middlemarch

my wife, who loves middlemarch and eliot in general, read like 30 pages of it and put it down. when pressed for a reason she was like ehhhhh new yorkery.

Good job, Nietzsche. You'd think he'd have had some respect for Eliot's sensitivity to the complexity of ethical life. Eliot doesn't read to me like a fanatical moralizer. She's always emphasizing ethical difficulty as an epistemic problem: we harm each other by not properly seeing, comprehending, or acknowledging each other.

G. Eliot. — They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.

We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth — it stands and falls with faith in God.

When the English actually believe that they know "intuitively" what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/dec/08/best-british-novel-of-all-time-international-critics-top-100-middlemarch

The news still wouldn't please Casaubon.

i guess i should read some zadie smith, huh?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/dec/08/best-british-novel-of-all-time-international-critics-top-100-middlemarch

oops sorry for linking that again. not awake yet...

also, i should read middlemarch. so many on that list i haven't read.

i guess i should read some zadie smith, huh?

Eh, I never get the love for her. her first book, White Teeth, was a very promising but baggy and flawed debut novel. her second one was awful. her third was a rewrite of a better E M Forster novel. Don't know much about her 4th. Her short fiction is slapdash. But everyone acts as though her every literary opinion was inscribed by God on a stone tablet.

I love that Villette is in the top 30 of a list of this kind now... I doubt that it'd happen five years ago.

I had no idea this book was so much fun!

(caveats: kindle says I'm only abt 13% in; I didn't read thread yet for fear of spoilers)

It stays fun!

one of these days...

i'm still having trouble with the narrator's tone, which i didn't expect because i really liked 'adam bede'.

two years on this still seems weird to me

i liked their hamburg stuff but i just can't get behind 'revolver'

adam bede is grebt

it's wild fun in a way adam bede isn't, so maybe someone who doesn't like fun would prefer that book

I read Middlemarch for the third time two years ago and am looking forward to another read.

I read 100 pages of this book and it is legit funny. I had to put it aside at the time as college started. I'll return to it again though.

xxp i just like dairy maids and spirited lady preachers

https://s17.postimg.org/g3yfcsyjj/The_Dairy_Maid_and_The_Lady_Preacher.png

THATS WHAT IM TALKIN ABOUT

it is kind of unusual how much the narrator opines before the reader has a chance to make their own judgments. j otm.

I like this about the book though -- it's the opposite of what you're told to do in creative writing classes. and it works because the narrator is such a sharp reader of the characters

Well, it's a 19th century convention

Yeah but it seems more pronounced here than in other 19th century novels so far. The narrator goes deep, examining each characters' contradictions, almost as soon as they are introduced.

i think eliot examines psychology as a material quantity - i.e. capable of analysis and representation with the same lucidity as the world and also having as much objective consequence as, say, money, or a town scene.

or at least that's what i recall thinking when i read daniel deronda a couple of years ago. even though it is conventional, it's also kind of noticeable beyond that as you say treesh.

otm, and Treesh otm, she isn't just an omniscient narrator, she's like a scientist talking you thru the rules and results of the experiments she's laying out

That sounds about right -- a phenomenological approach.

Also kind of mean! I take it personally whenever the narrator is rude about my (current) faves

The World and His Wife---bet Virginia Woolf got a kick out of that. Also Margaret Atwood (thinking of wifely enforcers in The Handmaid's Tale).

Also, can imagine Flaubert or young Beckett or somebody writing a whole novel about Casaubon. As with Bartleby, I find him v. relatable, without really wanting to.

So, how does one pronounce Casaubon? In my head, I'd been reading it as "Cazza-bon" but I'd just heard "Ca-say-bon" and am wondering if I'd been saying/reading it differently all along. "Casaw-bin" is what a google result suggests. I'm neurotically fixating on his name each time I read it (which, at this point, about a third through the novel is quite often) and I'm very curious what others think.

In the BBC mini-series the characters said "Cazza-bonn" but my grad school professor said CA-SAW-BIN.

Cass-uh-bawn with my New Jersey accent

I like the Jersey version. I've been reading it with what are seemingly slight variations each time and it's slowly begun morphing into "Cause-a-bon" and even less recognizable forms.

