Middlemarch, George Eliot

I finished Middlemarch awhile ago. It affected me so much that I have not been able to accurately review it. I have thought about it much, and dreamed of discussing it with my mom. It is one of the most accurate and incredible portrayals of human life I have read; like many classics, I find it to be true.

to quote more of its genius:

Life would be no better than candle-light tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy. 570

We must not inquire too curiously into motives. Miss brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble in the utteranace: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must kept the germinating grain away from the light. 17

Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retinaed very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted... any of those great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty - how could he affect her as a lover? -5

Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia's mind towards her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions? 10

There are characters who are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in drams which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilitis will clash against objcets that remain innocently quiet. 200

Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbour's lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of the unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness. 342

our good depends on the quality and breath of our emotion; and toWill, a creature who cared little for what are caleld hte solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to have within him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the inheritance of a fortune. What others might have called the futility of his passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he was concsious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy.

I like Mary best out of all the characters, for her imperfectness of character (upon meeting her, don't we know she is surly because of her plainness, but compensatingly endowed with a clever tongue and good humour?) in her fidelity are traces of my heart:

It has taken such deep root in me - my gratitude to him for always loving me best, and minding so much if I hurt myself, from the time when we were very little. I cannot imagine any new feeling coming to make that weaker. 550


If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions ,partings and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.

I could never relate truly to Dorothea's passion for Will, though, who seems lacklustre, mediocre, what our society calls a "loser" and theirs a "vagabond."

I like Mary's father Caleb, too, who is generously good, who manages to convince others of their folly in a simple, logical way. (re: Railroad fight scene.)

When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. and we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.

I find Lydgate and Rosamond's marriage very tragic and realistic. In the young and charismatic doctor Lydgate's sacrifice of anything, even manlly pride, and ambition, for domestic comfort, I understand how some men are unerringly tender towards their wives. The inevitable softening comes because it must.

His marraige would be a mere piece of bitter irony if they could not go on loving eachother. ... His wife had a hold on his heart, and it was his intense desire that the hold should remain strong. In marriage, the certainty, 'She will never love me much' is easier to bear than the fear, 'I shall love her no more.' Hence, after that outburst, his inward effort was entirely to excuse her, and to blame the hard cicumstances which were partly his fault. He tried that evening, by petting her, to heal the wound he had made in the morning, and it was not in Rosamond's nature to be repellent or sulky; indeed, she welcomed the signs that her husbnad loved her and was under control. But this was something quite distinct from loving him.

Rosamond's depiction is very accurate too - there are women like her, whose smallest words and expressions bring others to blame and make them yield to her. In a thought-out, but not malicious way.

It is a terrible moment in young lives when the closeness of love's bond has turned into this power of galling.

He had begun to have an alarmed foresight of her irevocable loss of love for him, nad he consquent drearines of their life. The ready fullness of his emotions made this dread alternate quickly with the first violent mvements of his anger.

His mariage... if it were not to be a yoked loneliness, must be a state of effort to go on loving without too much care about being loved...

The affair of Raggles' sinister information, which brings about the catastrophe of the novel is a little overblown and unrealistic. But its effects are accurately drawn enough.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it, for conjecture soon became more confident than knwoledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

Dorothea's impetuous generosity is made of this:
Some of her intensest experience in the last tow years had set her mind strongly in oppostition to any unfavourable constructions of others... she disliked this cautious weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force.

more of Tertius (what a horrible name) and Rosamond:

"Even this trouble, like the rest, she seemed to regard as if it were hers alone. He was always to her a being aprt, doing what she objected to.... For he had almost learned the lesson that he must bend himself to her nature, and that because she came short in her sympathy, he must give the more."

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the greif of one who falls from that serene activity into absorbing soulwasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech - one does not at least hear how inadequate the words are."

I liked the ending about Mary and Fred's successes, each being attributed to the other.

There is really an odd reversal of foturnes in this story - Fred irresponsible, finally successful, Lydgate having always seen himself as sold out. I liked the portrait of how the Bulstrode dealt with their tragedy, too, but neither acknowledging the crime. That is how soem people work.

He burst out crying and they cried together... his confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent. Openminded as she was, she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire. She could not say, "how much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not say, "I am innocent.

I think it is one of my favourite books.