ago in college and then always meant to return to it, I found this on audio a pleasant experience. No spoilers, but highlights are three deaths that play crucial roles here. All captured with wheezes, faltering voices, and growing weightiness well by Stevenson. Now, it is her voice I will hear in these pages if I see them again.

Our library fiction group read this book, and those who actually finished, enjoyed it. It's a sprawling novel full of social history. It addresses the issues of the railroads, political reform, the poor and class system, religion, science among others in 1800's England. That's what I enjoyed most about it, as it provided insight into how English people thought and acted in the 1830's. It was published in the 1870's. There's a large cast of characters: Dorothea, my favorite, an intelligent young woman who hoped to be her older husband's intellectual companion but he was jealous, stuffy and guarded as he was pretending to be something he wasn't. He wouldn't let her into his world and she felt confined. Then there was an unhappily young married doctor, Tertius Lydgate, who was trying to succeed in medicine, but his spendthrift, vain and silly young wife was spending him out of house, home and practice. You follow several characters' storylines.

The story is set in a fictional town in the Midlands, thought to be the town of Coventry. It illustrates the mindsets of diverse townspeople and their feelings about each other and their status. It's a wickedly long book. I didn't particularly warm to any of the characters except for Dorothea, but thought them interesting. I love history and it provides a kind of time-travel into an English town of this time period. Several authors think it is the best English novel ever written. If you like long novels about the 1800's, see what you think.

I'm reading this book for my Great Books class at university and it is one of the hardest reads for most of the class. I have a lot of difficulty getting into the story and find myself skipping huge parts of it and just using sparknotes to see if I missed anything.

I finally did it. It’s taken me over a year, from March 2013 to April 2014, but I’ve finally read George Eliot’s "Middlemarch". Having come to the end of it, it’s hard to know what to say about it. Widely thought of as one of the greatest works of literature in the English language, and described by Virginia Woolf as "the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people", there seems little that a humble the store.com reviewer can add.

Only my own experience may suffice. I found it heavy-going, with a vast array of characters that was sometimes difficult to keep track of, and a depth of content and theme that consistently reminded me that the author was far more intelligent than I. But I persevered, because there is undoubtedly something compelling about this book: the sincerity of the characters, the vivid depiction of the time and place they inhabit, and the sheer scope and wit with which George Eliot writes. Every now and then a sentiment or concept would spring up in the narrative that was exceptionally beautiful, giving me food for thought for days to come.

Divided into six parts (not counting the prelude and the finale), the novel is massive, containing a huge amount of characters and chronicling their lives over a period of several years. For all this, it is possible to narrow down the scope to three main characters.

Dorothea is a beautiful young woman with aspirations of social reforms, desperate to make good in the world by whatever means necessary. She views the aging Mr Casaubon as the perfect husband, deeming him to be an intellect and a scholar who would achieve greatness with her as a helpmate in life. Unfortunately, the reality of their married life is not so appealing. Casaubon is a fussy and small-minded man, and when Dorothea finds some degree of companionship with his distant cousin Will Ladislaw, her husband finds a way of separating them even after his death.

Doctor Lydgate is a young doctor with modern ideas, eager to test out brand new methods of treatment when he arrives in Middlemarch. At first all goes well for him – with a good reputation and a charismatic personality, he’s soon edging out the competition when it comes to who the citizens of Middlemarch call upon for medical aid. But when he marries the rather vacuous Rosamund Vincy, things take a turn for the worst. The two are ill-matched, and when they run into financial troubles, his wife does more harm than good.

Finally, Fred Vincy is a somewhat troublesome young man whose decision to leave the clergy causes a ruckus in his family. But his childhood sweetheart Mary Garth supports him in his endeavours, leading to a long courtship despite the disapproval of their families.

The intersecting lives of these characters and their significant family members make up the backbone of “Middlemarch.” At the time of its publication it was unique in its focus on ordinary people (as hinted in its complete title: “A Study of Provincial Life”) and its refusal to treat the state of matrimony with the romantic trappings and promise of a happy ending that so many other novels did (and still do). At least two of the main characters end up marrying the wrong person and their rather miserable married lives are explored in depth across the course of the novel.

George Eliot also draws attention to the importance of finding the right vocation in life, as well as the right person with which to spend it with. Some characters have one but not the other, and it’s only when both work in harmony that happiness is attained. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Strewn throughout the novel are plenty of examples of warmth and humor, joy and quiet dignity. Dorothea in particular is a wonderful character study of a woman looking for a purpose in life, in trying to reconcile her inner desires with her outward demeanor, and her passionate-yet-melancholy need to do good in the world.

So it was a long journey, and at times a difficult one, but I reached the conclusion of “Middlemarch” as a satisfied reader. In searching for a complimentary televised drama, I was surprised to find the novel had only been adapted twice, a shortage that perhaps demonstrates the story’s length and complexity. If you do decide to try it, you’ll need patience and a long attention-span: it’s a deep and dense and wordy read, but ultimately a rewarding one.

Trying to say something on the fly about a novel as great as Middlemarch is a futile exercise: so much has already been said by writers and critics whose views automatically have more credibility in a line than anyone writing on these pages might muster in 20,000 words. So I'm cutting-and-pasting AS Byatt's gimlet-eyed introduction to a 2007 Vintage edition, with its myriad sharp observations and mots that undergird Middlemarch's claim as perhaps the greatest English-language novel of the 19th century, reprinted in the a Guardian piece of that year, in the hope that other lovers of this book will find and read the Byatt essay as preliminary to, finally, reading this novel - and loving it as I do.

And I very much do, for its anthropologically close observation and richly realized characters and brilliant working through of the "web" metaphor more than a hundred years before the coming of our own web, and George Eliot's laying bare the country English social networks she grew up amid, and their boundless backstreet chatter, irresponsible, cruelly interpretive, nudging and winking, blindly ignorant, metastasizing in horrific ways. The vast overall intelligence that informs George Eliot's writing must stagger the contemporary mind - the work of a genius polymath, who knew Dickens, Darwin, Thackeray, Collins, Mill, Emerson, Ruskin, Carlyle, James, et al., and whom the Victorian era simply could not suppress, (Middlemarch is autobiographical in laying out a catalog of slights and demeaning attitudes Victorian women were expected bear, in comments taken, literally, sitting down, with hands nicely folding in their laps.)

George Eliot - or, you may read, Mary Anne Evans - admirers will know all this. Suffer, I beg you, the fresh enthusiasm of an older reader who more than 50 years ago was forced to read Silas Marner and had since never understood "why?" And now, after those 50 years, having reread Silas Marner, still cannot: what were those high-school English departments thinking in foisting this lovely little book on cohorts of squirming freshmen? An abysmally bad choice, but an understandable one any Miss-Grundy-type English teacher might make, desperately hoping, and failing miserably, to cultivate a refined, civilizing literary sensibility in a horde of brutish children.)

So rather than bloviate a gale of epiphenomenal impressions about an immortal work of literary art, here's the perceptive Byatt, the link to which I hope the store.com will permit me to reproduce: [...]. And if the link doesn't make it, search for "A.S. Byatt George Eliot 'Wit and Wisdom,' The Guardian" for the 3 August 2007 article

I have to add that Rosemary Ashton's knowing and helpful introduction to the Penguin Classics edition made me pick up her George Eliot biography/critical appreciation, which I'm now going through and find thoroughly absorbing, not to say revelatory.

Middlemarch by George Eliot was definitely not what I expected. I assumed that it might be somewhat Avant-garde, and maybe it was at the time. It was unusual for a woman to be an author at that time, hence the pen name George Eliot taken by Mary Ann Evans. In 2014, however, the book would not be considered eccentric or Avant-garde. It reminds me a lot of books written by Louisa May Alcott, who was born about twenty years after Evans.

Middlemarch, as a novel, was very long and from another period in time. It was enjoyable, but also a bit overwhelming. After listening to the 35+hour audio book, I have to admit that I liked Middlemarch and all of its citizens. I came to understand and like all of the main female characters: Dorothea Brooke, Mary Garth and Rosamond Vincy, in particular. Their stories of love, disillusion and resolution are universal. The political and societal changes that were beginning in Middlemarch were also occurring in England and beyond. Other themes also occurred throughout the book.

I would highly recommend reading My Life in Middlemarch either before or after reading Middlemarch. It really gave me a better understanding of the significance of Eliot’s writing and of Middlemarch itself. I do intend to do some more reading on Eliot and Middlemarch. I found a graduate paper titled: “Louisa May Alcott and George Eliot on Class, Gender and Marriage”, written by Elizabeth Michelle Meyers in December 2010. I’m going to read it, because I think it will be an interesting read and may help me better understand the works of both authors. I’m sure there are other sources that would be equally valuable. For me, just listening to Middlemarch was not enough. I’ve gained a lot from going beyond the book itself, and my journey is not over yet.

Middlemarch is focused on marriage; the fantasies, the expectations, the disappointments and the trials which come from all of these facets of the institution. The story has a large cast of characters and their lives eventually meld together in the village of Middlemarch. George Elliott weaves the story into the political wrangling on the Reform vote of the day (giving more men the right to vote). For me, this was a distraction, but not so heavy that it spoiled the story. Eliot’s writing is elegant with a wise understanding of human nature. At times her ideas were complex enough to give me pause in following her meaning, but I enjoy a little deep thinking in a story. The banker Bulstrode committed an evil in his younger day which becomes exposed in his old age in the winding up chapters, but the details of the sin were not clear.

The BBC has a 7 hour miniseries of the story that I watched years ago but I didn’t remember much about it. I watched it again after finishing the book and felt enjoyably satisfied with the portrayal of the story and characters. I was hoping my Bulstrode confusion would be cleared up in the miniseries but it wasn’t laid out any better than the book. I need to read that chapter again and try to get some understanding of what happened. This is my 4th George Eliot: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. I have enjoyed them all and look forward to Daniel Doranda.

I'm a huge fan of George Eliot, and this was the first of her works I read. I actually cried when I turned the last page. The story is truly several stories in one. Perhaps it centers around two motherless sisters who have been raised by their uncle, an estate owner in the habit of turning a blind eye to the concerns of his tenants. Dorothea, his eldest niece, is humble young woman, beautiful and unaware of it, and self-denying to a fault. Her sister is somewhat more trivial but her admonitions to her sister to lighten up and enjoy herself are not without merit. Amidst the vast pool of characters are also the idol youth Fred Vincey, who might just turn right if the woman he loves would give him any encouragement. Mr. Lydgate is a new doctor in town, anxious to introduce new reforms in medicine and hospital management, and he, a sworn bachelor, soon finds himself in the clutches of the adventuring, but all in all well meaning Rosamond Vincey. In the background scandal and conflict are brewing and our dear Mr. Lydgate must keep himself above water. To me, however, the story is about Dorothea. Her self denying ways land her in an unhappy marriage to a man who will not be pleased (the self-important prig.) In the mean time, she becomes acquainted with his young nephew and they form a rather intense friendship. When the husband dies, and he wills away all of her inheritance should she form any kind of alliance with Mr. Ladislaw, it seems she is doomed never to find happiness, despite her enduring endeavours to be a good influence to all around her.

This book, to me, is a testament to the power of good influences. Dorothea is quite possibly my favourite heroine of all time.

You will never listen to small town gossip or office small talk the same way again.

You will think of these richly drawn characters, and whose decisions were flawed, like Lydgate's; who gave up money for love, like Dorothea; who is loving but ineffectual, like Mr. Brooks....

You will really sense the author's overwhelming intelligence and curiosity about how the economy works, how technology transforms society.

George Eliot's novel Middlemarch is a series of complex and profound psychological portraits of wealthy 19th century English provincial landowners. The story covers the vocational, political and romantic dramas of several characters in an epic book of intertwining plots. But for the most part, I just didn't care about these characters' lives. It took about 700 of the book's 800-plus pages for me to finally become invested in the struggles of the town's ambitious new doctor Lydgate, and I felt myself strongly affected by this part of the novel. As for the rest, I'm guessing that readers will need to find themselves independently drawn to this historical period or this type of society novel to fully appreciate Eliot's work. Unfortunately for me, I think I should have chosen a different book to read.

Our library fiction group read this book, and those who actually finished, enjoyed it. It's a sprawling novel full of social history. It addresses the issues of the railroads, political reform, the poor and class system, religion, science among others in 1800's England. That's what I enjoyed most about it, as it provided insight into how English people thought and acted in the 1830's. It was published in the 1870's. There's a large cast of characters: Dorothea, my favorite, an intelligent young woman who hoped to be her older husband's intellectual companion but he was jealous, stuffy and guarded as he was pretending to be something he wasn't. He wouldn't let her into his world and she felt confined. Then there was an unhappily young married doctor, Tertius Lydgate, who was trying to succeed in medicine, but his spendthrift, vain and silly young wife was spending him out of house, home and practice. You follow several characters' storylines.

The story is set in a fictional town in the Midlands, thought to be the town of Coventry. It illustrates the mindsets of diverse townspeople and their feelings about each other and their status. It's a wickedly long book. I didn't particularly warm to any of the characters except for Dorothea, but thought them interesting. I love history and it provides a kind of time-travel into an English town of this time period. Several authors think it is the best English novel ever written. If you like long novels about the 1800's, see what you think.

After I had a less-than-pleasant experience with Eliot's 'Silas Marner' in high school, I resisted reading anything else by the author for decades. Thus, when I have finally overcome my prejudice enough to read Middlemarch, I find myself totally surprised to discover that it is not just a good book, but a great book.

The highly interesting plot concerns itself with the doings of the middle class in England in the 1830s, particularly with three intertwined "love stories." But the actions are much more involved and realistic than in a standard marriage plot novel, involving disappointed dreams and compromise as often as fulfillment and unblemished happiness. What makes the novel outstanding is Eliot's perceptive portrayal of the characters, whose actions and motivations are entirely logical and realistic and recognizable, so that each character seems like someone you might meet. Or perhaps you might even see something of yourself. The most admirable characters sometimes reveal less than perfect traits, and the least admirable are not entirely devoid of worth. I have never read a novel with characters who seemed more real.

Eliot also excels in her depiction of the events and attitudes of the time and place, placing her characters and their actions and reactions in relation to their setting.

And Eliot is often very humorous, in a subtly ironic and satiric way. I often chuckled out loud.

For potential readers, I must say that this is not an easy book to read at all; it took me a much longer time to read than is usual for me. I don't believe younger people, who want to believe that love always conquers all, would appreciate it. It perhaps requires a certain amount of compassionate cynicism.

I'll boldly proclaim that this may be the most well written book I have ever read. That is not to say it is my favorite book, but that is only because of my less-than-intellectual bent for high drama.

There are several stories within this book. There is the main story and then several subplots. Highly engaging. It's a political, social and romantic journey. One of my favourite books.

3 couples and their struggle - through their eyes we can view society and politics.

1. Fred Vincy & Mary Garth: my favourite.
Their story is only a minor subplot, however, its the most poignant and sweet. Childhood sweethearts, Fred is madly (and blindly) in love with the intelligent, witty but plain Mary. Fred is goodlooking in a traditional sense, bred a gentlemen with fine speech and clothes and a fancy education.
Mary refuses to allow Fred to woo her until he shows himself willing and able to live seriously, practically, and sincerely.

2. Will Ladislaw & Dorothea Brooke: the principle characters (particularly Dorothea). Both are Intelligent and possess great aspirations to live in an equitable, sincere and positive manner which will bring good for others. I suppose one could describe them as socialist. Neither are concerned with worldly riches or a position in society.
Will is rather dashing, free spirited and rebellious. One could describe him as a well dressed Hippy. Very arty but also a political strategist and thinker.
Dodo is a sweet, inteligent, sincere and pious female (but lacking common sense). From a well do to background, she is the ultimate Lady. No airs and graces but naturally ladylike and elegant in manner and demeanour.
Will and Dodo have a passionate relationship that transcends all others.

3. Tertius Lydgate & Rosamond Vincy: I don't want to give too much away but these two are idiots. Lydgate (an idealistic, cocky and not very insightful medical man of genteel background) allowed himself to be swayed by vanity into thinking a woman would be satisfied with himself and nothing else (however, he learns his lesson soon enough and realises he isn't as clever as he thought he was). And Rosie (from a manufacturing family, new money but a fancu ladylike education) is the most annoying spiteful silly creature in existence. Proud, vain, ambitious and aspiring to become part of the fashionable genteel crowd, she made a mistake in marrying a man for his relatives rather than for himself.

There is also Celia Brooke and Sir James Chettam, although their relationship isn't part of the plot it is relative to the plot in a small way. Celia is Dodo's sister - she has common sense and is one of my favourite characters. Her observations are hilarious.

There are many other great characters including Mr. Humphrey Cadwallader and Mrs. Eleanor Cadwallader - a great couple. The Mrs is a funny woman, sharp tongue, very witty while her husband is a sweet and kind.

Great quotes from the book:

"What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?"

"For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion."

"The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots."

REALITY:

It took me probably 5 months to slog through the first 442 pages. So much detail. Stuff about the local politics that I didn't understand. Booor-ing. But because everyone, including my best friend, said this was such a great book, I persevered. After page 442, the pace picked up. Once Raffles entered the picture and the truth about Mr. Bulstrode came to light, then everything suddenly came together into a spell-binding last 250 pages that I whipped through in 2 days.

