If you’ve somehow missed being hounded by me to read (first) Middlemarch and (in the New Year) My Life in Middlemarch, you can catch up here.
You have now (ideally, but it’s almost a hundred and fifty years old, you can take another couple of weeks) finished George Eliot’s masterpiece, and have arrived in this place to share your impressions with the rest of us. Share away! It’s been such a pleasure reading this wonderful book with you, and seeing what gifs you come up with is always a delight. Take THAT, somber world of literary analysis.
And now, to the novel’s end. What are your thoughts? Rebecca wanted to share how much she enjoyed your appreciation for Mary Garth, and how thrilled she is that you are responding to Garth’s good sense and intelligence, having herself taken many years to get interested in Mary Garth. This, again, is something that really struck me on this trip through Middlemarch, as well as a recurring theme in Rebecca’s own book, the idea that your favourite characters may change from one read to the other, that it’s a book which will mean very different things to you at different times, and which you can expect to read as though it were for the first time at 25, 40, 65, and (knock wood) 109.
Deluge us with your opinions.
Having done so, you may now enjoy/mourn a brief hiatus from the world of George Eliot, as we will be picking back up after the January 28th release of My Life in Middlemarch to do some giveways and then joyously reimmerse ourselves in the written word. I begin to overuse my superlatives in praising Rebecca Mead’s book, but I do promise that the vast majority of people who have a difficult time thinking of themselves as being meaningfully separate from the books and characters they’ve loved in their time will adore it as much as I do, which is a great deal.
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Here is my last (or is it? can you ever trust a blogger) reminder for those who wish to attend Rebecca’s January 29th, 7pm event at the New York Public Library (discount code for Toasties, so if you enter TOAST at checkout, you’ll pay $15 instead of $25, and will skip service fees.) If you want to come early to attend the little private meeting with Toast readers and Rebecca prior to the event (jealous!), email me (it’s in the masthead) to get yourself on the list, and plan to arrive by 5:45pm to check in at the box office and be shown to the room.
Tags: books, george eliot, middlemarch, middlemarch book club, rebecca mead
I just want to say how grateful I am to this website for making me read this book. I never, ever, ever, ever would have picked it up on my own. And I adored the book.
I LOVED the finale part where she goes through everyone’s futures. Such a satisfying way to end things (like six feet under??). I think I was most surprised by Dorothea, actually. I was SO GLAD Dodo ended up with Will, but it was just a little disappointing considering her ambitions. Actually, I guess George Eliot summed up my feelings perfectly:
“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 a certain circle as a wife and mother.”
Immediately following that quote: “But no one state exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done.”
It’s foreshadowed from the beginning, when Eliot writes that women like St. Theresa are born into a world that has no outlet for the ambitions and good deeds of women. I love how Eliot is able to reconcile that injustice with the assurance that Dorothea’s life was happy, and important, and that she changed the world for the better, even if it’s not in a way that afforded her the recognition she deserved.
this book is so awesome.
This exactly.
Me too. Does this make Eliot the first person to discover the audience-satisfaction principles of “What Happened After” trope (a la “Animal House”)?
And, of course, Rosamond would eventually just steamroll on to husband #2. So unsurprising.
can someone please do a roundup of all cultural things that offer peeks into the future at their end? There must be a more elegant word for this phenomenon. But what is it??
Well, of course, there is a TVTropes for that: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhereA…
Jane Austen tends to do it.
I think it’s interesting to think of Dorothea’s arc in the context of Lydgate’s. He also had ambitions – more concrete ones than Dorothea, but similarly grandiose. His ambitions are also derailed by his marriage, though in a different way than Dorothea, and they both ultimately choose paths which satisfy their emotional needs rather than their desire to make a mark on the world. For Lydgate, though, I think we are supposed to think that his original ambitions could have been achievable, if not for his marital choices; whereas for Dorothea I think we don’t know if she had any path that would have fulfilled her ideals. “For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. “
Guys, I have not read it yet so I am going to run away from this comment thread, but you have encouraged me to pick it up for my kindle!