Apart from that, the book is wonderful. I'm kicking myself for waiting so long to read it, though I can probably safely say that I'm enjoying it now much more than I would have in my late teens or early/mid 20s.

Oh my god this Fred Vincy needs to quit while he's ahead. He's got Mary's promise, her dad's given him a job, and he's still haranguing Mary's mother to forgive him for gambling away the money they lent him.

Cringing rn.

this is not the Trump thread

Caz aw bonn

I think it's Ca-SAW-bin tbh.

He was such a dick.

"Please remember me," said Dorothea, repressing a rising sob.
"Why should you say that?" said Will, wit irritation. "As if I were not in danger of forgetting everything else."

on its own this is sort of a boilerplate romance novel line but it does have an impact after 634 pages of strained, excrutiating communication between these two characters, underneath the watchful, judgmental eyes of the whole town.

I'm reading this so slow. I've put it down for weeks at a time, read other books in between. I do not find it gripping. But I like it and as it moves toward its conclusion I am starting to appreciate its intricate, patient construction.

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

I know, right?

Finished a second reading, I don't remember it having such a <h>feelgood!!!</h> ending. And she saves the best gag for last, after telling us that the town thinks that Fred's book was written by Mary, but Mary's written by Fred:

In this way it was made clear that Middlemarch had never been deceived, and that there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else.

Also at the end I was impressed with this bit, which is the most explicit criticism of 19th century society in the whole book:

Among the many remarks passed on her mistakes, it was never said in the neighbourhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half his own age—on modes of education which make a woman's knowledge another name for motley ignorance—on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly-asserted beliefs.

... and yet it doesn't appear in the edition in Project Gutenberg, and has scarely a few dozen hits in Google. What gives? I found it in a 'complete works' ebook, no publisher indicated.

oops wrong brackets!

Ok it's present in the manuscript and first edition, absent in the second. I wonder why she decided to soften the blow.

That's strong. If I didn't have so much else to read, I'd think of reading it again. I did watch, for the 2nd or 3rd time, the 1994 TV version again last year. Very worthwhile, but might be less impressive to someone who's just read the book.

This is what the Penguin edition says about the ending revision:

Most of her corrections were minor, but she did revise the last two paragraphs of the novel in response to criticism that she seemed to blame society for Dorothea's mistaken marriage to Casaubon, when she had shown society to be, in fact, against the match.

George Eliot dropped these sentences from the second edition after recognizing that those critics were right who pointed out that Middlemarch society did not smile on Mr Casaubon's proposal.

So on its face it seems like the criticism was more about the internal logic of the book.

I'd say the prelude also makes the feminist point pretty explicit.

I guess that is right about the marriage, which is a shame as the other criticisms stand but have less rhetorical force by themselves. As for the prelude, maybe, though it's somewhat sardonic and circumlocutory, and doesn't linger in the mind as something at the end of the book does.

Good book

Possibly my favorite moment in Middlemarch is when Rosamond and Fred are bickering over breakfast:

"What would you think of me if I came down two hours after every one else and ordered grilled bone?"

"I should think you were an uncommonly fast young lady," said Fred, eating his toast with the utmost composure.

I know I'm veering into overhyping this and I'm going to put everyone off, but I do want to recommend Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters to everyone who likes things like Middlemarch and Trollope's Barsetshire books. It's not as sweeping in scope as Middlemarch but she makes up for it with even more depth and nuance in the characterization imo.

Sounds familiar---maybe in my Mom's stash---will delve.
Meanwhile, local library only has this:
Cranford ; and, Cousin Phillis /
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865.
Published in the new Penguin Classics look in time for BBC series based on Cranford.
Two of the nineteenth-century novelist's shorter works, in which she analyzes a country town besieged, at a critical time, by forces beyond its ken, and presents an unfulfilled love affair which pits old values against new. Good?

I haven't read Cranford in a long time so my memories may be off. I remember it as a pretty good read; it's amusing in a quiet way and has a great first line, but it's not really a novel - more like a collection of sketches. I think of it as sort of the anti-Pickwick - like, it's also an episodic comic novel of a sort, but the world it describes is almost all-female and the humor is sharp but restrained. It's very different from the rest of Gaskell's books. Really all her books are quite different from each other. I think North and South and Mary Barton are both very good but flawed, and I'd happily recommend both of them; Wives and Daughters is on a whole other level though.