If you can somehow force yourself through the first 2/3 of the book, you will be rewarded with what turns out to be one of the finest stories ever written (in my opinion).

ESPECIALLY LIKED:

I appreciated the realism shown in the romances and marriages of the young couples. How many stories portray marriage as the most wonderful institution on earth instead of what it more often is, the most difficult, particularly in the beginning? I was comforted to see what really went on behind the scenes.

There was nothing contrived or flakey about the characters. Even the worst of them was believable and acted in ways that were consistent with expectations.

The development and twists and turns of Dorothea's romance with Ladislaw was exquisitely portrayed. It all seemed completely impossible, and it was completely impossible, but somehow it all worked out in the end.

WHY? WHY? WHY?

In these old novels, so many times the young beautiful girl marries some louse or jerk and is miserable. The author dreams up a convenient way to remove him. The girl then gets a second chance at happiness with someone who is wild about her, and they live happily ever after. How many people wish their lives could be rewritten so easily? Well, it is nice to escape into a fantasy world where everything turns out well. Then we put down the book and resume our wacky lives of hardship and never resolved problems.

I got this book after seeing repeated citations of Virginia Woolf's statement that Middlemarch is "one of the few English novels written for grown up people." I like Woolf's writing and wanted to see what she was talking about. I made it to page 300 then threw in the towel. Eliot's prose is so oblique and abstract that half the time I couldn't figure out what she was getting at. She's just a step away from the arid, mannered, and stuffy language of her character Rev. Casaubon. Eliot comments quite a bit on the action of the novel, but I found her comments to be far from profound; e.g., she notes in one instance that a certain behavior by one of the characters shows that humanity can be very hypocritical. No kidding? And I'm afraid that I don't have enough interest in the lives of 19th century English provincials--their politics, their marriages, their social mores--to sustain me through this book absent any interesting writing or insights from the author. I never did figure out what made this book so "grown up".

This doesn't mean that many won't find the book fascinating. If you like English period dramas on PBS, you'll no doubt love this book. Hard for me to knock the book if it has so many fans, Virginia Woolf among them; on the other hand it also has its critics, like Salman Rushdie. I just know that it wasn't for me.

The first thing that I think is worth noting is, as with many Victorian novels, especially those later deemed 'classics' is, it is very very, long; but more than that, it is too long. There is padding to the story, which accounts for around 25% of the word count. Worse - the padding is page after page of narrative from the author's own viewpoint; it is clear that George / Mary Ann had a great understanding of the human condition, and used her intellect / knowledge / experience to dissect the psyche of all the characters. The trouble is, it is superfluous to the tale. But gripe over, despite the excess print, paper and glue, what remains is a superb story - or stories.

Set in the fictional Midlands region of Middlemarch in the 1830s, the tale has many central characters, and even after this, a strong supporting cast, (to swap to movie buff mode for a moment). It has more than a touch of the Pickwick's about it also, as not all strands of story concerning one or more group of characters ever turn out to be linked, but many are, and I think this oddity works very well in its favour.

As usual with these tales which, and I know I am years out of date now as it has long happened, it is a tale mostly of the 'big house' not the 'cottage', (although the connections therein are of course adequately covered) and begged to be made into a lavish period drama, which of course, did happen and not too long ago. There's the gentry with money, the gentry without; there's those who are on high but their empire sits on misery, while others would put Job and the Lord out of their jobs, but, and being sadly realistic for then and now, get nowhere fast. There's the ubiquitous bohemian, the friendly uncle, the wicked uncle, the good husband, good wife and their not so good counterparts, lawyers, doctors, farmers, builders, inns, and carriages and four and stables. Relationships good and bad are covered; there's a backdrop of changing monarchs, the Reform Bill, scientific and medical advances, the spread of the railways and its effects on rural Britain, and more. In other words, all the staples, which if done well, make for a great tale of yesteryear, which this is of course, the preachy flowery bits (many of which are so flowery I don't even know what the author is getting at) notwithstanding.

If you fancy either a steady read over several weeks, that's fine as this is just the thing. If you usually read from cover to cover in days, best get a week's worth of shopping in, send the kids to your sisters and give your partner a ton to vanish to the Dog and Duck with, as you'll need much of the waking day over several days to get through this, but whichever is preferred, you'll be glad in the end, to have read one of the truly classic classics, author indulgences to boot.

Middlemarch has been on my bookshelf for decades. I even watched a few episodes of the PBS or BBC (don't remember which) TV version. My University of Chicago Alumni Book Club, at my suggestion, picked it as our next read. And I am so glad we did, because I loved it.

I didn't realize George Eliot had written such a clever, insightful, funny, and just down right enjoyable book. I'd read Silas Marner in college, liked it, but found it deeply psychological but pretty sad and droll, although it has a happy ending. Middlemarch has the psychological insight into its characters, and there are sad parts, but much of it is hilarious in a very understated English way.

There are twists and turns in the plot, and the story is interesting. But, the real delight in the book is the characters. It is wonderful how Eliot reveals a character to think something, while saying something that is consciously contrary to what the character is thinking, yet others understand the character to be expressing something altogether different than what the character is thinking and saying, and then the narrator reveals that they are all wrong.

Wish I hadn't waited so long, but it was worth the wait. False Prophet, a Legal Thriller

Well, not every classic is really `classic', but I'm so glad I stumbled across this in a local 2nd hand store. Wow. I don't think I've read anything like it before - and I don't think it'd get past a publisher these days. It's so loose, it's almost like a soap opera: she feels no need to tie everything tightly around one major plot, with maybe a couple of sub-plots. The uniting thing is the town (well, generally some of the wealthier elements of the town - although there is some range of class), and the gaze moves here and there among various residents. The characters are really potent. Not necessarily multi-layered and complex, but striking, and Eliot seems to have a gift for finding something authentic to focus on without becoming a mere stereotype. I am reminded of some of C.S. Lewis' characters, having some essential moral point about them: I know he enjoyed this book, and definitely he could have drawn something of that Screwtape notion of the profound implications of seemingly small actions, interactions, attitudes and choices. Particularly by the end of the book Eliot is quite philosophically didactic, with true heroism painted as the generous life of someone quietly forgotten.

This book also leads me to an odd comparison - with Fred Saberhagen's 'Swords' series, based around a dozen god-forged blades, each with a particular, if you like, super-power (e.g. healing wounds, cutting stone, bringing luck, drawing loyalty etc.). The fun is watching the way they interact, enhancing, neutralising, antagonising, inflaming each other. Eliot manages that with her characters - she creates such strong personalities I came away with a renewed sense of how valuable each of us are, the significance of everyday choices, the tragedy and triumph of the mundane. Each of Eliot's main characters has the presence of one of these god-forged swords, yet can be influenced well or ill by interplay. Context and personality both work on each other: neither nature nor nurture makes something inevitable - but they are both also hugely powerful. I loved the way that, for example, Dorothea's naively optimistic egocentrism - that she is made to improve the lot of the unfortunate - is not merely dismissed nor endorsed. Her strong personality works both for and against her. There are elements of this in some of Austen's characters, and doubtless Eliot was across Austen, but Eliot feels no obligation to have fairy-tale endings. Dorothea's zeal can both trap and free her - and this despite the purity of her intentions.

It's also a delight that the story doesn't stop with a wedding, but follows the course of marriage (or two). There's also wonderful room to move: even characters that you are made to think should end up together won't necessarily. And even that won't necessarily be a bad thing.

The book is hugely psychological, constantly highlighting the gaps between why people act the way they do, and the reasons they think they behave that way. Self-awareness is a rare commodity. There is also a huge amount of pride behind actions: I know it's still a huge motivator, but at times in the book I wondered if in that society at that time there was a far greater need to be seen a certain way by your neighbours. At times I lost myself in the torturous logic of why these young (or even not so young) swains with burning passions could never admit to them - but I do live in a time and place where our mythology so strongly condemns (theoretically anyway) money being admitted as a reasonable obstacle to romance. But there are other reasons why people, even well meaning people, can get caught up in destructive conversational patterns that make a hell out of a potential heaven (a point well made in Ann Tyler's painfully insightful, 'Breathing Lessons').

I'm not completely convinced by all of Eliot's characters, and I'm also separated from some of the potency of some of the conventions she's playing with by time and my own context's assumptions. But I'm still mightily impressed and will definitely seek out some more of her books. And this one goes straight onto my, "To be read again," shelf.

"Middlemarch" is such a glorious work that even an audiobook reading that doesn't express all its astonishing fecundity can still be a more satisfying experience than a silent reading. And so it is with Kate Reading's interpretation. She has a pleasant voice and she reads the dialogue very well but obviously doesn't grasp what George Eliot is getting at much of the time. Every sentence has rapier-like point, most of it humorous, and Reading rarely seems to get the joke. She passes obliviously over the words which require the emphasis of a consummate joke-teller; it's like hearing a joke flatly told. You might get it but it needs work on your part.

Reading also makes a hash of Eliot's frequent long sentences. She begins them breezily, seems to have them under control, but then starts to labour as the additional clauses make their appearance, and almost sputters to a halt before effortfully spurring them on to the bitter end. To be fair to her, sentences such as these are rarely to be found in any literature under a century old and the tradition of the Epic Sentence has foundered somewhere in Hemingwayville. Still, I think anyone attempting a reading of any work should know precisely what they're reading and not a mere approximation of it. However, I'll point out that Reading is not alone in this sin.

Despite these misgivings, I still like this reading because it only requires a bit of extra concentration and inner modification of Reading's delivery to bring Eliot's magnificent novel to life. I can't think of a work that so unequivocally and consistently articulates its ideas: it comes closer to providing an education it itself than any other novel I can think of.

As great as the author and the story was, in some ways Middlemarch was an arduous read. Rather than emphasis on plot, there were a lot of characters introduced and observed throughout, ending with emphasis on a few personal life journeys. Dorothea and Rosamond were each in unhappy marriages. Dorothea to a self-centered idealist and Rosamond to a her-centered idealist. Both women were in love with Ladislaw, an appealing but wandering misfit with no real past or connections with anyone that mattered in Middlemarch. I don't know much about George Eliot personally but I wonder if Ladislaw represented someone that she was in love with because he excelled in creative pursuits, art and writing.

There's a lot of dissatisfaction in all of the characters whose lives were entertwined. Although rich, no one really had enough money. They were powerful in their communities but disagreed with each other. There was hypocrisy in religion. There was strife within the families. It kept my interest because it was a colorful cast of characters but the deep analysis into their psyches was spelled out in anguish a little too strongly.

In spite of this, I gave it four stars because it was 800+ pages that were a pleasure to get lost in even though it required self-discipline to stay with it.

One of the great books of the English language. George Eliot's uncanny perception of the human mind and heart is rendered in beautiful prose (but expect longer sentences and larger vocabulary than most present day books), metaphors that perfectly capture the emotion or movement or internal thoughts she's conveying through figurative language, and characters so perfectly wrought, you feel you know them intimately (and you do!).
It's a tome - so be prepared to sit with it for a long time -- or listen to it, as I did. The narrator brings each individual character to life so that you can't believe the same person speaking for different people.

This story is somewhat off my usual fayre. Ostensibly it is a romance story, or rather three romance stories that are intertwined. As such it is a book I never before bothered to read as I would not want my cool macho image to be dented by the sight of me flicking through a romance! But I managed to get a copy for my e-reader from "Manybooks" and thus read it in secret!

And I am very glad I did so. Of course, this is a classic so the judgement of history is already there as to the worth of this book, and nothing I add here can change that. Without a doubt this is a book that can be read and enjoyed by many many people. What I can add to this is that it can also be enjoyed by people who do not go in for icky romances! And the reason I can say that is that the real strength of this story does not lie in the romances themselves, but in the wonderful observation ad depiction of life in the 1830s of rural England.

From the opening pages where you have people namedropping Wilberforce and other such luminaries in their social circles, you are drawn into experiencing life amongst the tight Victorian social circles. You see how people wish to better not just themselves but others, but are often frustrated by the cages of convention. You see characters reform themselves, and others ruin themselves. You see people who are not evil and yet do evil deeds for human reasons. You see a mirror on the souls of the characters and ultimately ourselves as readers.

George Eliot's characterisations are wonderful. Her writing is still accessible to the modern reader, and whilst she makes some use of techniques where the narrator knows all and can moralise on the reader's behalf - something you would not find in a modern work - these techniques do not wholly detract from the work, and were - of course - quite common in Victorian fiction. One plot element also reminded me of Dickens in the unfolding coincidences in the background of two characters. But whilst the work is therefore clearly Victorian, it remains very readable. The auction scene and some other scenes were very funny, and as you recognise the types of characters being portrayed in real people - past and present - you will be amused by this work.

So if, like me, you don't do romances - don't skip this work. It is well worth reading.

I enjoyed Middlemarch. In fact, the more I read it, the more I enjoyed it. However, I can't really say that it is one of the 100 best novels of all time - I hope not anyways, or I am going to be a pretty disappointed reader if this is as good as it gets. Here is what I liked: The character development is really good. There are multiple story lines that get intertwined and it makes for a nice mix of characters and stories. It truly is a "study of provincial life", and Elliot does a nice job of portraying different types of people, marital discord, gender issues and societal issues - and much of the topics are still relevant today - quite impressive since the story was written in the 1800s. Elliot also has a nice way of inserting her point of view, or endowing little "tidbits of advice" that I found "highlight worthy". It is the type of book where I might go back and just read the quotes I highlighted - as I found them quite relevant and eloquently put. The story held my attention until the end.
That being said - I still have trouble giving it a 5 star rating - just not sure it is worth the legendary hype. I kept waiting for something a bit more dramatic to occur. Was waiting for the really big shoe to drop or bomb to hit, and it never happened. I guess that is in keeping with "provincial life" - it just sort of plodded along. I'm not even certain I could pinpoint the climax of the book although maybe that reflects my shortcomings as a reader :-). And while I appreciated the "Finale", to learn what became of everybody, it did seem a little contrived to me - a bit too neat and tidy. I was a little disappointed by the end in that regard.
In sum - I think it's a good book if you want to tackle one of the lengthier classics. Having a Kindle was key for me, in that I could look up all the words I didn't know (which were many - again - maybe my shortcoming). Clearly a talented writer, I think she achieved her goal of exploring different types of people, marriages, and "midlife crises". That being said, I would not say it was a life changing book for me - just an interesting read.

Eliot (the pen name of Mary Anne Evans) dazzles with the life in the simple nineteenth century English town of Middlemarch. Eliot's work shines in many ways. Human behavior and life and motivations are told in both amazingly perceptive observation and pinpoint accuracy language. She tells a good story and has engaging characters. This reader found the opening chapter, describing sisters Dorothea and Celia of such luminous descriptive power that its sheer overwhelming quality overshadowed the meanings. Only after settling into the book could one enjoy the characters and events because the awe-inspiring writing became a given. The rich characters are drawn from a variety of the times' social strata, wealthy and poor, young and old, wise and uh, not so wise. They're humans who face the challenges of life, misfortune, the consequences of divergent thinking/acting contrary to public opinion, gambling, secrets, and of facing romance and matrimonial commitment with its varied turns, and many issues of growing up and making choices. Yes, there's more than one good love story going on and it's none too surprising finding out that Eliot is a woman given the depth and insights she elaborates about women's relationships, internal thoughts, and roles with men in this society still very much male dominated. Eliot's magic with words necessarily means keeping a dictionary handy. The principal characters draw one in well, for this reader, particularly Dorothea and Lydgate, and even lesser characters such as Mr. Garth and his family, the dynamics of the Vincy family, and the Farebrother family. Religion and politics and relationships all add to the mix, are written well, and only deepen the reader's enjoyment. Simply terrific. Worthy of its status as a classic and great book.

Middlemarch is a town in early nineteenth century England and serves as a microcosm of English life at that time. And it's not just about the landed gentry. It covers many walks of life and includes a kaleidoscope of characters who are not comfortable with their wealth or lack thereof, their choice of spouses, their family history--you name it. There's Fred Vincy, who's been educated for the clergy but doesn't feel he's cut out for preaching. He fancies Mary Garth, who's pleasant and plucky but plain. Mary loves Fred but can't abide his aimlessness or his financial follies. Of course, Fred and Mary can't come right out and express their feelings for each other. Dorothea Brooke has it all--beauty, thoughtfulness, sufficient resources--but chooses to marry an older, unappealing, wealthy scholar. She realizes her mistake during the honeymoon but does her best to make it work until he conveniently dies. She has a penchant for her husband's cousin Will but can't admit this, even to herself. Her husband was obviously more attuned to the situation than Dorothea or Will, as his will makes it impractical for the two to marry. In fact, there are lots of scandals involving Will's heritage and relationship to Bulstrode, an unsavory, overly pious character, who is being blackmailed by an old acquaintance. Tertius Lydgate is the new doctor in town who hopes to make his mark in medicine and is Dorothea's male counterpart in the altruistic department. His reputation, however, suffers from his liaison with Bulstrode, and he finds himself buried in debt and married to a beautiful but frivolous woman who can't appreciate his aspirations. This is sort of a Victoria soap opera with lots of misunderstandings and even some political turmoil, which was lost on me, even with the assistance of the notes at the end.

