middlemarch

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