Yes yes yes! I actually audiobooked it and I cant even recommend that highly enough. It was aMAZZzing! Complete and utter perfection! The most incredible voices that I never could have even imagined in my head. I listened to the Juliet Stevenson version. If you are a person who has a lot of time where your hands are busy but your brain is free, audiobook it!!!!
(and I know at least one other toast-er was listening to Kate Reading version and loving it, too)
Yep, that was me – superb on audio, this book. Well worth the 31 hours and 51 minutes!
Off topic, as usual, but I purchased one of those mini ellipticals because of your recommendation, and I love it! I would never have bought it from just looking at it online–it looks too much like many cheesy and useless bits of equipment sold to people who will never actually use it. Sitting down or standing up, it’s great! I’ve added ellipting to netflix as part of my daily exercise routine, at least until it is warm enough to run outside again.
I do have many thoughts about Middlemarch as well, but whether I will get the time and space to write them out thoughtfully, who knows?
I still don’t care for Dorothea, and don’t think she actually learned much from her rash decisions, but it was interesting to re-read (or first read the last half!) and realize that my opinions of many of the characters are the same, but for different reasons.
oh man, I am still considering that tiny elliptical! It looks awesome, but I worry I would break it or break myself falling off of it.
well, I bought it because I’ve always wanted an elliptical, but can neither afford a full size one nor spare the room to set it up, and I’ve steered away from the compact ones because they usually seem to be intended more as aspirational sculpture (and ugly sculpture at that) rather than a functional bit of exercise equipment. I do a lot of balance-y things, so I wasn’t worried about falling off; it remains to be seen if I’ll break it. And I had the money to buy it, which would not normally be the case, because I had a wad of holiday gift money.
If you’re worried about falling off, it works fine sitting down. The instruction book is very clear about how to use it both standing and sitting (though I don’t switch the counter around, I just read it upside down when sitting). And, you could work your way up to doing it standing. That’s the thing people don’t consider when wanting to start exercising. You don’t have to do it like the crappy reality shows and high priced dvds with all the shouting. You can just start easy; every little bit helps. Uh, guess I should end the exercising PSA, ha! But I am all for everyone doing whatever exercise they can handle, and if you think you will use a mini elliptical, go for it!
Yay!!! LOVE MY WEE ELLIPTICAL.
SORRY TO COMPLETELY DOMINATE THIS THREAD, but is there a read-by date for Toast discussions of My Life in Middlemarch?
It doesn’t come out for another week, so I haven’t decided how long to give people yet. Suggestions welcome!
Favorite quotes!
“A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.”
Can’t help but seeing as a response to Austen: “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
The Middlemarch ladies waiting to tell Rosamond what’s up: “…various moral impulses were called into play which tended to simulate utterance. Candour was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candour never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then again, there was the love of truth — a wide phrase, but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than her husband’s character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in her lot: the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend’s moral improvement, sometimes called her soul, which was most likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer.”
Dorothea to Rosamond: “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.”
The importance of literature, courtesy of Celia and Dorothea:
“If you knew how it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you.”
“Can’t you tell me?” said Celia, settling her arms cozily.
“No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know.”
“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.”
“He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfull on a murdered man’s brains.” Ha!
And finally: “for the 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.”
these are excellent. I also loved that Basil Plant thing (I KIND OF want an occasion to someday say that to someone).
And I guess that last one, about Dorothea, is kind of the argument against the part I quoted above about feeling like Dorothea didn’t live up to her own talents.
I had never heard of the basil and corpse thing but then it showed up in another book I read this week. Here is the reference if anyone is curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella,_or_the_Pot…
whoa, i really want to read that poem, but i am really intimidated
I DEFINITELY want an occasion to use the basil – brains line.
“Can’t help but seeing as a response to Austen: ‘What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?’ ”
YES. ITALICS. UNDERSCORE.