"Here, with the nearness of an answering smile, here within the vibrating bond of mutual speech, was the bright creature whom she had trusted - who had come to her like the spirit of morning visiting the dim vault where she sat as the bride of a worn-out life; and now, with a full consciousness which had never awakened before, she stretched out her arms towards him and cried with bitter cries that their nearness was a parting vision; she discovered her passion to herself in the unshrinking utterance of despair."
~ George Eliot

Stick with this - from the size, it should be evident that it takes a good while to get completely grounded and involved. After that happens, it is impossible to put down this wonderful book. It's an in-depth discovery of the lives of several people in Middlemarch -- small town rural England during the time of reforms being planned in the 1880s. A time not altogether too different than our own, except for the predicament of women.

Dorothea is a fascinating woman, and a window into the lives of the women of those times, and -- through the various men who intersect with her, comes a picture of life as it was, the politics as they were, and the classes as they existed.

The talent of this author blazes across the many pages, bringing character after character which is beautifully developed and worked in among the various happenings, all wrapped around an epic design that, time after time, take one's breath. The (female) author chose the name George Eliot with the intention she be taken seriously as a writer. Even with the passage of time and changing of styles, it is impossible not to take seriously this amazing, wonderful book and its creator.

Highly recommended!

George Eliot, (nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans), wrote a literary masterpiece with "Middlemarch." I was forced to read this novel in school at an age when term papers and grades meant more than absorbing the riches this book contains. I reread it recently, after thirty years, and it was/is so worth the revisit! The Barnes and Noble Classic Series Edition of "Middlemarch" contains an excellent Introduction by author and poet Lynn Sharon Schwartz. There is also a brief biography of George Eliot included.

Ms. Eliot created here, an entire community in England in the mid-1800s and called it Middlemarch. She populated this provincial town with people of every station, local squires and their families, tradespeople, the rising middle class, (Middlemarch, right?), & the poor and destitute, ruthless and honest. She crowded them together, with all their ambitions, dreams and foibles, in this magnificent literary soap opera, and wove a wonderful web of plots and subplots. Ms. Eliot also wrote scathing social commentary and used great wit.

The fortunes of Middlemarch are rising in this new era when machines and trains - fast, available transportation - are changing the world, the economy, the politics. Rigid social codes, the British class system, is in danger of being breached. Folks are out to make a quick buck, or a shilling - anything to acquire wealth and enhance social position.

Dorothea Brooks lives in Middlemarch. She is an intelligent, sensitive young woman, who wants to dedicate her life to important endeavors. She does not want to settle for a typical marriage and family, but looks toward a more noble cause. As a woman, a professional life is not open to her, nor is the pursuit of intellect, outside of marriage. She weds the elderly Rev. Casaubon, a cold, narcissistic man, thinking that by assisting him with his scholarly research and writing, she will find happiness.

Dr. Lydgate comes to Middlemarch to begin his medical practice there. He is an idealist, who has dreams of finding a cure for cholera and opening a free clinic. He meets blonde and beautiful Rosamund Vincie, who fancies him for a spouse...along with a new house, new furniture, an extensive wardrobe, etc.

A dashing, romantic Will Ladislaw, nephew of Rev. Casaubon, enters the story, as does Rosie's brother Fred, who wants desperately to marry his Mary, but is out of work and in debt. This cast of richly drawn characters continues to grow with the introduction of Mary's family, the Garths, the banker Bulstrode, friends, relations, and an evil villain or two.

This complex novel and portrait of the times, is one of the best reading experiences I have had in a long while. I cannot recommend it highly enough. 5+ Stars!

JANA

I enjoyed "Silas Marner" by George Eliot, so I looked forward to "Middlemarch." I really enjoyed parts of the book but found other parts long, overly wordy and boring. She sometimes took a chapter to tell something that should have taken no more than a page or two in my opinion. I would have given in 4 stars, but the ending was very predictable and reminded me of a fairy tale.

Besides "Middlemarch" being the finest novel ever written in the English language, the narrator Juliet Stephenson gives the single most staggeringly brilliant reading I have ever heard on the hundred of audio books I have listened to over decades. She is the Meryl Strep of audio recordings, nay (as George Elliott might say) indeed better in that she vocally and expressively acts out a huge cast of characters in a single reading. Each voice has both the tone, accent and affect of both the region in England that they are from but the sound of the social class (or "position and place" as GW would say) they are from as well, and makes you feel their age whether an old man with frailties or a young beautiful woman or child in the bloom of their youth. She does men's voices and women's equally well; indeed so well that for the first half of the book I was convinced that there were multiple male and female actors doing all the voices. I plan to write her a fan letter for she truly is the equivalent of George Elliott in terms of talent and brilliance, whose work she not only honors but outdoes in her superb craft as one of the world's greatest actors. I had read "Middlemarch" years before but Ms. Stephenson made it so deeply rich in subtly and texture that the book took on dimensions I never got out of the reading of it. It is ironic that I give this review of the narrator more than the book. But if we were in a theater, we would, upon completion of this performance, all rise and give her a long and unending standing ovation. She is truly talent on loan from God. I would listen to her read a phone book or the Oxford English Dictionary if Audiobooks ever decides to have her narrate the same. Bravo Ms. Stephenson! I will select the my next audio book to listen to not on the basis of the book but on whether or not I can find another book recording she has done. If you only listen to one more audio book before the end of your life, make it this one. My only consolation upon hearing the famous last sentences read is that I can go back and visit Middlemarch and all its characters through the magic of her reading.

I will not presume to comment on the novel itself, which is regarded as one of the finest in the English language.

Since the Kindle Edition came from a reputable publishing house, I expected the presentation to be of professional quality. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Compared to a typical free edition (Project Gutenberg, for instance) this edition has the advantage of an introduction and chapter links. However, the typography has amateurish mistakes. The font size changes from chapter to chapter (it appears than when verse is quoted, there is a tendency for the typeface to change size permanently). The text is sometimes justified, sometimes not. I have noted these irregularities both on a Kindle device and on the Kindle for PC program. The edition seems to be free errors in the text itself, and the formatting irregularities are a relatively minor distraction.

Given the resources that the store has at its disposal, I still find it surprising that formatting of Kindle editions is generally so awkward and inconsistent.

In creating the town of Middlemarch and it's inhabitants the author left no stone unturned. She brought out the best and worst in the human soul and the story was poignant and well written. I believe this novel gives some insight to the true feelings of the author. It is a remarkable piece of English Literature and being that it was written by a woman reflects that the sex thought about what was going on in the world... outside of the drawing room. There were so many scenarios going on in this work and the cast of characters were more than I normally find in a novel but she fits them all together brilliantly. It is a rather lengthy work but it is highly entertaining and well worth the time spent reading.

George Eliot (pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans) penned a masterpiece when she wrote Middlemarch. This mid-19th century tale of the lives and loves of a variety of British townspeople is skillfully and intricately woven. Perhaps its most compelling character is Dorothea, who is intense in her religious duty and in her deep emotional sensibility; two characteristics that interplay with turmoil as she faces marriage and remarriage. Her first husband, Mr. Casaubon, is an ancient and crusty scholar, who attempts to win her promise of eternal devotion even after his death. Both her marriage and widowhood are complicated by her deep connection to her husband's cousin, the irresistible Mr. Ladislaw, whom she eventually marries at the expense of her late husband's fortune.

Rosamond Vincy is a much shallower woman, who, in spite of her outward loveliness, has a soul that is priggish and bent on absolute self-service. She effectively ruins her husband, Dr. Lydgate, both financially and relationally. Mary Garth is perhaps the most admirable woman in the book; she is sensible, steadfast, and self-sacrificing. She will not allow herself to be swayed by romantic whimsy; yet she does retain a deep devotion to her first and only true love, Fred Vincy - an irresponsible but well-meaning young man who eventually, through Mary's love, is able to make something of himself.

Numerous other characters people the fascinating landscape of Middlemarch - among them Mr. Bulstrode, a pious but tortured soul, whose transgressions and hypocrisy lead him to a wretched end; Mr. Farebrother, a kindly and faithful rector who helps everyone he can, even when it means giving up his own chance for happiness; Sir James Chettam, Dorothea's suitor and then her sister Celia's husband, and the strongest opponent to both of Dorothea's marriages; Celia herself, who plays a significant role in the early chapters but then fades to not much more than a foil to Dorothea; and Mr. Featherstone, the cantankerous old bachelor who holds sway over his entire extended family by keeping them guessing as to the contents of his will - a will which eventually affects many other aspects of the story as well.

How Mary Ann Evans was able to create such a fascinating, intriguing, and moving story, I can only begin to guess. In spite of its dry-at-times (yet undeniably intelligent) political wrangling and references that are now unfamiliar to most readers, the book is filled with literary excellence, a masterful plotline, and vivid characterization. And moreover, it is enlivened, Austen-like, with pungent and poignant little insights into humanity. What is said of Dorothea at the end of the book can be said of the general events of the story itself - "Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful... But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts."

Middlemarch is not an epic; it is not the most world-renowned novel ever written. It is a little religiously sardonic; some have called it humanistic. Yet in its faithful depiction of a set of very real characters and the choices and chances that defined their lives, it can contribute a little something to our understanding of ourselves and of the world. In that way, it is indeed not ideally beautiful; but without a doubt, it can be incalculably diffusive.

There are a lot of versions of ‘Middlemarch’ on the market and this Enhanced Ebook edition wins my prize for best value and best content. It’s only 99c and includes a revised, error-free text, stunning illustrations and a link to a free audio book. Need I say more?

One of the greatest (the greatest?) novels ever written. To account for the few negative reviews that appear here, I'd say that if you come looking for an Austen-style marriage plot, you might be disappointed. It begins that way, and there are elements of what makes that genre great throughout, but this is a fundamentally different project. This is a compassionate and penetrating (and sometimes purposefully languid) portrait of humanity in its most unremarkable and quotidian form. People's frailties, hypocricies, misconceptions, egoism and self-delusion are remarkably well-drawn, but without any of the contempt that sometimes peaks through in Trollope, Austen, Henry James, Wharton, etc. I read this book when I was 20 and was astounded by the precision and beauty of the writing, and for that reason alone, considered it one of the best books I'd ever read. I have returned to it several times in later life, and what strikes me every time I reread it now is its value as an ethical guide--how wise and unsentimental it is in its advocacy for compassion, empathy and an almost Buddhist/stoic approach to understanding the events, decisions and circumstances that make up a human personality. It's very hard to do justice to the joyful beauty alive in the world Eliot creates, so please, don't take my word for it, spend 30 hours of your time to get through this incredible book.

George Eliot's colossal novel "Middlemarch" is a literary White Pages of a rural town in pre-Victorian England, portraying several of its citizens in all the glories and disgraces (mostly disgraces) regarding their lives, marriages, and personal and professional ambitions, while using the historical and political events of the time as a backdrop. This is one of the finest examples of a character-driven novel, where the plot is customized to the characters, rather than the other way around.
A major theme in this novel is marrying wrong. Dorothea Brooke, a girl with ideas of social reform -- one of her occupations is designing cottages for poor villagers -- marries the scholarly but stodgy Edward Casaubon, who is old enough to be her father, because she is attracted to his disciplined, erudite mind. However, Casaubon employs her as a sort of secretary and assistant and becomes increasingly demanding of her. Then there is the seemingly fairy-tale marriage of Tertius Lydgate, a brilliant and promising young physician, to Rosamond Vincy, spoiled daughter of the mayor of Middlemarch, a wealthy manufacturer. Rosamond's expensive tastes endanger their marriage financially and romantically. On the other hand, the marriage of Dorothea's younger sister Celia to the dapper Sir James Chettam is nothing but bubble-headed bliss because they both are too superficial to care for anything deeper than peerage and pulchritude.
The novel ties its characters together with a few interrelated plot threads, the most important of which concerns Casaubon's young second cousin, Will Ladislaw. Will and Casaubon have little respect for each other, and when Casaubon suspects that Will and Dorothea are attracted to each other, he places a stipulation in his will denying Dorothea his fortune upon his death if she marries Will. Moreover, Will has been cheated out of his own fortune by Middlemarch banker Nicholas Bulstrode, who finances the hospital that employs Lydgate. Lydgate's association with the dishonest Bulstrode threatens to cause him further disgrace and ostracize him from the town.
Meanwhile, Rosamond's brother Fred typifies the irresponsible young man with money problems who manages to reform himself and win the respect of the girl he loves. The irony is that Fred expected a great inheritance from a rich uncle who instead, on his deathbed, offered the money to his servant Mary Garth, who happens to be Fred's beloved. Now, Fred's only options are to join the clergy, which Mary would not approve of, or get a job -- with Mary's father.
More serious and intellectual than the works of her immediate forebear Dickens, Eliot's novel seems to strike out bold new territory for British fiction of the time, especially considering the progressive mindsets of characters like Dorothea and Lydgate who act in contrast to tradition-bound grunts like Casaubon and the other town doctors. Her sophisticated prose style of intricately structured sentences and deep psychological penetration appears to have been a huge influence on Henry James. Much more than the sum of its parts, though, "Middlemarch" leaves its reader with a distinct impression of a time and place and, on reflection, the rewarding feeling of having accepted the challenge of reading it.

This will be a personal reaction, not a proper review. And yes, 4 stars, which for a book of the stature of Middlemarch, translates as, "This is very good, but I was disappointed."

Middlemarch is the story of a number of people in an English town in the early 1830s, written decades later with the benefit of research. There's the idealistic Dorothea, who wants to do good in the world; the equally idealistic Lydgate, who wants to reform the medical profession; the careless but good-natured Fred; the evangelical banker, Bulstrode, who has a dark secret; and many more. Several storylines intersect throughout the novel, which touches on politics, religion, medicine, social change and a good deal more.

Eliot has a reputation for writing great characters, and yes, the characters here are all distinct, complex and believable. And yes, the writing is genuinely insightful, and when the narrator (as she often does) comments on some aspect of human nature, it's likely to be something you'll recognize, perhaps something you hadn't quite put your finger on before. And yet, it is a long and slow-paced novel, taking a lot of time for scene-setting and extended metaphors, and also a rather didactic one; I felt the characters were explained more than shown, smothered under layers of authorial intent. I never felt much connection to this story, though it did become more interesting as it went. While I recognize Eliot's talent here, it's not a book that captured me and I find myself with little to say about it.

However, my lukewarm response may not predict yours. First, I enjoy strong writing and complex characters, but am less interested in more academic aspects of literary writing, such as classical references, symbolism, or extended metaphor; those who eat all that up are likely to love this. And second, I'm just tired of reading about well-to-do, repressed English country people in the 19th century; I think I've reached the point at which, however insightful an author's vision may be, it loses its luster by focusing on this particular milieu. Within that setting, Eliot's scope is much broader than, say, Austen's, but for all the books that have been written about it, this society is simply not that interesting. On to something else, and maybe in 20 or 30 years I'll reread this and like it more.

On the edition: I read the Penguin Classics version, which is fine. Endnotes are somewhat more numerous than necessary, but at least they don't spoil anything.

A real pleasure to recently discover this classic for the first time, "Middlemarch" is a fine example of the English style of writing from that period, a long book of almost 900 pages, with a large cast of characters and several main plot lines, novels like this are a reminder of the richness of the English language. This is a soap opera set in the fictional town of Middlemarch with descriptions of every walk of life, George Eliot's perceptions of human nature make this a timeless piece of fiction, though there is no doubt that she describes a way of life gone forever.
A main theme in this novel would seem to be possessing Utopian visions and the difficulty of putting them into practice in reality. One of the main characters is Dorothea, a young woman with great social ideals, she "thinks too much for a woman" and is under constant pressure from well-meaning realtives who want her to marry safely and give up her goals of saving the world. Dr. Lydgate is someone else we come to know quite well, another individual who has lofty ideas but trouble coping with the real world because he tries to ignore it. Mr. Brooke and Bulstrode also have certain visions of themselves not shared by an informed public.
Some reviewers seem to feel this book is too long, that the story could have been told in half the words, but I would not change one bit of this, the beautiful use of words helps me to escape into the world of Middlemarch when life was slower moving and people had more time for reflection.

I read Middlemarch 30 years ago for a highschool assignment. It was over my young head. Making it through the 900 pages was like climbing a mountain and back. It took me about 600 pages to get into the book, and hundreds of pages were devoted to the politics and goings on of the time - something I had little interest in. A more mature reader would probably have found that fascinating.

YET - Of all the books I have read and heard through the years, it is a few sentences in this book that captured my heart more than any other anywhere. See what you think:

"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

(Middlemarch, a few paragraphs into Chapter 20.)

For writing and insight like that, people make pilgrimages. Eliot's writing has thousands of brilliant paragraphs that are stunning in their eloquence and clarity.