Can't actually remember if I've read Cousin Phillis; I should dig it out and give it a try.

Your description has reminded me of seeing some of the BBC Cranford on PBS---will see what all I can find by her in the family troves, thanks!

' It had me from the first line and it did not let me go'

Same for me, this was a joy and I raced through it, as much a page turner as anything I've read. Daniel Deronda, though, takes me a lot of time.

Because I finally read Middlemarch at the beginning of the year and am finally finishing Anna Karenina toward the end of it, I can't help but compare the two. I think I find the world of Middlemarch more precisely constructed and perfectly flowing.

That's interesting because the novel I kept comparing in my mind w/ MM as I read it was War and Peace (which I read about 10 years ago), whose characters (but especially Natasha) I felt were the most vividly human characters I'd come across in any book. I still think Natasha is incomparable: to me she just about jumped off the page; but ultimately I feel Middlemarch -and partly for the reason you point to- gives me more of what I look for, what I've always been looking for, in a novel.

Because in addition to the elaborately constructed and intertwined world of its people, they are all embedded in intertwined forcefields of feeling, aspiration, obligation, and self-deception.

And what other novelist gives you such exquisite psychological insight alongside such to-the-last-pence accounting of everyone's assets, debts, and income? I mean, Balzac deserves a shout, I guess, but as far as I've read him, he keeps his eyes on just one or two characters at a time in this respect.

There are places in the novel where it feels like it's being ghost-written by an Annales historian.

I reread Daniel Deronda in 2019. You're tempting me to give this one my fourth go.

I love hearing that, Alfred.

I've not read any Eliot beyond this, and am wondering which to grab next. Open to any suggestions from you or others.

The Mill on the Floss is essential, b/c of or despite the sentimental bits.

DD is in a league of its own. How it handles proto-Zionism and a proto-Jamesian plot is unique in English letters.

Half of Daniel Deronda is great! How you feel about the other half depends on your tolerance for earnest Victorian philosemitism.

was reading the amazon reviews of middlemarch...

"I am sure that George Eliot did not use the expressions 'c programming language' and 'e book' when writing in the 1850s. But they occur often in my Kindle edition of Middlemarch."

sounds better imo.

Half of Daniel Deronda is great! How you feel about the other half depends on your tolerance for earnest Victorian philosemitism.

― Lily Dale, Tuesday, November 16, 2021

idk -- I can't separate them! They're symbiotic. Hitchens of all people wrote a long, carefully considered defense of the novel in the late 1980s. Not that intentions matter, but here's an Eliot letter excerpt:

As to the Jewish element in “Deronda,” I expected from the first to last in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance and even repulsion than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is—I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid—in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to. Moreover, not only towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us. There is nothing I should care more to do,if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow men who must differ from them in customs and beliefs.

Alibris has great prices on the Oxford World Classics editions, new. Went ahead and ordered Mill on the Floss. (Plus a Middlemarch to give away).

Hitchens of all people Whatever his own intentions in '80s, in late 60s or early 70s, according to Guardian obit:

It was while working for the Statesman that he experienced a "howling, lacerating moment in my life": the death of his adored mother in Athens, apparently in a suicide pact with her lover, a lapsed priest. Only years later did he learn what she never told him or perhaps anyone else: that she came from a family of east European Jews. Though his brother – who first discovered their mother's origins – said this made them only one-32nd Jewish, Hitchens declared himself a Jew according to the custom of matrilineal descent.
Also Martin Amis wrote about his chagrin when Hitchens, introduced by Amis to Bellow, proceeded to lecture the Laureate about Israel, right there in B.'s own kitchen, I think it was (fuck all these guys, literary merits aside).