I feel like reading that line made the whole book worth it.
From the scene when Dorothea and Will get together: “”it is more intolerable—to have our life maimed by petty accidents.”
I loved that Eliot pushes the idea that Fred has to learn to lead his life properly for his own sake, and it’s boring and slow and doesn’t have a magical 80s montage where he draws up land management plans to Eye of the Tiger. Interpolating madly, I feel like Eliot (or maybe just Mary?) has such a tough love attitude towards him: you can’t just fix your problems, you have to fix them for the right reasons or they’ll start all over again, and btdubs, designating someone else as your ‘conscience’ or ‘better part’ really just gives them the pressure of carrying your well being on their shoulders. What I love most, though, is how Fred’s story is basically a chick flick in that his journey is a Bridget Jones/Eat Pray Love/90s heroine self-improvement deal: after Hitting His Low Point, he Finds His Own Self Worth and Reaches A Better Place and then – of course – Collapses Gratefully Into His True Love’s Arms.
Anyway. Vincy Feelings, I guess.
The last few lines reminded me so much of the kind of person my mum is that I took the book and read them out to her, and she looked pleased in a trying-not-to-look-pleased way and I nearly cried a bit. Which, thinking about it, is much better than how that situation could have gone.
Had a great talk with my mother about Middlemarch and she said something very interesting – Janet Erskine Stuart, the aristocratic Anglican turned nun and author of several texts on education for girls, apparently refused to allow Middlemarch to be taught in schools of her order, because she believed Dorothea was a bad example for young women. According to Stuart, she was a character who expressed herself primarily through the men she married or chose not to marry, and her spiritual growth is marked by her romantic or platonic relationships with various men – Chettam, Casaubon, Ladislaw, Lydgate.
Stuart was pretty hardcore about raising women to be fearless and independent:
“What do we want to bring up? Not good nonentities, who are merely good because they are not bad. There are too many of them already, no trouble to anyone, only disappointing, so good that they ought to be so much better, if only they would…If we want integrity of character, steadiness, reliability, courage, thoroughness, all the harder qualities that serve as a backbone, we strive for them by the power of example that is not set as deliberate good example, for that is as tame as a precept, but the example of the life that is lived, and the truths that are honestly believed in.” – The Education of Catholic Girls
(My personal take on it is that Stuart thought the romantically appropriate end of the book would be for Dorothea to go back to Rome, convert, and become the Mother of an order, and that the mundane act of marrying Ladislaw was a failure of imagination.)
gosh, this whole discussion is really making me question what we are supposed to think of Dorothea in the end! Are we supposed to pity the fact that she made this sad sacrifice? or are we supposed to think that the “effect of her being on those around her” redeemed her sacrifice?
Because also if Eliot is writing Dorothea as an example of someone who expresses herself through her male counterparts, and that is something we in the end are supposed to pity/be disappointed by, wouldn’t that have been in line with Janet Erskine Stuart’s ideals?
My confusion is making me really look forward to Rebecca Mead.
I think you’re supposed to let the ambiguity hang, and different people get to feel differently about the way Dorothea ends up. Eliot is much too good a writer to create a neat moral tale where there’s a clear lesson and take-away message to each person’s story. Just like in real life, it’s not necessarily possible to neatly label someone’s life good or bad, successful or unsuccessful.
Dorothea ended up happy and in love. She never did the great works she dreamed of doing. She made many people around her happy in small ways. All those things are true, and which one of them we think is most significant has a lot to do with our own values and experiences.
I started to jump to Dorothea’s defense, but then I remembered her cheerfully telling her sister, “Yeah, I said I was gonna do good works and make life better for all in my widowhood, but none of that really came together, so I’ma marry lover-boy instead!”
You know, I’m still going to jump to her defense; she finally did something she wanted to do. She deserves that as much as anyone else does, and snooty old nun ladies can go hang.
You’re right. And it’s not like she didn’t do her good works once she was married; in fact, they were able to embark upon them together, and prob got more done b/c of their mutual support, so you’re right, the snooty old nuns (and I) are wrong.