I just this book as a required reading for a philosophy and thematic discussion class, and while I have found all the books asigned worthwhile reading, I didn't know what to expect with this book, having never read any Eliot and also having heard it described as a "chick book". While it does often read like an extremely ellaborate 19th century soap opera, I cannot recommend this book highly enough, whatever your reading preferences. This book cuts across genre lines not just as a result of the witty storylines and sharp dialogue but as a legitimate and inciteful case study of human nature and human interactions, both social and romantic.
Set in and around the town of Middlemarch, somewhere in England, the story encomasses the lives of a slew of dilightful and diverse townspeople, tending to focus on and revolve the story around three couples: Dorothea/Ladislaw, Rosamond/Lydgate, and Mary Garth/Ted. The entire story is very complicated and impossible to give a summary of here, but sufice it to say that Dorothea is an aristocratic, idealistic, religious girl of twenty who wants to do something great and has an inquiring mind, so she marries a man named Casaubon, but he turns out not to be so great as she had hoped and he has a young cousin named Ladislaw who has been supported by Casaubon and doesn't understand how Dorothea could be attracted to him, and is convinced that Casaubon will make her as wretched as he is so Ladislaw must protect her... And that's just one of the many inter-weaving subplots.
The real genious of this novel is the complex realistic characters that George Eliot fills her book with. These characters are all real and presented in such a svmpthetic light that though you will likely come to care for some and despise others, you find it difficult to judge them as being good or bad. The role that human relationships plays in our lives and the problems caused by common miscommunications are all dealt with realistically and sympathetically. Questions such as, what makes a good marriage?, what does it mean to be great?, and how should one treat ones fellow man? are all featured genuinly a promonently.
This is not to say that this is necessarilly a philosophic novel, it can be read just for the real pleasure of reading, but it is one of those rare great books that never fails to entertain while engaging the mind and the spirit throughout. A must read for anyone, regardless of taste, who likes to read for the sheer pleasure of it.

I really stand in awe of Ms Eliot's tremendous talent. I would not like to be classified among those modern day literary critics who indicate that a certain author's plots aren't worth much, but the books are saved by their wonderfully constructed sentences. But there is no doubt that GE is a master of the language. She is a writer of profound elegance who shows a deep understanding of human psychology. All that said I am pleased to say that she can also write a darn good story.
Middlemarch is one of many Victorian novels that presents the plight of women during that period (how many other women were out there with writing talent that were stifled, I wonder). There are three plots in the novel that examine male and female relationships and the role that both sexes play during courting and marriage, and we learn how women were treated with condescension if they voiced an opinion on something. But this is not a gothic romance novel. It is a beautifully written story of the social milieu of English provincial life around 1830.
There is a certain law that pertains to Victorian novels: If a character is married early in the novel, then that marriage is doomed to failure. Middlemarch follows the law scrupulously. You must be married in the book's waning pages if you want to live happily ever after. Dorothea is a wealthy young woman who marries a scholastic, elderly clergyman because she wants to gain knowledge at the feet of a master. Unfortunately he is a dried up fig with no ability to communicate wisdom. He dies but leaves Dorothea with a burdensome restriction in the will: she can not marry a man that she also loves. Dr. Lydgate marries a dim and self centered woman who sees a husband solely as a provider of a fine life style. And poor drifting Fred courts a plain, but bright commoner who will continue to reject his advances until he settles down and finds a career for himself.
Now maybe that plot outline makes you yawn, but it is the way that George Eliot tells it that makes the difference. She presents a crystal clear picture of these people and their lives and society and even politics. And despite her stately language GE has an engaging, subtle humor to her writing. Mr. Crabbe, the glazier, loved joining the group for gossip, and is described as one "who gathered much news and then groped among it dimly."
My copy of Middlemarch is the Norton Critical Edition, and I highly recommend it. It contains and extra 150 pages of Ms Eliot's letters about the book; her notes laying out the story; and some interesting contemporary and current reviews and analyses of the novel. Henry James, liked it, but had some criticisms of the lead characters, which I found myself (sort of)agreeing with. It's a great supplement to a great novel.

George Eliot is a genius in describing the development the inner thoughts and motives. The lives and choices of two pretty girls (Dorothea and Rosamond) and two plain (Celia and Mary) are followed. The latter two make better choices, though all end up relatively content. Dorothea, who is too high-minded for reality, reminds me of my own sister, Dorothy, who followed the Maharishi to Iowa, but found a great husband along the way. Rosamond is simply too self-centered and materialistic. She gets her own way, eventually, pushing her husband, Dr. Lydgate, to move to London. where her beauty would no doubt get a wider theater.

Many of their problems would be eliminated today by trial marriage. Other situations are not prevalent these days - so many ministers (true in my genealogy, also) so little medical knowledge, and few women's rights. Too-young death was more with them than in our time. But ignorance, gossip, jealousies, xenophobia, inability to handle debt, are still the norm, and much can be learned from Eliot's well fleshed-out characters.

There were some characters who would be fun to play - especially the gossipy Mrs Cadwallader, Rev. Farebrother who played Whist to support his collection of old female relatives he was kind enough to keep, or the intense intellectual Ladislaw stretched our on the Persian rugs of other's homes, or the nasty Mr. Featherstone on his deathbed. I will have to watch that PBS series.

The book is too long - approaching 900 pages - and It occurred to me that it would make a great Masterpiece Theater serial - and indeed it was, about 20 years ago. Relationships and places were complicated, and I was aided by a "Middlemarch Relationship Map" I found on-line. I never quite caught on to all the political references and legal terms. Some of Eliot's quotes at the beginning of the chapters escaped me.

It's worth the read, but perhaps with a little skimming in some sections.

This is a beautiful and romantic novel not to be missed by any fan of classic literature. The thick volume (795 pages) may be an instant put-off for some readers and the story does take a little while to develop, but TRUST ME, once you get past the first 50 pages, you'll be HOOKED and finding it difficult to put down the book.
I love George Eliot's style of writing - beautifully and distinctively eloquent and expressive, and with such observance and skills in depicting the depths and complexities of human relations and the demands and passions of the heart. The book also explores the issues of "class" (e.g. in the courtship between gentleman Fred Vincy and working class Mary Garth), "money" (e.g. questions raised over Featherstone's will after the old miser's death), "politics" (on elections and the cause promoted by the 'liberal' Middlemarchers), "scandals" (especially concerning the dark secrets of the respected banker, Mr Bulstrode) and even "murder" - all portrayed brilliantly in high drama and with engrossing suspense.
My favourite character is the heroine, the virtuous Dorothea Brooke whose life is made miserable by her marriage to the old, dull, selfish academician, Casaubon. Her later acquaintance with young Will Ladislaw who is Casaubon's cousin ("cousin, not nephew", as the vain Casaubon always makes a point to clarify, due to the apparent age gap between them) provides Dorothea with the companionship of someone who listens to and respects her views and who brings a ray of sunshine and cheer into her otherwise lonely life. Love soon blossoms between Dorothea and Will but they're forbidden to court/marry even after Casaubon's death due to a nasty clause put in by Casaubon in his will. It was pure heartache to read of the feelings that these two have for each other but aren't able to express due to societal constraints. Will knows rather early on that he loves her; it takes Dorothea longer to realize her true feelings. I got all teary-eyed when I read the part where Dorothea, alone in her room and in a state of inescapable anguish, moans out "Oh, I did love him!" [And to quote]: "... But she lost energy at last even for her loud-whispered cries and moans: she subsided into helpless sobs, and on the cold floor she sobbed herself to sleep".
The other main characters are no less interesting and will easily capture the reader's heart and compassion. There's Dr Lydgate, an ambitious man whose marriage to the vain, beautiful but spoilt Rosamund Vincy turns out to be a most exasperating and expensive affair (you have to read the book to find out just how SO). There's also a love triangle involving Fred Vincy, Mary Garth and Farebrother (the vicar). The other smaller characters such as Bulstrode, his wife, Mr Garth (Mary's father), a blackmailer (Raffles) and others are all well-painted and believable, each with their own story to tell.
Unlike some classics, this one provides a most satisfying ending because it discloses in the 'Finale' what happens later to the main characters after the "main story" has ended - e.g. up to what age they live to, if the (new) marriages are successful, how many children each couple has, etc.
"Middlemarch" is a truly remarkable classic and a wonderful, wonderful read.

It is hard for a modern reader to appreciate "Middlemarch" the way that contemporary readers must have appreciated the book. First, the book is written in a most convoluted and roundabout style, with long elaborate sentences conveying the simplest of meanings and emotions. Second, the plot and characters of the book have found themselves copied and pasted shamelessly by some many modern best-selling romance authors that the book no longer retains the striking originality and depth it had when it was first published. Third, the world that the book describes and lives in -- the provincial mindset, the unbreakable sanctity of marriage life, the honor code, the gentleman's conduct -- are no longer ironclad ways of life, and thus difficult for us to fully appreciate the emotional lives of the major characters. Then there is the length and pace of the book -- at almost 800 pages the book's plot does not start moving until two-thirds into the book, trying the patience of the reader who breathes and lives with his smartphone.

George Eliot's most famous book (although I think "Daniel Deronda" to be her masterpiece) concerns itself with resolving three love stories. There is Dorothea, a young wealthy orphan who has her sights on making a significant moral and intellectual contribution to humanity and who thought she has found the perfect mate in her pursuing her idealism in a wealthy preacher twice her age and already at death's door, as everyone around her is quick to remark. There is Tertius Lydgate, a young doctor whose pride and idealism are just as burdensome as his name and as his modern medical education, but who is actually fell by his marriage to a spoilt princess determined to crush her husband's pride the way no one else could. And finally there is Fred Vincy, born into a wealthy family but who suffers from what the British nobility considers the worst affliction: laziness. The book drifts back and forth among these three characters, and it does so in a lazy and haphazard manner so that we fail to see what connects the three, and what the book's ultimate themes are. Indeed, there are many themes in this book, but none really lack the substance and integrity to stand out; inter-generational struggle (how the elders are determined to bind the young to their wishes and plans) and the hypocrisy of a provincial life (when a banker is discovered to have come to his wealth through ill-gotten means the entire town turns on him even though many in the town have benefited from the banker's wealth, and so much of the sanctimonious religious piety of Middlemarch has been in fact been bankrolled by ill-gotten wealth) must readily stand out, but even these two themes aren't strong enough to sate us with a shallow understanding of the book. What messages are we supposed to leave the book with? "Watch who you marry"? "It's better to be rich than to be poor"? "The young will make mistakes that they'll regret for the rest of their lives"?

What interested me most about this book (and what probably interests most readers) are the love stories in this book, particularly Dorothea's story, and it is in her story and in her character that I found most wanting. Her character isn't fully developed, and there's a crass simplicity to her idealism. The book wants us to believe that in pursuing noble goals all of Dorothea's thoughts and actions are noble, and that's simply not credible to believe in a twenty-one year old. Dorothea's simple-minded idealism makes it difficult for us to sympathize with her, but what makes it nearly impossible is her ideal circumstances. Yes, she does marry a man twice her age, but this man also happens to be kind and generous if pseudo-intellectual and aloof -- he makes no demands of Dorothea, which she finds annoying but which also makes her comfortable. And when he departs he leaves her a fortune, making her instantly the matriarch of Middlemarch, and allowing her to conjure up the wildest schemes to spend her vast fortune. And all this while she is pursued by good noble men, and is doted on by the all the people around her. If Middlemarch had a longer time frame in which Dorothea is forced to suffer some loneliness for her bad choices then this would be a stronger, more compelling book.

I bought the Penguin Classics edition (1994 version) because of the copious notes explaining language and references likely unfamiliar to reader's of today. These notes made reading Middlemarch a little more cumbersome, since they are at the end, but the added understanding made it worth the effort. Those interested in researching George Eliot's life and her other works should consider finding a copy of the Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot, John Rignall ed., Oxford University Press.
Middlemarch, recommended by a friend who knew that I enjoyed reading 18th and 19th century literature, was a difficult book to put down. I had just finished Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and prior to that all of Jane Austen's work. In comparison, Middlemarch seems to hold a middle ground between Bronte and Austin in terms of style. Where Jane Austen's text tends to be light and simple, Bronte's a bit heavy and complex, Eliot's Middlemarch is also complex but it flows like Austen's best works. Middlemarch isn't perfect - Eliot actually revised the ending because it contradicted earlier assertions. But it is definitely a great read and worthy of being on everyone's bookshelf.
Whether or not her depiction of early 19th century England is accurate I don't know. What I do know is that her characters are endearing in spite, or perhaps because, of all their faults, misunderstandings, and sometimes downright childish behavior. Eliot try's not to judge the actions of her characters by occasionally halting the story line and explaining them in what seems to be a neutral "scientific" manner; and I often found those explanations insightful and worth remembering (if only my memory would cooperate). Middlemarch, for me, stands with Jane Austin's work as one of the best novels I have read in a very long time.

This is not for the faint of heart. I'll be the first to admit that Eliot is no day-in-the-park author. She's regal, she's massive, she's intense. She's the Titanic, the way it was meant to be. The upside of all this is that you enter a world of literature so engrossing and pungent, it will be hard to pick up a less involved book afterwards. Eliot is an aquired taste for some, but, oh, what a taste! I began her books with Middlemarch and it has been my ultimate favorite ever since. It even surpasses Pride and Prejudice in my estimation, no small concession.
Middlemarch isn't a glamourous town, but it *is* full of strangely fascinating normal people. They're deliciously human, understandably flawed, and believably redeemed. Love, life, and death are not sugar-coated, but shown in all their respective glory and shabbiness. The characters, however minor, are honestly portrayed, making you feel like one of them. Idealistic Dorothea could have lived in any age, in any place. Lydgate is another. They are mirrored by the sad realism of the Bulstrode and Casaubon among others. All the other Middlemarchers fall in between these common extremes. With as broad a brush as Eliot paints with (covering religion, provincial politics, social mores, business, romance), there are also many (relevant) commentaries that have her wielding as fine as brush as an ivory-painter (intricacies of human nature, society, and the ironies of life). Eliot was an unabashed intellectual, but persuasive and logical, making it a pleasure to delve into her mind. Her works are diamonds in English Lit - captivating from afar as they are breathtaking up close. Read her for the fun plots, as well as the brilliant insights.
The characters are true, the settings are used to perfection, and the complexity is amazing. The characters may not endear themselves to you on paper, but they become so lifelike through details that they will compel feelings through reason - reaching your heart through your brain. Not a likely arrangement, but one that Eliot pulls off uncannily.
Eliot made a masterpiece of town life with Middlemarch. The same is done for pastoral life with Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede. For a shorter, sweeter story, read Silas Marner. And never lump her with Dickens, who gracelessly and grotesquely inflates life in order to make a point.

George Eliot is the queen of the complex sentence. The good news is that the dialogue in this second rate romance level is great. The bad news is that the author takes very complex and hard to follow 20-30 word sentences to explain the action. One other thing. With several courtships and marriages taking place none of the character has a single sexual thought not to mention no sexual actions. Oh wait! A pair of lovers do kiss while in a thunderstorm during a lightening flash illuminating their faces and the kiss. The only kiss in over 50 chapters.

Having been slightly bored by "Silas Marner," I was not expecting much gratification from this massive tome. But I had heard good things about "Middlemarch" from others, so I steeled myself and dug in. I was quite figuratively blown-away by the quality of writing.

It is not just that Eliot is an excellent satirist, but that she makes penetrating psychological insights and crafts very well-developed, imminently human characters, who are sympathetic despite their faults. She also exhibits a brilliant mastery of the English language, describing both internal and external scenes in the most beautiful of terms.

"Middlemarch" is not an easy read; there are multiple characters with complex relationships to one another, and the threads of their singular lives are eventually thoroughly tied up into one another. I found that keeping note cards on the family trees of the various characters was of assistance when reading. But once you have established who everyone is, the complexity of the novel is no longer a hindrance, and it may be read as lightly and quickly as any work of fiction.

The plot line is interesting enough, but it is the personalities of the characters that are truly gripping. I cannot recall a single novel that has stimulated my intellect as deeply, or drawn upon my emotions as expertly, or commanded my respect as fully as "Middlemarch." I cannot issue a higher recommendation.

Middlemarch by George Eliot. Highly recommended.
It seems that it's nearly impossible to talk about Middlemarch without mentioning its breadth and scope. The irony is that the entire novel takes place within the confines of this small community and within the sometimes-small minds of its various citizens.
Although a vast number of characters populate Middlemarch and its environs, each who speaks has a distinctive voice, yet does not fall into being mere type only. The horse dealer sounds like a horse dealer-but one with a particular background and perspective. The setting itself represents every type of town, suburb, village, or neighborhood where you'll find the complacent, the critical, the aspiring, the intellectual, the earthy, the wealthy, the poor, and the worker in between. As with many English novels, the setting, in this case Middlemarch, becomes as much a central character as any other, whether it's Dorothea or Lydgate.
The tapestry Eliot weaves is complex; one character's actions can affect the lives of others he or she may rarely meet, while the unknown behavior and works of Bulstrode in his youth decades ago eventually touch nearly all.
How the characters come together is sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. Dorothy's interest in Causabon, although a puzzle to her friends and family, is painted in broad strokes to the reader; her later interest in Will Ladislaw, grows somewhat more delicately if based in the same altruistic roots. Mary Garth and Fred Vincy have, in their way, come together in their childhoods; they are still struggling with mutually agreeable terms that will allow both to acknowledge the love and affection that are already there. Lydgate and Rosamond are both more of a puzzle and less of one-a case of two opposed personalities with opposing views, opposing goals, and opposing personalities drawn together by that most capricious of matchmakers, proximity and circumstance, to form a union that will frustrate both and satisfy neither.
Against the background of these four sometimes difficult relationships (Dorothea and Causabon with its lack of love or eros, Dorothea and Will with the barriers set by Causabon's will and that of the Middlemarch society who frown on Will and Dorothea's association with him, Fred and Mary with her imposed restrictions to set him on the correct course in life before she can make a commitment to him, and Lydgate and Rosamond with their diametrical oppositions) is the long, happy marriage of Nicholas Bulstrode and his Vincy wife Harriet. Unlike the others, there are no visible barriers to their happiness, and they are happy as a couple-except for the events in Bulstrode's past that haunt him in the back of his mind and then at the front with the appearance of Raffles. The marriage survives the ensuing scandal, but the individuals-Nicholas and Harriet-become poor shadow of their former selves.
It is in a town like Middlemarch that a woman like Dorothea will find it impossible to find approbation for her plans and Bulstrode will find the antagonism of those who have come to terms with their own worldly desires. It is in a town like Middlemarch that merely the raving words of a delirium tremens-afflicted Raffles can upset the respectable work of a respectable lifetime. The downfall of Bulstrode validates the town and its modernizing secular culture.
Middlemarch is a novel of insight into personality, motivations, social behaviours, and history. In the end, even the happiest characters have failed at most if not all of their youthful aspirations and have become variations on the Middlemarch theme-husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, day-to-day toilers rather than dreamers and achievers. Middlemarch is Everytown, where you will find an example or two of Everyone-and their dreams or lack thereof.
If you intend to glean the utmost from it, begin with an annotated, critical edition; while Eliot enjoyed a high enough level of erudition to reference the current events of 1830s England along with mythology, religion, quotations, and developments in science and medicine, most of us today cannot begin to follow them without assistance. Knowledge of these references will enrich the rich text of a rich mind.
Diane L. Schirf, 1 September 2002.

