Middlemarch

Rating:
Summary: A Literary Masterpiece! Try Reading It Again- It's Worth It!
Review: 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! :))

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the best novel ever written
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Middlemarch is a pleasure to read.
Review: 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 absolutely "deleitable" (I couldn't find a word in English), page after page.

Since it is divided in short chapters, and it's a huge book, I read only one or two chapters a day; I didn't want to "embriagarme" (sorry again). It was an experience. It you love reading, I mean really love reading, then this is for you.

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

Rating:
Summary: A Town Called Middlemarch
Review: It's comparatively easy to describe things as we wish them to be than to describe them as they really are. With "Middlemarch", George Eliot has accomplished one of the truly difficult tasks in literature: to describe things as they really are and still hold the reader's interest with less than exceptional characters.

"Middlemarch" was Eliot's attempt to describe a pre-reform English country town. Within the novel we run across the typical characters like the wealthy land owners, clergymen, polticians, etc. The book primarily revolves around the actions of two families, the Brookes and the Vincys.

The main characters are Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, a newcomer to Middlemarch. Dorothea has an independent mind at a time when women were supposed to be openly subservient to men. She intends to do much good in the world and is constantly drawing up 'plans'. Lydgate is a physician who wants to make improvements in the medical field. He has a solid idea of what he wants to do with his life and how to accomplish it.

Through these two characters, Eliot presents the frustrations and joys to which we can be driven because of an idealistic mind. Both Dorothea and Lydgate are idealists. Both encounter many trials because of their idealism, trials that they overcome in their own ways.

In "Middlemarch" Eliot also makes a statement about marriage. Dorothea and Lydgate's problems stem almost entirely from bad marriages. They each go into their own marriages with distinct impressions of how married life will be and both are very disappointed when the reality of the situation becomes obvious.

"Middlemarch" is one of those novels that it is difficult to explain why one likes it. The plot is predictable, the characters are unexceptional, and the time period isn't particularly interesting. However, Eliot has constructed a masterpiece with this novel that few have matched. Perhaps the genius of George Eliot is that she could do so much with so little.

Rating:
Summary: Everyone, everywhere.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Warm, fuzzy, too long. Think Tolstoy after a lobotomy.
Review: Middlemarch is treated as a classic: it shouldn't be. While it has some amusing stock characters and portrays some of the great disappointments of life, its moralizing is overt and its plot is boring.

The characterization is thorough and and frequently good. But the villians are all too villainous and the good guys all too good. One can see the ending a mile off, and one begins to shift in one's seat after only 200 pages.

However, one hopes that the end would have some twist that would dispell the reader's suspicions of a transparent march to an inexorable ending. Eliot disappoints with her anticlimactic and smarmy ending.

Rating:
Summary: Pleasant, Diverting, But Also Insightful
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Very Enjoyable Novel
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An English classic
Review: 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.

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Summary: A blow-by-blow account of the boxing industry
Review: 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.