Seriously, it’s so much easier to go Do Good in the world when you have someone who loves you in your life.
You guys, has anyone else seen the Masterpiece Theater version of Middlemarch? I tried to watch it with some ladyfriends a couple of weekends ago, and we just could not get engaged. Then I put it on to have noise while I did something else, and suddenly I was finishing the last five hours of it over the long weekend. And I loved it! I think everyone is perfectly cast. I think it would be hard to watch if you hadn’t read the book, but since I recently had, it was marvelous to see Dorothea being as angelically beautiful as she should be. And Caleb Garth looking exactly like a big beautiful dog with kind eyes. And Lydgate and Rosamond having all their (seemingly one-way) sexual energy and all the bad-for-each-otherness physically plain.
And I wish you all had been with me in the last episode, when Rufus Sewell comes all smoldering and striding into Dorothea’s garden (not a euphemism) like Heathcliff off a moor!
Relevant to an upthread discussion: the miniseries plays Dorothea and Ladislaw’s marriage as the outcome of Dorothea’s desire. It’s his too, of course, but they emphasize her realization that she loved him stormily, and the conversation when Celia asks if he likes her very much, and Dorothea replies that she hopes so, because she likes HIM very much. It helped me see their marriage in a slightly different light–I’m Team Unsatisfied With Their Romance, usually, but she and Mrs. Garth are (I think) the only women who marry for love. (Well, Mary maybe, but that’s arguable.) So that’s interesting, and in his defense, Ladislaw is the only man who more or less loves Dorothea for who she is, not who they wish she would be. (Looking at you and your surprise puppy, Sir James!)
I actually love it because it openly portrays Rosamond leading Lydgate around by his dick. The subtext becomes overt.
Yassss! But it’s also such a delight to watch them both prance about and out-arrogant each other. That scene at the Vincy party where he comes over at laughs at poor Ned’s book–so perfect.
I have proclaimed the hotness of Rufus Sewell on this very site. I hope more people get it because lawd!
He runs hot and cold for me. He’s super twitchy when they first introduce him in the miniseries, but once he becomes a Love Interest they really zoom in on the smoldering eyes and shapely lips and Byronic wardrobe. . .
See, I feel that most people love Mary. And I like her, but her behavior in the Featherstone deathbed scene–and her self-righteousness about it–irritates me. Refusing a dying man’s wish just to uphold one’s reputation does not seem terribly honorable to me.
That scene is very uncomfortable, because it’s clear that he had second thoughts, but I think she would have been in a real legal mess if she had burned the almshouse will. Even if she could have done away with all the evidence of its burning–which would make her a sort of conspirator, which she would not be into–there was still a second lawyer out there somewhere who would have a record of drawing up the almshouse will, and if anyone questioned it, Mary would certainly be implicated given her nightwatch duty.
With the weird way Featherstone keeps his money in bed with him, I read this scene as him being quite out of touch with modern ways of going about business, and I thought that the problems of burning the will might have been more obvious to Mary than it was to him (or to me).
Right?!? She basically doesn’t do it because she is worried what other people will think!
Yeah, I try to look at that from her perspective but my basic compassion-brain always gets in the way.. But then, if she had, then maybe Fred would not have grown up into a decent human? I don’t know.
I saw it as sort of the only choice she can reasonably make. Its like your boss coming up to you a day before they leave for a new job and being all, “i know this is how the timesheet works, but can we fudge it, seriously, I’d change it all above board but I don’t have time right now.” and even though it’s not a big deal, its the fact that when they leave your name is going to be the one that marks the change and someone might be like, “did you change so and so’s timesheet? Why did you do that? well I know he said to, but it’s your name on the thing isn’t it, and you didn’t have the authority.”
Mary is basically saying, “dude if you want to chuck a will in the fire, when I’m all alone with you, why can’t we do it when someone else is here to witness it? I’m super happy to get someone else to come help out, but I can’t just burn your stuff all by myself with you all weak in the bed.”