Middlemarch is a soap opera for the educated reader. You get to snoop into the private lives of all these people, to witness them in their most private moments, interactions, and thoughts. And you get history and philosophy too, so you don't feel like you are wasting your time on drivel. It is delicious. Middlemarch is one of those very long books that I wouldn't have minded being even longer. I looked forward to spending an hour every night in the town of Middlemarch; the ride is so pleasurable, that you don't really care if you never get to the end. Middlemarch, like every book, is not for everyone, but if you are interested in peeking into the lives of all these fascinating and, in many cases, very imperfect people, give Middlemarch a try.

The version of MIDDLEMARCH I read was the Modern Library edition with an introduction by A.S. Byatt. Ms. Byatt mentions that Eliot was the great English novelist of "ideas", and as such was the progenitor of Proust and Mann. Reading MIDDLEMARCH, I can understand her point. As far as Victorian novelists go, George Eliot was Dickens with a finer sense of wit, and a subtler intelligence.

MIDDLEMARCH centers on Dorothea Brooke, a young woman with fervent and noble ideas and ideals, and a hunger for intellectual enrichment. Unfortunately, she lives in a time and place which is not conducive to the attainment of her aspirations, and winds up in an unfulfilling marriage to Casaubon, a sickly cleric much older than herself, a pedantic scholar of theology and antiquity, who wanted an obedient secretary for his life's work as well as a dedicated and subservient wife, more than (as she had hoped) a life partner on the road to discovery. While married to him, she meets his cousin Wil Ladislaw, a young man of keen intellect and a passion for art, but with a dubious past and unsettled future.

Another key character is Tertius Lydgate, a young doctor who comes to the provincial town of Middlemarch to do research, make great discoveries for the benefit of mankind, run a hospital and practice that will utilize his knowledge for good more than for personal financial gain. He falls in love with, and marries the mayor's daughter Rosamund Vincy, a very pretty but shallow woman. Related to the Vincys through marriage is Peter Featherstone, a miserly old landowner in failing health whose demise might benefit Rosamund's brother, and Nicholas Bulstrode, a wealthy banker (with an overly pious attitude) and influential member of the town council, who has many important enemies in Middlemarch, as well as an awful secret to hide.

MIDDLEMARCH is a novel about relationships and about human aspirations and how society (in this case provincial 18th century English society), conspires to thwart those aspirations. Unlike Dickens, who likes to paint in broad strokes and vivid colors, Eliot is much subtler in her craft. Her characters have complex tones to their personalities. MIDDLEMARCH is a finely wrought study of these characters and of the times that nurtured them, influenced them, and ultimately affected their fortunes.

George Eliot is a keen observer of her environment, and beyond the people themselves, of the religious, social, and political factors which complicate interpersonal relationships. All this done with a wit and wisdom as well as a sense of understanding and compassion that exude from every page.

Virginia Woolf once said that "Middlemarch" was the first novel written for adults and she is correct. With the exception of Fielding's "Amelia" this is one of the first books to marry off its heroine before the first 150 pages and to let the audience realize the consequences of not examining the real nature of one's future mate.
The book is set in the reform period and all of the main characters are intent of carrying out some measure of reform. Dorothea Brooke wants to make poverty as appealling as wealth, Dr. Lydgate wants to reform medical care to eliminate diseases with the latest methods. Dorthea's uncle Mr. Brooke wants to get elected to parliament on the "reform ticket," Mr. Casaubon, who later marries Dorothea, wants to reform scholarship by producing something called "The Key to the World's Mythologies."
It probably will not spoil the book by revealing that none of these reforms are realized. All are wrecked by human nature and flaws in the characters themselves. The only person who succeeds is Mary Garth who manages to reform Fred Vincey who begins as a rascal, bellowing for something called a marrow bone for breakfast and then transforms into a likable figure. This I think is key to what is afoot in Middlemarch. Before society can really be reformed, human nature needs to be so regulated as to permit a more general reform of society. Some may dismiss this as a simplistic solution, but it is no more a simplistic approach than those theories that ignore human nature as they build castles in the air, just like the people of Middlemarch.
I must confess that I found this book slow going at first. I think that the key to the book is that Eliot does not consider any particular character as the mouthpiece of her ideas (for a while I thought Dorothea was meant to be Eliot herself, but she is too great an artist to make this kind of mistake). No, this is Eliot's best book and rightly so. She does not cheat in the characterization which is one of the strengths of the book. This makes her work shine through nearly 150 years later.

I had to read "Middlemarch" for a Victorian literature course, and I approached it with certain trepidation: it's a tome, for a start, and by the time I braved it, I'd heard pretty much everyone in the class muttering about how dense and difficult it was. I had that reaction, too, for about 100, or even 200 pages. But I fell in love with it slowly. You have to almost re-learn how to read when you approach a novel like Middlemarch; it was not written to cater to short, wandering attention spans. But the brilliance of this book gradually reveals itself. Eliot is subtle and serious, but she is also witty and very humane, and in "Middlemarch" she tackles so much: science, art, religion, politics, love, morality.
I noticed by the end of the course that everyone who had previously been whining about this book had come to feel a certain sense of awe toward it. "Middlemarch" certainly demands a lot of time and thought to fully appreciate, but it's not difficult to understand why this is considered the great Victorian novel.

I was extremely hesitant about reviewing George Eliot'sMiddlemarch, as it's been ten years or so since I've read it, but inthe end I couldn't resist adding my comments to those of others. Quite simply, it is the greatest novel yet written by an English author: Middlemarch is the fullest realisation of George Eliot's ideas on social philosophy combined with her utterly convincing characterisation and remarkable moral insight.
The novel's 'heroine' is Dorothea Brooke, a young woman of excellent virtue who is passionately idealistic about the good that can be achieved in life. The provincial setting of Middlemarch is the environment in which Dorothea's struggle to fulfil her ideals takes place, and the novel's central theme is how the petty politics of provincial 19th century England are largely accountable for her failure. In parallel with Dorothea's story is the story of Lydgate, an intelligent and ambitious doctor who also runs up against the obstructive forces of provincial life and finds them severely restrictive of his goals.
Eliot is supremely compassionate, yet never blind to the faults of her characters. Dorothea's ideas of social reform are naive, while her high opinion of Casaubon's work proves to be a major mistake. But Eliot is never cynical when the motives of her characters are pure, and does not censure them for failure. What she is critical of is the narrow minded self-seeking attitude which forces Dorothea and Lydgate to come to terms with the fact that often good does not win out over circumstance. The subtext to this is the fact that the high ideals and sense of responsibility intrinsic in both Dorothea and Lydgate means that there is no question of them ever finding love together. In essence, Middlemarch is simply about life and how things don't always work out, despite our best intentions, but are often the product of negative forces. In other novels Eliot's didacticism can sometimes jar, but it is impossible to ignore the depth of her wisdom in Middlemarch.
Middlemarch is the best novel of our greatest novelist - of the major Victorian writers only Tolstoy can really compare with her - and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

That is high praise, I know, but I couldn't think of any better superlatives. George Eliot writes with such keen insight into such diverse lives, it staggers the imagination. Virginia Woolfe wrote that Eliot was one of the few nineteenth century authors who wrote for grown up people, and I couldn't agree more. She never insults her readers by telling them what their opinion should be of any of her characters. They are all intricately drawn with an even hand, good traits and bad. Just when you think you've found a character that it is impossible to sympathize with, Eliot debunks your opinion in a single poignant paragraph.

I read and loved this book in college, and I've read it every two or three years since. It never wears thin. Anyone who wants to know how perfectly seamless a novel can be must read this masterpiece.

I can do little but agree with all of the positive comments from previous posters. George Eliot puts human lives under a microscope and examines them with wisdom and compassion. The town of Middlemarch, with all of its human drama, could be any community at any time, and its people are just like our friends and neighbors. But we get to know Eliot's characters so much better than we ever get to know our friends and neighbors. These characters are some of the most fully formed in all of literature -- Dorothea Brooke, the idealistic young woman who marries the wrong man for the best of reasons; Tertius Lydgate, the young physician who sets out to change the world but finds his own weakness his biggest obstacle; Caleb Garth, the humble man who knows when and how to take a stand; Nicholas Bulstrode, the prosperous businessman whose reputation is endangered by some questionable past dealings. No situation is trivialized and no character is or decision is portrayed as one-dimensionally "good" or "evil" -- Eliot does each character justice, showing us their thought processes and letting us understand exactly why they do what they do. I entitled my review "perhaps the best novel ever written," but I know of none better. I urge you to jump into the world that George Eliot creates and enjoy her intelligence, wit and wisdom.

Middlemarch is a challenging book to read for several reasons. One, it is too long. Two, the author has a tendency to go off on philosophical tangents. Three, the author will sometimes spend several paragraphs on the inner workings of the mind of a very minor character who is hardly pertinent to the story. These flaws aside, I will say that I enjoyed Middlemarch very much. It is easy to get caught up in the lives of Dorthea, Will, Fred, Mary, Dr.Lydgate and Rosamond and many others. George Eliot wrote wonderful dialogue in this book--the conversations between characters are very interesting. I thought Dr. Lydgate was the most compelling person in the book. He had such high hopes and was a good and honorable man. Yet, he let himself be ensnared in a silly marriage and here the author is very insightful in portraying Dr.Lydgates trapped, disappointed existence with Rosamond. What he wants in a wife and marriage and what she wants in a husband and marriage are miles apart and so, in the end, they resign themselves to one another. I also liked the character of Mary. She's a strong woman who knows what she wants. Although Dorthea can be irritating at times, with her insistence that everyone see things the way she does, she is good and goodness is appealing in a central character. Her relationship with Will Ladislaw is portrayed well. Their love for one another was truly believable. While reading Middlemarch, there were a few times in which I felt as if I were slogging through, but there were many more times when I didn't want to put it down. So, all in all, a good read and worth the effort.

Remember the first time you read a classic, expecting it to be hard work: dreary "educational" stories, and abstruse language? And then you read it and found out to your delight that good writing meant it was easy to read and kept your interest? Middlemarch is simply fun to read. The language is high, and for some readers perhaps "wordy," but not the type of wordiness that has too many descriptions of things. It's thoughtful. Middlemarch is really an elevated soap opera, with completely filled out and amusing characters, angst filled situations, and lots of interesting history. If you like to read about the Victorian era, enjoy the repression they live under, and like to long for people to speak their hearts when they feel they can't, then you'll like this book. It is very long, but I always appreciate that when it's a good story, and this is definitely a good story.

I first read this book in a college course about self-deception as a theme in literature. This was by far my favorite of the things we read (we read such other things as Vanity Fair, The Ring and the Book).
This is really a long book about ordinary circumstances in a 19th century rural area in England. So why is a book such as this one considered such a classic even though not many particularly grand events happen?
The book is the study of the ordinary in many ways. You end up seeing how different people live and deal with different situations and what kinds of people they are. At the same time that the reader comes to judgments about the people in the book, George Eliot manages to portray most of her characters sympathetically. Even the worst people in the book are rounded out in some ways and Eliot tries to imbue a sense of humanity. It portrays an "adult" view of the world instead of the simplistic view of the child. In fact, Dorothea makes a journey during the book from a child with a romanticized view to an adult with a more rich understanding through life experience and wisdom.
If you're looking for a book about exciting events, with high drama, with a fast pace, don't bother picking this book up since you'll probably dislike it. This is a book written by a woman and expressing some criticisms of a woman's place in the world of her time. It is also a book that explores a more ordinary setting and viewpoint than perhaps most male authors of the time would write in such depth about. She brings a different experience than most male or female authors of the 19th century. Male authors focused on grander events (their characters often fighting to get somewhere in life) while many female authors showed a romanticized view of life and love. Look at the romances of Jane Austin in which a good marriage seems to be the ultimate goal, or the stormy loves of Emily Bronte in which some strange control/love dynamic becomes magnified to almost heroic proportions. The author is showing something unique, more restrainted, less extreme, more "middle" or ordinary. She manages to pull off a more balanced or "middle" view, also. I noticed some other readers mentioned that it was slow, that they thought events were predictable, or other similar criticisms. These criticisms are valid as far as they go--but they miss the point since these elements aren't really the center of this book.
In fact, Middlemarch is really about a somewhat mundane existance that is inhabited by many people in the real world. We aren't immune to a mundane existance today: work; TV; having enough money to get by; domestic squabbles; eating; relating to other people; perhaps dreaming of something grand but not accomplishing it. There are many events of a mostly ordinary nature that gradually lead one way or another in the lives of people (both ourselves and others around us).
Really this book is about gradual changes, about good acts and bad acts. It's about coming to some state of acceptance and a kind of enlightenment in life. It's about making the unexceptional life one of meaning even when circumstances prevent many large or great things. It's about a hard-to-define quality called "goodness" even absent huge acts or events.
In any case, give this book a read if you like 19th century English literature since it's one of the greats of the period. It's also one of my favorites since I feel as though the author is treating the reader as an adult, without pulling punches, while explaining something about the life that most actual people experience.

I am in awe of George Eliot. She has constructed a narrative that is uncommonly perceptive and literate about both the subtle and quirky level of individual motivation and the larger forces of society which form the arena in which human lives play themselves out. Middlemarch is a provincial English town during Victorian times and Eliot selects a broad range of characters from every level of society to illustrate her themes. Prominent among these themes are the way in which the ambitions of potentially extraordinary achievers can be constrained by a poor choice of affiliation, most notably bad marraiges. She also addresses the role of women, the way that wealthy landowners determine the quality of life for the poor, and presents insightful portraits of a number of personality types. It is often a very funny book as well, as she exposes the foibles of the pompous and self-deluded with subtle and unerring accuracy.

This is not a light read. This is a long, dense novel, but I found something fascinating on nearly every page.

I must admit that I was intimidated for years by this novel. It sat on my shelf for ages, neglected in favor of "easier" books to read. Once I started it though, I couldn't put it down.

I generally read really quickly, but you really should take your time with every word of this novel. Otherwise you miss sentences like the following:

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." !!!!!!!!!!! AMAZING.

Not to mention a lushly romantic plot that really tears you apart. I couldn't believe how breathless I was during the interactions of two of the main characters. Deeper messages aside, this was an emotional experience. I read Middlemarch like I read novels that will not be in print more than 10 years. So don't be intimidated by the density of the prose like I was!

Middlemarch follows the characters of a small provincial English town. It displays a mastery of interiority that surpasses any other. Mature, insightful, and profoundly human, the book illuminates the patterns of human thought, and allows one to see that even the most average of lives is beautiful and meaningful when closely viewed.
My one complaint is that, in her effort to portray humanity truthfully, Elliot frustrates the efforts of all the most visionary and idealistic characters. Perhaps in life these sorts of people do not always succeed, but one would like to have hope that they sometimes do.

Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up peole", and I could not agree with her more. In contrast to her male contemporaries such as Dickens or Thackeray with their sentimentality and their clean stories, Eliot comes as close to facing the "boredom, the horror and the glory" as a C19 novelist can.
Middlemarch is essentially about how lives can go wrong. It starts out with idealistic Dorothea Brooke wanting to reform the world and young Tertius Lydgate being about to rock the medical world with striking new discoveries. Eliot shows what life does to those two. Or better say, she points out how it is essentially each person himself or herself who is responisble for what happens. "Time will say nothing but I told you so."
No reader can fail to be touched by the wake-up call of this book: We must face what we are about to to with our lives and not take important decisions lightly.

I spent two months with Middlemarch. It is not a particularly difficult book to read, but it must be read without distractions. It is a very dense novel and requires great concentration to read it because of the tremendous amount of details contained within it. The astonishing ability of Elliot to create both characters and the setting of the book makes it an astonishing work of fiction.

In particular, the character of Rosamond Vincy is one of the elegant pieces of dissection of any character in English literature. Her failed relationship with Lydgate is at times almost painful reading as it either reflects either oneself or people you know. Like all good reading, it becomes a commentary on your own life and makes you reconsider your views.

I read the Penguin classics version with some commentary and I found the notes to be invaluable as well as the bibliography.

