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Ann Kjellberg's avatar

Another thought: I noticed that Eliot doesn’t linger much over setting scenes, but she gave us such a luminous picture of the afternoon of Dorothea’s walk, when she was “not consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.” We suddenly feel the breadth of the landscape as an expression of her sense of possibility, such a contrast with the pinched, indoorsy Casaubon. We see her as a romantic heroine in a vista, like a Caspar David Friedrich painting.

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Janice Axelrod's avatar

“Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought ...” Love how Dorothea is constructing a fantasy about Mr. C. projecting her own qualities and longings onto him.

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