Middlemarch (1874)

By George Eliot

736pp, Fiction

links

Henry James on Middlemarch Middlemarch is at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels.

Notes

2014-03-26

Notes from November 2019

I listened to a podcast about Middlemarch, a book I adore. A couple of interesting things were brought up that I hadn’t thought of.

(1) The comparisons of Dorothea to St. Teresa.

One of the hosts mentions the Bernini statue which is in Rome where Dorothea has her terrible honeymoon and first meets Will Ladislaw (I understand Eliot visited Rome so I guess it’s likely she would have been familiar with the statue). This immediately made sense to me in terms of Dorotheas initial rejection of the world of the senses (most notably she thinks horse riding is a terrible sensuous indulgence that only a pagan would enjoy) and her experience in Rome specifically of encountering the fantastic physical reality sculpture having been “fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort” and the sculpture in question is so physical.

Adside: This statue of St Teresa also plays an interesting role in Anna Burns excellent Milkman.

(2) They bring up Middlemarch as a kind of expression of Spinozan philosophy esp. the ethical dimension but also determinism.

I’m into this. My mind immediately jumped to the matter of the will which is one of my favourite scenes in the book. Also, morality of inaction; Mary chooses to refuse action by not burning the second will whilst later Mr Bulstrode attempts to avoid moral culpability by remaining passive.

Good grief, it’s such a good book!

Notes from Jan 2022

The BBCs 1994 adaptation of Middlemarch has been on iPlayer for the last while and we watched the first episode the other night. I didn’t watch the end as I had to help a child get to sleep but I don’t feel the urge to watch further episodes. The whole thing just felt wrong, not my Middlemarch. Dorothea started off too sympathetic and her sister too shallow, it felt cartoonish. I did like the relationship between Mr. Farebrother and Lydgate.