With all of its 880 pages, I expected “more” in terms of a definitive plot, which I did not find. The characters are rich and the time period displayed beautifully by Eliot. Her descriptive powers are delicious as evidenced by description of Mr. Casaubon: "as genuine a character as any ruminant animal". (pg. 173) The pace of the book is slow and reminds somewhat of Austen and Wharton. I have 2-3 other Eliot’s in my anthology and as of right now I’m not anxious to begin them.

This is a huge book, and is often cited as one of the finest examples of English Literature of all time. No literary fan should fail to read it at least once in their lives. It really is a grown-up epic story which, apart from having been meticulously written in the first place, is further enhanced by the high quality of editing in this edition, along with the evocative illustrations. The addition of a free audiobook version to download is a valuable bonus. A high quality edition of a timeless classic.

here is another look at that dreary social life of 19th century England Jane Austin taught us to yawn through. but Eliot turns out to be a charming and enticing story teller who maintains her own personality even while carefully introducing us into the daily lives of several dozen English Villagers,
The story drags on and on and on and I can not put it down. Eliot has made me really worry about how these folks will manage to work out their self imposed problems. a wonderful and satisfying visit to a world we cane from but will never have to line in. thank God.

Mary Ann Evans -- far better known as George Eliot, of course -- was one of that mid-nineteenth crop of great English novelists whose work still grips the reader today. Indeed many critics consider her among the best of them and some regard her as one of the best Western writers of all time.

How good it is then to have two of her seven novels in this well-formatted and beautifully illustrated edition. So interesting to compare the work that is probably her masterpiece, "Middlemarch," with the very different but also brilliant earlier novel "The Mill on the Floss."

This is a must read book considering all the references to it in literature. But why? The dialog and narrative direction are remarkably similar to that of Jane Austin books and neither is especially relevant from anything but a historical perspective. I suspect that apart from those values there are the wonderfully insightful lines such as these:

"Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another."

"A man's mind - what there is of it - has always the advantage of being masculine, - as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm, - and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality."

"...when a woman is not contradicted, she has no motive for obstinacy in her absurdities."

"Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others."

"...the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it."

"The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes."

"But Aquinas, now - he was a little too subtle, wasn't he? Does anybody read Aquinas?"

"...it is seldom a medical man has true religious views, - there is too much pride of intellect."

What to say about a book like "Middlemarch"? It is needless to say, at 800+ pages, a little heavy, and might very well try the casual reader's patience. I fancy myself a fairly quick and discerning reader - but; this took me over two weeks to read, and I found my interest waning in and out for most of the novel. It is therefor, not something I would quickly recommend to just anyone.

However; I adress this to the student of Victorian literature,the student of history, and the aspiring novelist. To you, "Middlemarch" is a goldmine. The subtitle:"A study of provincial life" says it all. George Eliott touches on Religion, politics, Business dealings, and above all marriage; all set in the late 1820's early 1830's, before the Reform bill. Though it encompasses the lives of several families and individuals in the Middlemarch county, it centers around two in particular: Dorothea Brooke, the idealist woman, who traps herself in a loveless marriage; and Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor, who finds his marriage to a selfish and vain woman, the chief factor that causes the loss of his medical ambitions and his financial and personal ruin. It is the study of human nature, and emphasizes the role that chance plays in everyone's lives. It is also valuable to the aspiring novelist, to study for the characteration, and plot twists alone. And though it is a rather thick book, and at times can become a little dry by the long pages of narrative rambling, it is a great example of the intellectual depth of one of the great woman novelists of the nineteenth century.

Most people consider Dickens the greatest English novelist or the greatest Victorian novelist at the very least. While I admire Dickens' abilities, none of his novels that I've read comes close to MIDDLEMARCH in terms of accessibility, wisdom, character development or coherant plotting.

This is not to argue that MIDDLEMARCH is a perfect work of literary art, or at least not in the eyes of today's readers. Many a modern reader will be put off by its length, the challenging vocabulary and complex sentences, Eliot's frequent allusions to political, religious, literary, artistic and philosophical esoterica, her characters' hyperbolic fear of "scandals" (laughable by today's standards), their views on the place of women in society, and Eliot's fussy Victorian "not" phrases that overflow throughout. (A random turn of the pages yields the following examples: "One fine morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long ...." Same paragraph: "He was sufficiently absorbed not to notice ...." Next paragraph: "... a breathing blooming girl whose form, not shamed by ....") These begin to NOT thrill the reader before too long.

But my litany of minor criticisms aside (and they are minor), Eliot's masterwork certainly challenges GREAT EXPECTATIONS, BLEAK HOUSE and DAVID COPPERFIELD for sheer reading pleasure, and far exceeds Dickens' novels in seriousness of topic and tone. As Virginia Woolf famously observed, MIDDLEMARCH was written for grownups.

The one area in which Eliot clearly cannot challenge Dickens is humor. Dickens was a gifted humorist and created many a character simply to make his readers laugh, whereas Eliot appears to have been mostly uninterested in such trivial pursuits. Perhaps serious Victorian grownups weren't supposed to laugh?

But fear not, if you give it a chance, you too will be swept up into Eliot's MIDDLEMARCH world, and you will find yourself caring a great deal about the fate of Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, Will Ladislaw, Mary Garth, and the rest of her pantheon of characters, all of whom, far more than any of Dickens' creations, seem of flesh and blood rather than caricatures on a page.

So, to answer the title question: is MIDDLEMARCH the best Victorian novel? Hard to say, but it gives GREAT EXPECTATIONS an excellent run for the money.

High on my lengthy soon-to-read list: Eliot's DANIEL DERONDA, THE MILL ON THE FLOSS and ADAM BEDE.

I've read so many great reviews of Middlemarch that I can't really hope to compete but I have to say something. I had watched the mini series on NetFlix a while back and decided that I had to read this book. I bought the dead tree version and couldn't quite get through it even though I knew and loved the characters from the mini series. I recently purchased this as an audiobook and can't put it down. Middlemarch is easily the best novel ever written for its complexity of characters and sheer simplicity of every day life and struggles. As has been mentioned many times, this is not a tale of high drama, but the characters and what they go through are very accessible. Even though this book was written in the language of the time which I can imagine many readers will struggle with, keep reading anyway. I liked the audio version better for that reason. Although I know how it ends, I just don't want to finish it. I want to keep all of these characters with all of their flaws with me forever. This is not Gothic fiction, and Wuthering Heights still stirs me much more on an emotional and passionate level, but if we're just talking quality in literature and in painting the human portrait this is it, no question. Although I wouldn't rank this as my all time favorite book, I have nothing but respect, admiration and a great sense of awe for the writing ability of George Eliot and the intimate stories told within the pages of this book. Anyone who is literate and lives as an adult with all of the day to day decisions and struggles should absolutely read this book. Ms. Eliot was a true literary genius, few artists of any interpretation have succeeded in doing what she did so adroitly. This book is almost like a painting-a vast lush landscape where the characters make their lives. I think the author basically captured TV almost 100 years before it was invented, this book certainly puts our modern day reality shows to shame. With that being stated, there is a voyeuristic element to this novel that I think compels many many people to read it. Same thing that drives many folks now to watch the reality shows. We're all observers in Middlemarch and you probably won't come away from this book any more intelligent nor stupid than you were at the beginning, but you will have experienced the true power of literary genius and have found yourself entertained along the extensive, winding, intersecting journey.

A sweeping Victorian novel--Eliot at the height of her powers. I am not sure what possessed me to think I could accomplish all 785 pages in the first two weeks of a new semester, but nevertheless, I did so and enjoyed every minute. I found the most exquisite pleasure in the meticulously-rendered minor characters, particularly Celia Brooke-Chettam and the Garth family.

I'll give you my favorite quote. Will Ladislaw, a devoted admirer of the book's lead- Dorothea, is caught by her in what appears to be a precarious situation with another woman (I won't reveal who). This woman flippanty tells Will he can follow Dorothea (who fled the scene), and "explain his preference":

'He found another vent for his rage by snatching up [her] words again, as if they were reptiles to be throttled and flung off. "Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I've never had a PREFERENCE for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living."'

Quick review: one aspect of this novel is about unwise choices in marraige, HOWEVER, this novel is NOT anti-marraige (as the most popular positive review seems to allude). In fact, at its core is the idea of marraige for love and, in several cases, this novel examplifies the need of pushing through trials with your spouse (Lydgate, Garth, and even creepy Bulstrode). No character walks away from their marraige in this novel, and ultimately it has happy endings.

What I love most about Dorothea is that she LEARNS throughout the novel. That she changes. In the beginning she is prudish, opinionated, and spurns romance to marry a man under a disillusioned ideal it will broaden her usefulness. At first I didn't care for her, I liked her sister better (who becomes somewhat silly later on). Through her trials, Dorothea softens. She is humbled. She sees the value in others and spurns viscious gossip and judgments. By the end of the book, my opinion of her has managed to rotate 180 degrees.

I've already said more than I intended, but I hope you give this novel a chance.

Initially, I expected Eliot's Middlemarch to be something akin to Austen's handling of "three or four families in a country village," but Ms. Evans bent seems more toward anthropology than satire, and in the end I came to regard her as something like a melodrama-free Dickens. Well-written though it is, I'm fairly certain my only real motive for recommending it is that it's the most utterly low-key tale of murder I've ever read.

This book is very high on my list of favourite books of all time, and it is thought to be George Eliots' masterpiece. It is wonderfully grand novel that covers a lot of territory in a lot of pages. There are four main plotlines in the book, and Ms. Eliot develops each of them to the fullest without letting any of them get lost in the shuffle. There is the story of Dorothea Brooke, the story of Lydgate's marriage, the history of Mary Garth and the fall of the banker, Bulstrode. The book is a masterpiece because of the storyline and the characters which she does so very well, but it's also a masterpiece because it is a very substantial work of great psychological and moral penetration. I can't say anymore about the book, since my words cannot hope to convey the grandeur of it, but it is a "Must Read" for anyone who loves great literature and purity of the English language. Definitely another "desert island" book for me.

It would be interesting to plot a trajectory of women's novels from Austen to Wharton. Austen looks at marriage as the goal, the consummation; Eliot follows it through its problematic stages; and in The House of Mirth its absence fills the novel. The view of marriage darkens with each step. Every marriage in Middlemarch is blighted, except for those that take place at the very end of the book, which seem almost like dreams compared to the unpleasantly realistic situations that have preceded them. Eliot's even, slightly sardonic tone is rarely bitter or bleak; when she steps back and comments on her characters it's always a delight to hear her sane interjections. Yet she is hardly unbiased. She has little sympathy with Rosamond or Casaubon, and a little too much patience with Dorothea, whose piety I found grating, and Will, whose ticklish pride and unwillingness to compromise seem a bit silly. The way she handles Lydgate's irritability, on the other hand, is perfect: "To the last [he] occasionally let slip a bitter speech which was more memorable than the signs he made of his repentance. He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for a explanation, said the basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains."

George Eliot has woven a wonderful story here about marriage, rural life, and reputations in 19th century England. The characters are all flawed but I enjoyed them nonetheless. Life is full of decisions, and, unfortunately our decisions can come back to haunt us all our lives. Still we must make the best of things and the characters here do (in their own ways). I was impressed with the author's (Ms. Eliot?) wit and searing intelligence. She doesn't overwhelm with details and descriptions - there is rarely a wasted word - hard to imagine over this many pages. The volume has lots of helpful footnotes. It is a great bargain for anyone who wants to see what a truly great novel is.

This book is an epic for the common people. It sheds the tradition of typical epic characters but keeps the epic form. This is a major work, and while I would be hard pressed to find any stylitically inferior passage, I still feel that it is too long. This is what will drive away many potential readers, and that's a shame. The book is a realist character study and an ethical treatise. It's hard for me to think of a superior stylist to Eliot. The story is a collage of characters, their ambitions, loves, and disappointments. It is the story of provincial British life. I have always had a problem with artificial literary beautification of plain things, but I think Eliot makes a good case for common characters - not merely simple but kind people, but people who might have been great if not for the extraneous factors surrounding their lives and clashing with their aspirations.

The characters were fascinating, the plot good, the writing superior. However, some of the back stories, tangents, and other narrative observations and analysis started to get a bit exasperating. But putting that aside, I still think this book is fantastic and I am so glad I read it.

For those who come to MIDDLEMARCH for the first time and wonder what to make up the more than 900 pages of text, they might look at the clue that George Eliot provides both in the subtitle "A Study of Provincial Life" and in her Prelude. The former suggests indeed a study of life within the narrow confines of middle class life in England before the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, yet the massive weight of the text implies that it will be a telescoped examination of that life. It is almost as if Eliot wished to place Middlemarch on a microscopic slide and then blow up the image to fit an IMAX screen, from which the reader could see, hear, and feel the images jump off the pages in unforgettably realistic power. In her Prelude, Eliot writes of a hypothetical woman that prefigures Dorothea Brooke: "Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity." Such a "life of mistakes" of the book's major and minor characters when combined with the epic sweep vision of a small slice of English society produce the book's essential theme: no one in the book is meant to be seen as heroic or even tragic because Eliot's deterministic philosophy does not allow them to overcome the stifling hand of a vision of life that hints at only the wispy illusion of success but delivers only the inevitability of failure. In such a climate, neither heroes nor tragic figures can thrive.

Part of the reason that readers have trouble keeping straight the huge cast of characters is due to Eliot's original means of publishing. MIDDLEMARCH did not start out as a fully-conceived nor finished product. Eliot had planned to write a series of connected novels, beginning with Dorothea Brooke, but after simultaneously writing two of them, she saw that their tightly interlocking themes would complement one another if they were presented as a continuous whole, so she began to publish them as a serial. She was quite successful, so much so that her publisher reminded her that in order not to let her panting public forget who was who, she had to include--or at least mention--each character on a regular basis.

Eliot divides the book into four storylines. The first deals with the aspirations of Dorothea Brooke and her disastrous marriage to Edward Casaubon. The second relates the attempt by Dr. Lydgate to establish a successful medical career that also is demolished by an unwise marriage. The third tells of the many travails of Mary Garth. And the final explains the rise and fall of the banker Bulstrode. Each of these main characters represents types of the middle class that made up the social strata with which George Eliot was so familiar. As they interact with each other, Eliot depicts their respective struggles to achieve success or happiness. These attempts usually begin with marriage or high hopes. Dorothea Brooke suffers disillusion with her husband after only a few months. Casaubon, for his part, endures the agony of knowing that his Great Book is truly the piece of trash that Dorothea rightfully suspects it to be. What emerges in the reader after completing the book is a sense of knowledge of the inner lives of the book's characters and of accrued impressions of life on a vast scale, but what is lacking is the realization that no one in MIDDLEMARCH has learned anything of value except perhaps that fate is a game of chance with the deck stacked against humanity. The reader further acknowledges that God has pulled a disappearing act, leaving the residents of Eliot's world to fend for themselves. And since the characters of MIDDLEMARCH do not change, then neither does its readers. The final judgment on MIDDLEMARCH is that it shows in a universe of detail and character delineation the interlocking lives of characters who suffer mightily, but in whose suffering fall short either of heroism or tragedy.

Middlemarch has been described as the one Victorian novel written for grownups. Here, Eliot combines the multiple and interlocking plot lines so beloved by the Victorians with adult characters facing real problems. Particularly engaging is Dorothea Brooke's efforts to find a way to serve, if not achieve, greatness. Rather than undertake some great work herself -- something that Victorian women were not encouraged to do -- she chooses to dedicate herself to supporting a man that she mistakenly believes to be creating a major work. Similarly, Lydgate's slow downfall is realistically portrayed. Unlike many of the works of Dickens, Middlemarch's multiple plots work well together. If you have not read anything by George Eliot, this is the book to begin with.