If you think about how Featherstone makes up a rumor about Fred and sends him to Bulstrode to get Bulstrode to deny saying something no one but Farebrother said he said, it seems clear to me why Mary made the right choice. Featherstone is capricious, he’s changeable and he’s not above putting the people who take care of him in the soup. What if in the morning he was like, “changed my mind, this girl burned my will!”
I dunno, I felt a lot of sympathy for Mary in that situation. I’ve been there with someone asking me to put my good name on the line because whatever it’s no big deal.
It’s Featherstone who is being a dick there. What kind of person makes a fuck you all will and then keeps it in his back pocket and then puts the young woman who works tirelessly for him despite him being a real jerk in the middle of it, even though he’s not going to leave her anything either way?
Ooh I ended up madder than I expected to.
I don’t know if that’s an equivalent scenario–is your boss dying? Is he asking you to sign his timesheet so that his family gets his last paycheck, because he can no longer move his hand?
Yes, Featherstone is absolutely being a dick, and is capricious as hell. But he is also basically regarded by everyone as an expiring moneybag, so he has some reason to be ornery and tricky with his arrangements. Mary’s being a stickler is the sensible thing to do, but it just seems harsh to me–perhaps even more so because I do think we’re meant to admire her defiance of Mr. Featherstone.
Maybe your boss signed his last paycheck over to this other cousin to torture his wife, and then put off changing it until right up to his last day and now it’s too late to make changes, but he’s at your desk being like, “sign in under your name, I always MEANT to change it back”.
i just think there’s no winning for Mary here. I don’t admire her so much as I sympathize a lot with the fact that she’s stuck in this total grey zone. Imagine if she did burn the will and got “caught”. Middlemarch basically drove Lydgate out because of a rumor about his involvement with a dead guy. Mary would have to go be a governess ASAP if they suggested she burned his will to favor Fred. I mean, maybe she should have run out the door and found someone else to witness, but, he also tried to bribe her when she stood on principle- he was all, “burn my will and you can have this big old pile of money sweetheart.” That part would pretty much disincline me to be helpful either.
Here’s what she says, “I cannot help that, sir. I will not let the close of your life soil the beginning of mine.”
I guess it’s interesting because you know, Caleb Garth sticks to his principle- he gives up managing for Bulstrode even though it would help Fred out, and he comes off principled. Why is Mary’s situation different and less open to sympathy? Is it because she’s harder to like? She is much more prickly than most of the other characters.
I found Mary one of the easiest characters to like, really. Maybe it’s because the narrator really wanted us to like her, but compare her to Rosamond or even Fred, and it’s no contest (at least for me).
Also, I don’t think anyone’s mentioned it directly, but how sublime is that scene between Dorothea and Rosamond?
That was what I was going to comment about! That entire couple of days – Will’s losing his temper, Rosamond having an actual crisis of conscience and feeling things, Dorothea and her tearful realization of her actual love, and then the two women actually speaking frankly to each other (which is what I always want to yell at people to do in novels, forever) – that might have been my favorite part of the book. So much happens!
yes, I think that is definitely the best part of the book.
I’d have been here sooner, but I had to make myself “finally sure that Paphlagonia was not on the Levantine coast, and fix [my] total darkness about the Chalybes firmly on the shores of the Euxine.”
You know what was the biggest surprise to me? How affected I was by the Bulstrodes: “her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, ‘I know;’ and her hands and eyes rested gently on him. He burst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side…. His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent.”
So touching, really, after all the ways I’ve disliked Bulstrode throughout the book. The devotion of his good wife and the forthright way he finally gives up and faces the consequences of his shame almost entirely redeems him.
Yes! The Bulstrode scene is so poignant; it seems like Eliot’s own response to “Why always Dorothea?” We can sympathize with those who are unromantic, unbeautiful, and ignoble.