I'm tempted by Romola. The Oxford World Classics sits on my uni library shelf, not checked out since 1996.

xpost I enjoyed this account, though (kudos for introduction and now-it-can-be-told, MA).

coincidentally was ravished by this over sept-oct and i thought of tolstoy too: simultaneous intense ambition on both micro and macro scales, characters as carefully sculpted miniature figures against sprawling domesday book social-novel ground. (the passage where it zooms out for the first time, suddenly going from 100 pages of austen-close examination of three or four characters to a bird's-eye description of the late industrial revolution and then back in to a dinner party's worth of characters it can follow in every direction, is a vertiginous thrill, rly took me by surprise.)

they are all embedded in intertwined forcefields of feeling, aspiration, obligation, and self-deception.

otm which means that 1) all the literal politics in it can be observed in such detail (they should teach the chapter about the meeting to decide on the new hospital's curate in any course they're teaching the prince in) but also 2) even all the romantic psychodrama becomes materialist, these very finely drawn personalities all being tugged+squashed+distorted by external forces, everyone a mass in a fluid. this is a theory of history! something else it has in common w war+peace.

funnier than tolstoy tho-- not just the narrator's clinical distantly compassionate irony (tho this is almost always funny)-- but some of the dialogue (fred/rosamond at breakfast above) verges on wodehouse. also lmao @ the story of lydgate's first love and the interruption of his galvanic experiments: read this out loud multiple times as a lil short story; in some ways it's a fractal of the whole book. he left his frogs and rabbits to some repose under their trying and mysterious dispensation of unexplained shocks.

Hidden actresses, however, are not so difficult to find as some other hidden facts,

i think i will start this tonight

I am sympathetic to Eliot's mission in that half of Daniel Deronda. But it is a biiit of a slog to read through unless you're precisely tuned to receive it. It's one of the most impressive feats I've seen attempted in a novel - marrying those two halves. But it takes me a lot of time to get through. Mill on the Floss was a very natural follow-up to Middlemarch for me. Adam Bede, apparently often read in schools, is a more 'ordinary' Victorian work and probable comes off as less exciting to most.

No love for Silas Marner here? Not as epic as Middlemarch or Deronda but iirc tender and moving without being overly sentimental. I couldn't finish Adam Bede, am yet to try Mill on the Floss.

it's the only one i've read.

(also a school friend was an extra in the 1980s tv adaptation that was filmed partially in tewkesbury)

i vaguely remember it being faintly ridiculous

(the book, not the tvm. although ralph's beard was a bit lolsome)

Felix Holt is mostly a dud.

I dimly recall enjoying The Mill On The Floss, incl relationship of sister and brother, though could see why critics of Eliot's time (and prob since) had some trouble w the ending.

I read it in grad school, didn't like it as much as what I read earlier and later

Read it ca. 1990, so may revisit, also may check out the ones I was supposed to read in high school, Silas Marner and (?) Adam Bede. Need a break from recent lit.

So what might be her best, other than Middlemarch?

It's Mill on the Floss

Daniel Deronda

Some way into Mill on the Floss. She's very good with children and her ability to spin unique moments with her characters into wry but penetrating insights into the human condition is in full force - but aside from little Maggie I can't say I'm that interested in what's going to happen to any of the characters.

It's fairly reminiscent of Dickens, using children to tug on the heart strings, and occasional forays into romantic if not downright sentimental flights of fancy:

Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the limbs of infancy; it lay with the neatliest finished border on every sloping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new depth of colour; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees, till it fell from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the rough turnip-field with whiteness, and made the sheep look like dark blotches; the gates were all blocked up with the sloping drifts, and here and there a disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified “in unrecumbent sadness”; there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow. But old Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the outdoor world, for he meant to light up home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness of indoor colour, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm fragrance of food; he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred, and make the sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden day-star. His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless,—fell but hardly on the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the food had little fragrance; where the human faces had had no sunshine in them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want. But the fine old season meant well; and if he has not learned the secret how to bless men impartially, it is because his father Time, with ever-unrelenting purpose, still hides that secret in his own mighty, slow-beating heart.

The end of book two:

They had gone forth together into their life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them.

"Reader, the remaining two thirds of this book will be a stone cold bummer."

Ladislaw is the least believable character, but I like him because Dorothea likes him.

I like Henry James on Middlemarch, he starts off all blowhard ('one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels') but ultimately he's more sympathetic than that suggests (lol at him of all people marking a dozen passages 'obscure' though).

https://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol3/issue2/jameshmm.htm

(maybe thread should be renamed Middlemarch and other works by George Eliot aka Mary Ann/Marian Evans)

lol James was just expressing the anxiety of being influenced by a girl

bbc adaptation of middlemarch is on iPlayer for the next 16 days