"Middlemarch," George Eliot's magnum opus, is a work that should have had the firm hand of an editor. Coming in at 838 pages, it is really about a 450 page work. Heavily padded with the author's observations and philosophizing, and interminable detail on sometimes minor characters,it reminds me of slogging through a rain-soaked, ploughed field until the final one-third of the novel.
One main plot thread is that of the fatally flawed Nicholas Bulstrode who, though drawn to Christian religious sentiment, has feet of clay that ultimately destroy his plans for fame and honor. It is the destruction of Bulstrode that provides the most interesting story line in the novel. Bulstrode has, in his nefarious past, deeply wronged Will Ladislaw who comes to the town in the form of a cousin to the man, the Reverend Edward Casaubon, who will become Dorothea's first husband. Dorothea Brooke, the other main plot thread, is a super virtuous, moderately wealthy woman of puritan values and a naive zeal for service to some great cause. unfortunately,Dorothea's zeal overcomes her good sense, in spite of considerable advice from friends, and she marries Casaubon who she sees as a man with a mission. Unfortunately, Casaubon has not the ability to carry out the mission that he has chosen but he will be resolutely supported by the virtuous Dorothea in spite of her recognition of his short-comings. Fortunately, the Reverend dies early in the story, leaving Dorothea rather impressive wealth to carry out good intentions. Unfortunately, the Reverend puts a poison pill in his will that seems at first to thwart the virtuous Dorothea's desire to take the also virtuous Will Ladislaw for her second husband. Fortunately, Dorothea's virtue has no bounds and the Reverend's poison pill will have little ultimate effect.
Mingled with these threads and bulking up the novel, not always to its benefit, are a number of other threads of miscellaneous colors. There is the young physician, Dr. Lydgate, who is newly arrived and thus jealously regarded by the established physicians of the town. Lydgate is of good character but poor judgement and so is deservedly punished by becoming inextricably snarled in the destruction of Bulstrode, giving the virtuous Dorothea a chance to demonstrate her virtue by saving Lydgate from total destruction. There is the Vincy family which has produced a son, Fred, and daughter, Rosamond (who marries Lydgate in the course of the novel), of imperfect character who thus impact other persons in the story to their detriment. Again the virtuous Dorothea rides to the rescue by demonstrating to Rosamond what the true character of a wife should be. An almost entirely separate story is that of Caleb Garth and his family who represent the Victorian ideal, hard-working, pastoral people of the earth whose morality exceeds that of the wealthy (except, of course, for the virtuous Dorothea.) Caleb and his daughter, Mary, demonstrate that pastoral virtue by saving Fred Vincy from himself. There is the struggling parson, Mr Farebrother, supporting his sister, mother and aunt who resorts to penny-ante gambling to eke out his finances; the virtuous Dorothea saves him from himself. There are many other minor characters, one of which is instrumental in the downfall of Bulstrode, but the ones discussed above represent the bulk of the story lines in the novel.
Eliot chose to write her novel as the omniscient observer, giving her the chance to comment on anything she chose to and this is probably the weakness of the novel and the cause of its excessive length. She gives her readers little chance to form their own judgements, carefully analyzing her characters' faults and mistakes in judgements and adding extensive philosophical commentary. Take for example her description of Mr Farebrother's reaction to another man of the cloth who has bested him in getting a position which would have greatly reduced Mr Farebrother's need for outside income:
"But Mr Farebrother met him with the same friendliness as before. The character of the publican and sinner is not always practically incompatible with that of the modern Pharisee, for the majority of us scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own arguments or the dulness of our own jokes. But the Vicar of St Botolph's had certainly escaped the slightest tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in this - that he could escuse others for thinking slightly of him, and could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him."
Eliot has to some extent defeated her own moralizing in this novel. Although Dorothea is a viruous woman, in the end it is always the fact that she has wealth that enables her to carry out solutions to problems.
Eliot had not the ability of her contemporary, Charles Dickens, to draw memorable characters such as Fagin and the Artful Dodger but she included a much wider social swath and intensity of emotion than that of her predecessor, Jane Austen. Jane Austen, however, gave her readers more room for their own judgements and could write with an intoxicating style - for days after reading "Emma" I caught myself thinking in Austen's modality and tempo. Although Harold Bloom has included Eliot in his Western Canon, I could not bring myself to give her that status on the basis of "Middlemarch" as he seems to do. In my opinion, a reader would spend time to better effect by reading two or three of Eliot's shorter works such as "Adam Bede" and "Silas Marner."

It is an English classic, of course, but it is more than one of those books you only read when you are taking a course in English Literature. This is pleasure reading!
My first language is Spanish and I read this at college. It wasn't even mandatory (there was no time left) but I opened it and I couldn't put it down. It is one of my top 5 literature books.

Since it is divided in short chapters, and it's a huge book, I decided to read only one or two chapters a day. It was an unforgettable experience. If you love reading, I mean really love good books, then this one is for you.

Treat yourself well for a month. Read it.
It's George Eliot's best work.

I really enjoyed this very long book, with its intricate plot weavings and army of characters. Even though its language was very old-fashioned, stilted and at times hard to figure out just what were the words saying, still it was all marvelous, and I was sorry to put it down. Lydgate was truly a tragic figure in the best meaning of the word, for the world would have judged him successful. How many authors have turned out such a figure, in just those terms? Rosamund was a hateful creature. The PBS series justified itself in every way, everyone very well cast, especially Mr. Brooke. The theme of disenchantment is seen in the marriages of Dorothea and Lydgate, in Bulstrode and Fred Vincy. All these people were so alive on the pages! The plot details, connecting so many people, was wonderful.

Although the sentences are often long and interwoven with several ideas within them to the point where I had to read some over, this book is still to me a monumental piece of artistry in the way it is written, the story developed and the creation of characters I was totally intrigued with. I don't think this is a book for the casual reader however but for someone that can really appreciate the art of weaving words into a tapestry. At times I was just awestruck by the brilliance of the work. Several months later, I still am. What a brilliant mind (in my view.)

Middlemarch reminds me of Jane Austen but mixed with the male side of life too. It's not just about women getting married, but about men pursuing careers. There was a lot of politics, too. I found some very lengthy descriptions unnecessary and skipped a few with no loss. There is a BBC series of Middlemarch on Netflix and it's long too, because they leave almost nothing out and the dialogue is word for word but it's great to watch that after (or while) reading the book.

An interesting story full of the old flowery way of writing and speaking.
The characters are portrayed very realistically, and the story is told in great detail which seems very slow for this day of fast everything. Stick with it and get to know the characters for a good story.

I enjoy English literature of the period, but aside from some astute observations of human nature, I cannot say that I enjoyed or can recommend this book. It uses up a great many words to say very little about characters that you never come to care about even after 100s of pages. There is simply no reward for your efforts.

There are several wonderful, astute customer comments below so I will just add one thing. In addition to being an astonishingly well-crafted portrait of society, of marriage, of individual dreams and disappointments, I believe that Eliot wrote Middlemarch as a mirror for the reader to examine his or her own life--somewhere in this vast novel, if we are honest, we can all find someone like ourselves--and to realize that each choice we make, each of our relationships, provides us with the opportunity to affect the lives of those around us in either positive or negative ways. So often readers hold books at arms' length; it is easy to pass judgment on others, whether on characters in a book, or on our neighbors. Few books combine brilliant story-telling with profound moral value. Middlemarch is one such book. Do not hesitate to read it!

Rarely have I enjoyed a classic with more surprise than Middlemarch. It looks to be an endless and boring morality tale from the plot summary, but reads like a work of high psychological art.

The only other writer who has taken me so convincingly inside the thoughts of so many characters is Shakespeare. A strong compliment, but Eliot shows that she had the goods and somehow weaves an epic and beguilingly entertaining tale out of a quite depressing subject and period.

I recall not wanting this book to end; for an 800-pager, that's strong praise indeed.

They don't write 'em like this anymore!

I love this Penguin edition; they've been doing it right for so long that their versions of the classics have all the right, simple touches.

Truly great writing makes you feel ennobled for having read it; Middlemarch is most decidedly one of those books.

George Eliot was the greatest sculptor of characters. She could do grand magic with words. Through the words of George Eliot, we know each and everyone of the characters in her novel with intimate details and deep sympathy - we could see their faces up close: now they blushed, or darkened, or twitched, or pouted, or lighted up, or looked bewildered. She expressed the most difficult, the most ambiguous, and the most awkward feelings with precision, charm and force. In Middlemarch, the story had a simple, rambling plot, put together to support the cast of characters Eliot lovingly sculpted. Many argue that Middlemarch is one of the greatest novels of all times. Yes, I agree.

This classic Victorian novel was on my list of books to read, and I had heard good things about it.

This epic novel (880 pages, lots of characters) begins with the story of Dorothea Brooke, a kind-hearted young woman who gets stuck in an unfulfilling marriage. Eventually, she is able to find love. The rest of the story (and there are multiple subplots) is filled by the intricacies of the townspeople of Middlemarch. Here you will wade through stories of gambling debs, family scandal, and various other estate affairs.

If this sounds intriguing to you, then have at it. Eliot is wonderful at Victorian prose, and although she was often criticized for being "depressing," it's great stuff. If you thought "Emma" or "Pride and Prejudice" was a little slow, however, then it is likely you will not be impressed.

The main problem I can see with a book like this is that there is something in it for everybody to complain about. Victorian romance novel fans will complain that the book is not happy enough, and that Eliot doesn't talk enough about love. Epic novel fans will complain that there isn't enough going on and some things are only hinted at.

This book is notable in that Eliot was trying to write a much more serious novel than other women writers of the day, and in that she succeeded. Readers who are interested in women writers should read this book, and it is important in the history of English literature. I guess I wasn't able to see as much there as others could.

I'll add my own impressions that every prospective husband and wife, and every husband and wife should read this book. It's been noted that Middlemarch contains some of the finest scenes of married life written. Criticism serves to place this work with the greatest of classics. In that perspective I only felt Middlemarch short of Shakespearean omnicience and less sweeping and broad in power than some of the Russian stuff. Elliot's machine gun intellect, present in every word, sentence and page, requires intense concentration reducing a little my ability to reflect and enjoy as I read. But the code word here is "brilliant" or substitute any similar adjective for this most enjoyable and worthwhile book.

I realize I'm in the minority, but I can't agree that this is the best, greatest, most wonderful (etc.) novel ever written. It's well-crafted, to say the least, but is it really enjoyable? At over 700 pages, and much of that social commentary, it can take quite a lot of dedication to get through.
There's nothing wrong with social commentary in a novel; we could do with more of it. The problem is, it quickly becomes dated. There are entire chapters of "Middlemarch" devoted to discussions of 19th century politics -- which you do need a foundation of knowledge to appreciate. There are other chapters regarding the machinations in selecting a pastor for the new hospital, long rambles about the treatment methods of city and country doctors, and so on. As part of a study of English history, with a knowledgeable instructor to provide background information, this might be interesting... but to the casual reader it's dry, dry, dry.
Aside from that, George Eliot goes to great lengths to explain events from everyone's point of view. Hardly a thing goes by without the reader knowing what everyone thinks about it, from the main characters to the people in the local pub. It's fascinating that she was able to flesh out not only her main characters but also the minor characters with whom they come into contact. It can drag on a bit, though.
Finally, the main characters themselves: I won't be the first to note that "hearing" everyone extol Dorothea's overabundance of virtue is a chore, but the other characters do have their flaws; they are all too human, and very interesting, as are the relationships between them. The chapters where people interacted with each other and the story progressed were fantastic, but it still took weeks for me to finally put the book down.
It's definitely worth reading if you like this type of historical fiction, but I wouldn't think less of anyone who found it not to their taste.

Eliot in all her work from epic masterpieces like Middlemarch to small novellas like The Lifted Veil has the ability to make intelligent readers stop and re-read lines. However, while occassionally we may stop to marvel at the complexity, spohistication, or elegance of her language it is more often than not the philosophical depths with she is able to illuminate in her most simple phrases and candid characters. The characters in Middlemarch, specifically, are indeed well developed but they are not complex-- rather they play off each other to illustrate to the reader a human composite. Each one seems to have a dominant theme about them that when combined with each other draws a picture of true humanity-- complete with its contradictions and dichotomies. This is the beauty of the novel and why we reread certain sections-- Eliot makes us care about everyone in the piece and all their stories as all are essential in determining our own instrinsic emotional reaction.
Middlemarch is not a page turner-- it does require an emotional committment. . .however, it is worth all a reader's energy.

It's daunting to dare to attempt a review of one of the world's great classics, but just a few words from an admirer. Middlemarch is the engrossing story of an intellectual woman's marriage to a straight-laced, traditional blue-nose of an English cleric. Poor Dorothea. Eliot captures her mind and feelings, her confusion, her drive to be true to herself, and her dilemma about how to do so, with sensitivity and clarity. Poor Casubon, who hasn't a clue what to do with this headstrong woman. Middlemarch also provides deep insight into small-town English society at mid 19th century. This is not easy reading, but neither is it overwhelming. This is a jewel of a novel that should be savored, worth every minute of the time it takes to appreciate in all its fullness. Definitely a stop and smell the roses sort of experience.

George Eliot's novels, set in small towns in England, are filled with some of the most sensitively drawn and realistic characters in literature. "Middlemarch," with her usual insights and wonderfully drawn portraits and the political crisis in which her characters are caught up is probably her masterpiece. This version is a wonderful edition for Kindle, well formatted and beautifully illustrated

I have had a copy of this book on my shelf for years without reading it. It was so very thick, the print so small, the pages so thin! It looked dauntingly long and dull.
But when I finally picked it up out of a sense of obligation (after all, I majored in English, and it is a highly acclaimed classic) I was amazed to find myself laughing out loud on the very first page!
Dorothea, Eliot's heroine, is SO very earnest, SO idealistic and ardent! She would never be so tawdry as to fuss with her hair and dress, or wear (gasp!) jewelry in public! She is interested only in bettering the lives of the poor in their neighborhood (you could visualize her at the fore of a modern anti-war protest). But when her sister draws her into trying on their mother's old jewelry, the pure beauty of an emerald ring inspires her to decisively choose it as her own. And she stubbbornly ignores any inconsistency between that decision and her ideals.
But her idealism traps her into marriage with a man who is not at all what she believes. She sees him as a paragon of learning, questing the seas of knowledge with fearless curiousity. In actuality, he turns out to be a cautious and small-minded scholar, drily obsessed with minor points of criticism on others works. Poor Dorothea strives to find ways to hold constant in her love in the face of ugly truth. And when she meets young Will Ladislaw, a man of similar idealism and energy, she fights to stay on her moral high ground. Thank goodness the dry old scholar dies! But even after death, he manages to poison the possibility of Dorothea and Will ever making a life together.
Around this couple swarm their relatives and acquaintances, and others quests for their best lives. Each couple and each character is amusing and absorbing in their own way.
Eliot's characters are introduced and drawn so very well that each personality is fully believable and real. But beyond that, Eliot looks at all of them, the best and the worst, from a viewpoint of loving and gentle amusement. Her pithy comments are hilarious, but never malicious. She draws the reader into her own frame of mind, and invites us to look at the variety of our fellow humans with compassion and laughter.
In spite of its length, and several dizzy plunges into despair, this is a light and lively story, very readable and heartwarming.

Of the more than 235 books read by the Columbus Men's Book Club, 16 received average ratings above 95/100. Ranked 6th overall, George Eliot's Middlemarch was a solild A+, one of the 10 with an average score between 95 and 98.5.

I read this Bantam text from cover to cover in anguish.George Eliot 's language is very hard for a foreigner to read,she used too many clauses and rare usage of words.
As a matter of fact,I don't find the book very engrossing or impressive,it was just a story of six young people who at last came to matrimony and some led a happy life(Fred and Mary),some led sort of a bad one(like Lydgate and Vincy).Rather,Eliot's witty comments at the beginning or ending of chapters interested me a lot.I don't understand why Dorothea cared so much about Christianity,and why Lydgate chose to put up with Rosamond for decades until he died,(he should pursue his dream in science.)If Rosamond was very selfish in character,it seemed to me,that at the end of the novel,Eliot delineated her as someone with goodness.She never spoke anything bad towards Dorothea since she went to live in London,and when Lydgate died,she married a wealthy old physician who was good to her kids.These are indeed virtues.So what on earth did the author think of Rosamond?Bad,not likely;good,she ruined Lydgate's career.

Some people had warned me that the writing of George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80) was heavy and uninteresting, but that only piqued my interest in her writing all the more. I am very, very glad I took up the challenge of reading this 890-page story, and I look forward to reading everything else George Eliot has written.
Although the inhabitants of the rural English town of Middlemarch live in a time now vanished (the 1830s), their thoughts and feelings are timeless representations of human nature. I was amazed at George Eliot's mastery of observation. She has a way of describing in precise detail complicated human emotions, and the (often irrational) motivations behind them, that I've never encountered in any other writer. Psychologically, she was definitely ahead of her time in her ability to understand and analyze these emotions.
It's true that the book is not without heaviness; for instance, I could have enjoyed experiencing the characters' live just as much without the political essays that Eliot weaves throughout the narrative, but these tangents were just a small annoyance and did not at all spoil my enjoyment of her rich descriptions of the many memorable individuals of Middlemarch.
On finishing this book, I was most affected by Eliot's observations that the drama of daily life often is not what we perceive (and often is not as bad as we think) and that even if we feel insignificant, this does not mean that our lives have no positive effect on those around us. As she so expertly puts it, "...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts [and is] owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life...".

George Eliot hasn't yet gained the modern pop success of Jane Austen or Edith Wharton, but I think its only a matter of time before she catches on in a big way and we see a big. lush movie version of Middlemarch.
For now, dont be put off by her novels of great Victorian size. If you are used to the broad comic brushstrokes of Charles Dickens, you will find Eliot a much subtler artist. She paints very subtle shades of emotion and morality.
If you have already read Middlemarch, you should seek out Virginia Woolf's essay on Eliot in her book, The Common Reader. Also, Eliot figures highly in Sandra Gilbert's study of Victorian literature, The Madwoman in the Attic.