(So glad I have the internet to distract me from my thoughts and don’t have to turn to musty old maps in my despised dead husband’s study.)
It’s funny, when I think of Middlemarch (this was maybe my 4th read of it?) I tend to remember lines more than scenes. A lot of particular quotes stick in my mind, but very few individual scenes. That one between the Bulstrodes is one of them, and it gets me every time.
I was surprised by how beautiful I thought that scene was. I just loved that Mrs. Bulstrode was fully aware that her husband had done some terrible things and still chose to stay with him. She wasn’t staying because he made some excuse or lied to her. She knew he had messed up and chose to stay. Also I just respected that when the truth did come out he didn’t insult her by making up lies or blaming someone else.
Favorite quotes!
“Rosamund being one of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.” Oh, Rosy, sweetie, BTDT, and you’re not the sex-kitten you think you are. Sorry!
“Will Ladislaw was always to be a bachelor and live near her, always to be at her command, and have an understood though never fully expressed passion for her, which would be sending out lambent flames every now and then in interesting scenes.” Rosamund is totally a 1993 fag hag, is what she is.
Then when Will fails to idolize her, and is furious, oh, his fury! “It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality she had drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be to a panther to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting.”
Will, dramatic: “Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I 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.”
Oh, and: “Mr Brooke was evidently in a state of nervous perturbation. When he had something painful to tell, it was usually his way to introduce it among a number of disjointed particulars, as if it were a medicine that would get a milder flavor by mixing.” So perfect. And a great strategy! ‘uh, the dinner’s in the oven, we’re out of cat food, I totaled the car, someone at work brought in brownies today…’
” ‘It must be about Dodo,’ said Celia, who had been used to think of her sister as the dangerous part of the family machinery.” Poor Celia. I’m glad she forced Sir James to the reconciliation. And how much did you figure Sir James objected to Will because he was still hung up on the proof that Dodo would rather basically any man besides him?
Mary: “husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.” Mary Garth, you are the best.
As is Letty Garth, who after fighting with her brother & appealing to her mom to say that nephews aren’t inherently better than nieces, and not getting satisfaction: “but Letty took it ill, her feeling of superiority being stronger than her muscles.”
Oh! Oh! (I’m NEVER shutting up.) (I love this book, I love this book club, I love everyone, love love love.)
Yesterday I scored a review copy of My Life in Middlemarch AND it’s narrated by Kate Reading, who narrated the audiobook of Middlemarch that I enjoyed so much this time ’round.
I’m so excited to listen.
omg! jealous!!!
Seriously. I can’t remember a time I’ve felt so much anticipatory excitement for a nonfiction book before its publication. And now whenever I read anything by Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker I kind of eye it warily, trying to figure out whether her take on Middlemarch is going to live up to my expectations.
They have other copies available: http://audiobookjukebox.squarespace.com/solid-gol…
Basically, if you have a blog (or will review it on GR, etc) & will review it incl. the narration, you can qualify to review for Audiobook Jukebox. They have guidelines up there. I don’t like to review books I don’t particularly like on my blog, so I pick favored narrators (I have such a large pile of favored narrators) and anticipated books, to up my odds of reviewing a title well, but they don’t care if you don’t like it, as long as you follow the guidelines. (Obviously, with Reading narrating Mead, I’m expecting very good things!)
i just joined goodreads to try and get a review copy! thanks for the tip. also – wanna be friends on goodreads? how do i find you?
Sure! Friend away. My real name’s Melanie Cremins
I’m so, so sorry I did not keep up with my reading, so I could enjoy these threads with everyone. I will say, however, that I have been enjoying this book so much that I feel I just don’t want to rush through it, but enjoy every sweet and funny line. So that’s what I’ve been doing. I can already tell I will need to re-read it immediately after I’m done – something I rarely do.
Thank you so much for the introduction to this book!
P.S. – I’d love a read-a-long of one of my favorites – Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.” :O)
I missed this thread yesterday! Snow and work were too distracting. I hope we can keep discussing!