George Eliot, (nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans), wrote a literary masterpiece with "Middlemarch." I was forced to read this in school at an age when term papers and grades meant more than absorbing the riches this novel contains. I recently gave it another shot, lured back into 19th century English lit. by easier reads, like Jane Austen, whose work I love, and the Brontes. But I don't want to compare apples and oranges. Let it suffice to say, I got back to "Middlemarch" 30 years later. And it was/is so worth the re-read!
Ms. Eliot created, with this book, an entire community in England in the mid-1800s and called it Middlemarch. She populated this provincial town with people of every station, local squires and their families, tradespeople, the rising middle class, (Middlemarch, right?), & the poor and destitute, ruthless and honest. She crowded them together, with all their ambitions, dreams and foibles, in this magnificent literary soap opera, and wove a wonderful web of plots and subplots. Ms. Eliot also wrote scathing social commentary and used great wit.
The fortunes of Middlemarch are rising in this new era when machines and trains - fast, available transportation - are changing the world, the economy, the politics. Rigid social codes, the British class system, is in danger of being breached. Folks are out to make a quick buck, or a shilling - anything to acquire wealth and enhance social position.
Dorothea Brooks lives in Middlemarch. She is an intelligent, sensitive young woman, who wants to dedicate her life to important endeavors. She does not want to settle for a typical marriage and family, but looks toward a more noble cause. As a woman, a professional life is not open to her, nor is the pursuit of intellect, outside of marriage. She weds the elderly Rev. Casaubon, a cold, narcissistic man, thinking that by assisting him with his scholarly research and writing, she will find happiness.
Dr. Lydgate comes to Middlemarch to begin his medical practice there. He is an idealist, who has dreams of finding a cure for cholera and opening a free clinic. He meets blonde and beautiful Rosamund Vincie, who fancies him for a spouse...along with a new house, new furniture, an extensive wardrobe, etc.
A dashing, romantic Will Ladislaw, nephew of Rev. Casaubon, enters the story, as does Rosie's brother Fred, who wants desperately to marry his Mary, but is out of work and in debt. This cast of richly drawn characters continues to grow with the introduction of Mary's family, the Garths, the banker Bulstrode, friends, relations, and an evil villain or two.
This complex novel and portrait of the times, is one of the best reading experiences I have had in a long while. And it didn't hurt at all! :))

For literature scholars only.

Long and boring. This was a serial that took four years to write; so its not fair to judge it as a novel.

It focuses on several marriages.

The most interesting plot line is about the doctor, who does not believe in traditional treatment methods (alcohol and opium); and his beautiful but shallow and materialistic wife.

I was taught that literary naturalism was a great American invention (Steven Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London), but George Eliot was doing it before they were born.

I have enjoyed this book. I'll save everyone the time and not comment on the characters, (although intriguing and realistic) or the themes and situations (all of which impact the reader). I would only add that the language and rhetoric George Eliot uses is consummate. Truly I didn't know anyone could write THIS WELL until I read THIS BOOK. Others come close in style - Dickens perhaps, but only George Eliot offers clever descriptions and beautiful language which add to the flow of this book. Coming from an 18 year old male, I wasn't sure I would like this book. However, George Eliot offered me a new love for Victorian Literature, and presented characters who are timeless.
"Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are."
"Even if a man has been acquitted by a jury, they'll talk, and nod and wink - and as far as the world goes, a man might often as well be guilty as not."
"Scenes which make vittal changes in our neighbours' lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness."

Masterpiece? Greatest English novel? Well, I don't know about that -- it's very good, but it's not perfect. But it is funny, and it's a page-turner. Our heroine, Dorothea, is an intellectual stuck in a very provincial town, and she just wants someone she can have an intelligent conversation with, and whom she can help do some kind of serious work. A very marriageble but not especially bright gentleman courts her, and brings her a puppy as a present. Dorothea doesn't _mean_ to be rude, but she speaks her mind, that she doesn't approve of having pets just to pet them -- she thinks dogs are happiest when they have some serious work to do. I laughed out loud at this point, as at so many others. I know just how she feels! And I also understand the sighs that her friends sighed as they rolled their eyes. That's our Dorothea! The gentleman caller eventually marries Dorothea's sister, and they (and the puppy) live happily ever after. Dorothea lives happily ever after, too, but only after being very, very serious about things for several hundred pages. You'll love her, and you'll laugh all the way.

I've read stories and books from different ages throughout the years that used language not akin to our own. Many of these books were interesting and thought provoking. This story, written in a more recent era where the language should be readable as in the works of Upton Sinclair, is not. Don't waste your time downloading it.

This book is wonderful from start to finish. Eliot deserves rank with the great classic writers. She has created fully realized characters about whom one comes to care. Her writing is pure 19th century--long descriptions and careful, insightful observations. I realize in today's world that we want things presented with "more matter and less art" but to find the art of Eliot, it is well worth wading through the 800-plus pages. This ranks up there with the best books I have ever read.

I first read this book as an undergraduate -- and I still pick it up now and again for inspiration. This is Eliot's best novel -- you may go on to read Daniel Deronda, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, but this is the one to start with. It has it all: the love story, the quest for fulfillment, an Italy honeymoon, allusions to John Milton, and financial struggles.
Tolstoy, Trollope and Dickens also capture the rich panoramic vision of humanity that Eliot shows -- but her view is so much warmer, so much more optimistic and expresses a strong undercurrent of benevolence. After you read Middlemarch, you will feel renewed and optimistic about the possibility in the world.
If you are at all interested in realism or nineteenth century life, you will really enjoy Eliot's portrayals of both Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate. Dorothea is the quintessential Eliot heroine who seeks to do good and be perfect in an imperfect world. She marries a much older man because he is a scholar -- however, he doesn't understand her spirit or her youthfulness. Tertius Lydgate is the idealistic doctor whose major character flaw is that he falls in love with women who don't see the value of the medical profession. Eliot traces the development of both Dorothea and Lydgate, as well as other characters in the community: Mary Garth and Fred Vincy are just one example.
If you are up for a challenge of a mixture of a nineteenth century novel, a mastery of realism, and some unexpected philosophy, you will gain something from reading this work. It may be enjoyed on many levels, but I think the most important one is that it shows portraits of the people who still inhabit our world --- the unsung heroes and the quietly talented.

I actually would have given 4.5 stars if possible. Very slow start - the first 2 books are filled with the narrative voice and making comments about 19th century events with which I was not familiar. However, the rest of the novel was fascinating, giving an insight into life in the mid 1800s in rural England. This novel is an excellent book club selection as there are so many themes to discuss (ie, marriage, self delusion, education, morals). I can understand why this was voted as one of the English best novels written.

I've written a review on this somewhere under another edition, but I wanted to comment on the Barnes and Noble Classic Series edition. It's very nice with an introduction by someone scholarly, and footnotes that are included at the very end, but the cover has that filmy stuff over it that tends to start curling off pretty quickly.

The story itself is wonderful.

This is a wonderfully sophisticated, intelligent book with sharp commentary on multiple social issues of her time.(and ours in certain aspects) All of the characters are wonderfully imperfect, restrained and original and are caught in the intriguing webs of dilemmas but their behviors are very coherent with their characters and subcultures. This author truly deserves our utmost respect.

George Eliot's classic novel "Middlemarch" is a timeless treasure that deserves to be read over and over again. My favourite characters in the novel are Dorothea, Will (I always thought of Orlando Bloom playing him while I was reading), Rosamond, Mary and Fred. Very well-written, though Bulstrode's shady past is somewhat confusing to me. great read, though.

Had to read this classic recommended by numerous writers of literature as their favorite. A little slow getting into and becoming accustomed to the long descriptions and vocabulary of the time. But the characters and story are so well developed I was taken in and intrigued by her method and understanding of human conscious and unconscious thought and behaviors. No simple story, this, but I enjoyed the journey through those times in Middlemarch.

This is an extraordinary novel and I like to refer to many passages over and over again. First, I love the texture of the novel. The way George Eliot describes her characters is bold and delicate at the same time. I like the subject matter immensely as I recall the earliest days of the Women's Liberation era. We called it, Womens' Lib. for short, that is, those of us who supported the cause of equality. With Middlemarch, Eliot gives us a view of love and marriage we moderns are happy to call social history. Written in the nineteenth century, we are introduced to women whose pervasive disadvantage in life was to be brainwashed that they were inferior to men. They were anything but inferior and Eliot captures the mentality of her women with compassion and artistry. She is descriptive without being overly critical. Today we refer to these martyred women with clinical terms; masochistic, depressed, borderline. The idea here is that seeing and accepting a one down position suggests that one's ego and personality are regressed. These may or may not be accurate diagnosis but its not about the label anyway. Its about the humanity Eliot is in touch with. Middlemarch truly is about the metaphysics of morals (Iris Murdoch). This particular version does not provide enough background information or insights into the life and times of Eliot. Since I care about those times from a social and literary standpoint, I plan to order an expanded version on the store. What were those factors that influenced Eliot's sensibility and unique style of writing? She was way ahead of her time. I want to know, how come?

Yes, that is a strong statement, but I believe Middlemarch to be the best novel written in English. And English is a rich language, overflowing with worthy works from both sides of the Atlantic, India and beyond. The only novel as a close contender on my list is Jane Eyre, with its fearsome symmetry and romantic passion.

George Eliot has been the bane of students everywhere who suffer reading Silas Marner in high school. But later on, you, like me, may develop a taste for the classics and this book will reward you richly.

The story is about Dorothea, a young, idealist woman, born to a good family with a modest fortune of her own. She is a prime catch on the wife market--money, family name, good looks. Her parents are deceased and her friends and uncle seek to pair her up with a local baron as the ideal mate. But Dorothea, bookish, religious and dreamy, has other ideas. She chooses, instead, a superannuated cleric who finally decides to marry as he feels mortality and ill health upon him. Casaubon, the vicar of a nearby rural church is a good match except....he's old, ugly and what the heck is he doing marrying such a young beauty. But Dorothea, who's imagining a sort of superior father figure who could "teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it" wakes up to far less than a reality of marital bliss. And there's an added complication created by her unworthy husband that has dire consequences for the young Dorothea.

The subsequent examination of marriage as a partnership in hell is written with stunning modernity. Eliot not only creates the disastrous marriage of Dorothea to Casaubon, but also pairs, as a comparison, Lydgate, a doctor and his frivolous, vain, uncaring wife. The relationship of marriage to society is never more well drawn, but the internal suffering of people trapped in loveless marriage is written with sympathy and cunning insight. Eliot herself had a live-in relationship with Henry Lewes, who could not divorce his wife. She undoubtedly wrote from personal experience. The insight into human nature, such as jealousy, disappointment, recrimination, loss of trust and a feeling of desperation are themes that anyone who has ever been in a relationship will recognize as truth. If you find classic literature hard going, watch the mini-series created based on the book. Then, knowing the general plot, you might enjoy the structure and language of the novel more.

This was a monster of a book. Not recommended if you are a flaky reader. Luckily I was forced to read this giant in about a week or so. However, I must admit that I lost track of a few of the characters throughout the book, which is why a family tree is helpful. But I suppose it just takes a matter of getting used to something and then it becomes second nature.

I felt the same way about shows like Lost and Heroes. I was a little turned off by how many characters there were. However, the more I watched the show, the easier it became for me to figure out each of the characters back stories and how they were connected. Middlemarch should be given the same chance and learning curve. It takes time. Overall, it's a good read if you are into a long book. I usually don't have the patience for a book this long, but at least I can add it to my impressive reading list of books.

This book has a very wide scope with a really penetrating examination of English life in a small town. Eliot spares no one in her examination of flaws at every level. It is not the easiest read, but worth the effort.

Psychological insight,descriptive writing,people like us but different in their morality and values, a look at life in 1829 that is totally absorbing. They seem to be living more carefully considered lives than we do. Great classic that I am revisiting after living a long life,definitely appreciated more this time around,

This novel doesn't need my praise. But this edition needs censure. I have found over fifty typos and legitimate mistakes, the kind of thing you almost never see except in translations. "Unconquerable" is rendered "conquerable," "in" becomes "is" (so you get things like "All force is twain is one"). You can't read more than a few pages without being distracted.

It's embarrassing that this edition slipped by even a single editor.

Some great characters and first person experience of the times combined with intriguing but convoluted and sometimes indecipherable plotline often made for a gripping read. Some sentences were for me in comprehensible, almost as if it were a bad translation but maybe that's the way they spoke in those times. In the end it all added up.

All summaries of its fantastic characterizations & plots aside, reading Middlemarch also made me realize that the power of concentrated and careful observation of human behavior (and the ability to translate that onto the page) that was practiced to perfection by Eliot, and that is the essence of the novel, is a dying art.

No one writes books like this anymore because no one observes this carefully anymore. Perhaps that is in part because novels like Eliot's laid the groundwork for a typology of characters that can now be referred to in shorthand. But I think it is also because we no longer find meaning in that kind of contemplation, rather we leap immediately to analyze, ironize, & distance.

It is truly an astonishing piece of work and while I have other favorites, I can think of no better writing in English.

In depth depiction of characters' personalities and social relationships that transcends any time period. Could not put it down until my eyes hurt. Eliot makes you care for these people and their destinies.

Is George Eliot the greatest 19th c writer? On the evidence of these two books, maybe. Her insight and depth of characterisation is unmatched and her stories gripping and well structured. Outstanding.

Don't remember when I've been so let down, especially given the high level of praise from the reviewers I read before purchasing. Gave up in frustration after completing less than 25% of the book.
What a sad collection of wordy FLUFF!

If I had to characterize this book with one word, it would be tedious. It is long, it drags. The plot is slow going, with many characters to keep tract of. The language is convoluted. Many of the words are obsolete; a number are colloquialisms long past contemporary meaning. The author does best in capturing the speech of ordinary people, particularly of the lower class in the novel. There are many "we..."; when I hear or read "we", I think someone is trying to bring me down to their mediocrity. Other asides to the reader I pass as quaint. The blurbs that head each chapter I found so remote from context, I gave up reading them. I am person who normally reads everything, preface, forward, afterward, notes, appendix, everything.

The tenor of the novel can gleaned from the following excerpt,

Dorothea said, "Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brngs. Even if we loved some one else better--than those we were married to, it would be no use...I mean, marriage drinks all our power of giving or getting blessdness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear--but it murders our marriage--and the the marriage stays with us like a murder--and everything else is gone."

If the above is not clear to you, those are some of the author's clearer sentences. The gist seems to be in the line of none of us is perfect, none are so bad, we dream, but we don't get all we want, life goes on, we all do the best we can. Middlemarch is a book I don't condemn, but wouldn't recommend. I do not rate the book on its historical value, by a woman, etc. As a good read it would not be in my top 10 novels, or 20, maybe even 50, but it is a novel written in and of a time past of some merit.

The character development in this book is phenomenal. several characters are not only well established, but they are grown and changed, and ultimately known and understood by the reader from the inside-out. I relished the wisdom and perspective of this book like I relished Jane Eyre.

Middlemarch is third-person, and it takes place in a place called the Midlands; there's three plots: Dorothea Brooke; Tertius Lydgate; and Mary Garth.
Dorothea Brooke is a disappointing character - she wants to be a feminist, and do her own thing, and she marries Will Ladislaw, who I found him annoying, too idealistic!

It's too realism-y for me; I can acknowledge it has ambitions, but it's a little underwritten for my taste.

I will say that I love 800+ novels. This one took much patience on my behalf. I don't feel that the story has any true purpose or direction until chapter 15. This novel is about many things, perhaps too many: love, marriage, debt, character, the common good, a changing society. The three main stories which articulate the author's ideas are of varying degrees of interest and some characters are 'built' in better ways than others. My particular favorites are the Garths, Lydgate and Mr. Farebrother. The main character, Dorothea, is interesting but a bit too perfect-she's compared to the Virgn Mary, so that may give you an idea of how morally superior she is. The character of Fred Vincy annoyed me so much that I felt the many pages devoted to him were almost wasteful.

The novel has wonderful aspects, the best being an attention to the moral and intellectual concerns of everyday people. The pages where Lydgate's innner turmoil about his debt are desrcibed showhow little things change.

What is frustrating to me about this book is the intrusive voice of the narrator; I dislike being told things in a novel that should be shown instead. Plus, there is a long-winded style to Eliot's writing that I did not find in two of her books that I truly loved: The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner.

This book will appeal to you most if you want to read about marriage and the tolls it can take on men and women, especially men and women who think. The scenes between Lydgate and Dorothea are fantastic and chapter 81 between Rosamund and Dorothea is a rare thing in fiction: an honest scene between women.

George Eliot (actually Mary Ann Evans) created a remarkable story. One would think a 794 page story would have to contain a fair amount of filler. Yet Mary Ann Evans had so much to say, so much humor to share, insight to express, and story to relate that no less than 794 pages would have sufficed. This is a tremendous book.

George Eliot was one of the most agile sports reporters of the Victorian era, and this novel, set in a bucolic English town, shows Eliot at her feisty best. The scenes of blood and gore were a bit much for readers at the time, but the exalted visions that overcome the boxers when they succumb to a knockout punch are as inspiring as any of the techno-hype that Hollywood delivers today. It's time to resurrect the reputation of this in-the-ring journalist-writer who knew the pulse of the people and put it on paper on purpose, pulling no punches.

Everyone should read this book before they get married. George Eliot is a master at rendering human character. She is a true sympathizer with the human condition, and merciless at the same time. Beautiful.

I could not find out how to access the audio. I learned to download audible for iphone and kindle for iphone, the whisper synch works great for text, but I never got the small button that would say it is an audio file as well. I called kindle who said that this is an audible issue, and I called audible who said there is no audio file listed for this book. It would be helpful to know what is meant by "audio link" and how to take advantage of it. The kindle text to speech function (I hope that is not what audio file mean) is humorously awful, a robot with a slight Swedish accent who has indulged in one too many, slurring words. Doesn't work well with this 19th century elaborately and beautifully written text.

I used to own a bookstore and when people would ask me my favorite book, I always named "Middlemarch." In my opinion, this is the greatest book written. George Eliot was a towering intellect and a masterful observer of humanity. Sure, you have to really focus on this book while you're reading it, but it's worth it. Dickens was a piker compared to Mary Anne Evans (the author's real name). Make the time to read this novel someday (along with Moby Dick, Ulysses and War & Peace).