I’m thinking about the contrast between my first and second reads of Middlemarch. I came to this book pretty late. (I’m not sure whether I regret not reading it when I was younger. I can imagine reacting more negatively then – I know I used to have a lower tolerance for books in which I didn’t find any of the characters fully sympathetic. But this could have been the book that taught me not to feel that way.) The first time I read it I remember being really struck by just how unsure I was of what was going to happen – this book breaks away from the plot beats of so many of its contemporaries/predecessors, and I really didn’t know where it was going most of the time. And of course I was blown away by the enormous imaginative empathy Eliot has for all of her characters.
On this re-read I was much more aware of how much this novel is about coming of age stories – about young people and how they decide what and and who they are going to be in life. There’s just so much here on that topic – how people are constrained by their circumstances, both in what they are able to imagine for themselves and in what their actual realistic options are; how even when they’ve imagined a life path they may be extremely misguided about what it will actually entail; how choices have consequences that may or may not be foreseeable, but the way those consequences play out is also a function of chance & contingency. How some mistakes are amenable to course correction and some aren’t and you don’t really have much control over which is which. OK, maybe I do wish I had read this in my teens or twenties.
interesting! I almost felt the opposite – like I always knew what was going to happen. I thought there was a lot of building up and foreshadowing even if we are like, “Nooooo NOOOO that is the WORST IDEA noooooo.”
I think the first time through, I saw the foreshadowing but didn’t quite believe it – I kept thinking, that’s not really going to happen, is it? I remember being surprised when Dorothea and Causabon actually married, and I remember being blindsided by Rosamond’s destructive post-marriage actions. It’s actually pretty impressive how little I knew about the plot of this book before I read it, given its blockbuster classic status.
oh, i see what you’re saying. I actually thought it made the book so suspenseful – like she would be foreshadowing and I would be resisting believing it would actually happen.
Also, yes – I had heard of the book but knew NOTHING about the characters or plot. Honestly most people to whom I mentioned reading the book were like, “oh what is that I’ve never heard of it.”
I read it when I was 18 and am ashamed to say I did not get/appreciate it then. I think partly because I was so very young, I couldn’t see how young the characters were, and couldn’t understand where they started and where they went (I mean, literally I understood everything that happened, I could still READ, but I didn’t emotionally connect to it). I remember mostly being frustrated with the characters, both young and old, and somewhat bored, and angry that Rosamond was so terrible (I still wanted happy endings), and glad that Dorothea and Will ended up together. I imagine (I hope) that at the time I got a little bit more out of it than that, but those are the things that stuck with me.
Reading it now 11 years later, as I am just coming out of what our society defines as “young adulthood” (the 20s), I can see and understand that coming of age arc so much better. I think the main things that I appreciate about being an adult as opposed to a teenager are also the things I appreciate so much in the book now: a willingness and ability to see everyone as human, and be interested in their humanity, even people who I don’t personally like or agree with very much; and an understanding of how we live within society, how it both constrains and enables us, and how to find meaning within a world that is much more limited than the world I believed in when I was 18.
I am so excited to re-read it in the future and find out what else I discover/how the book changes as I change.
Yes, I don’t think it could really be seen as a failing to not get some of this stuff as a teenager. I do feel like I was really well positioned to fall in love with it when I did read it, in a way I might not have at another age.
I’m excited about future re-reads too, and also excited that rereading at different ages will be a theme of the Rebecca Mead book!
“I could still READ”
ha!
Well you just never know with those 18 year olds…
Okay, but Celia is going to do the worst mommy drive-bys on earth, isn’t she? I mean, holy shit. “My sister has just had a baby! Naturally, despite always having been intelligent and thoughtful of others, she will hold it upside down and try to stuff burritos in its butt! SIR JAMES I MUST RUSH TO HER SIDE INSTANTLY AND TELL HER EVERYTHING SHE IS DOING WRONG”
Well you just never know with those 18 year olds…