A great reading experience can be like a love affair or a journey—it lives on in memory and in our lives, it touches the way we understand our own decisions, how we fall in love, and the way we approach our work.
I'm sorry our summer of Middlemarch is ending. It's been wonderful. It does feel right, somehow, that Dorothea and Lydgate both leave Middlemarch, both because of their spouses.
Me too! Mona, deepest thanks for this wonderful experience! Your pieces have been such a deep and sympathetic immersion, and it was such a wonderful vision for a way to expand Book Post. I wonder, do you think Eliot meant to say, even accidentally, that a person like that has to get out of a small town to find a way forward?
Great insights, Mona and Ann. Middlemarch is a place named for the bleakest time of year. It is a time and a place one wants to move on from. In the same year that the novel was published, Christina Rossetti published the poem, "In the Bleak Mid-winter." Here:
Thank you so much. How was Idalia? (I've lost track of Hurricane names. I had to make an earlier-than-expected departure from Mississippi to get home before LA's hurricane -- was it Hilary?)
Thank you so much for this nuanced note. I love the idea of analyzing the first and second marriages here...I'll ask Aaron Matz if he will share his paper.
Thank you, Mona, for lovely, smart commentaries! They were generous and rounded toward the characters in a way GE would have approved. The only true villains were the gossips, but they were mere petty demons. I liken the social forces that turned against Lydgate in the latter sections of the novel to the Schopenhauerian “will” that Anna and Vronsky try to challenge in Tolstoy’s novel. Anna stubbornly, willfully, goes to the opera after her affair with Vronsky and is humiliated by the social set that used to admire her. This is the “will in the world” we cannot defeat with acts of our own will. Tolstoy was smitten by Schopenhauer when he was composing AK. Don’t think any of that is going on with GE; it was just Lydgate’s powerlessness before those social forces that struck me. Again, thank you!
The thing I wrestle with is: Eliot closes with a lesson that we should value the small ambitions of love and domestic good, that large ambitious encounter immovable social forces. She seems skeptical about political change and yet sends Dorothea and Will there. But the big "and yet": she herself has produced this, this capacious, global answer to "The Key to All Mythologies," and followed the other path.
I wonder, though, if GE could have written Middlemarch if she thought, every day as she sat down to work, that she was writing a grand all-encompassing masterpiece. Maybe it's only in small acts -- artistic or familial or social --that greatness is sometimes achieved.
Okay, wow, good grief, I really love what you said here, Mona. I think these small acts lack the self-consciousness that tends to transform, as in made worse, I guess adulterate, the original selfless motive?
I agree. It's immature on Will's part. He had participated in the friendship and probably had some sense of Rosamund's feelings. It's his colossal bad luck (and a bit of extended plotting on Eliot's part) to have been walked in on twice by Dorothea, but it's unkind to take it out on Rosamund. Although his raw, cruel explosion allows Eliot to begin to reconcile Rosamund to Lydgate, who shines in comparison and gives her what she needs.
Mona has said a few times out in the world that she has struggled to get people in her life to read Middlemarch. I wonder what she was anxious for them to learn … Perhaps most urgently how catastrophically people who love each other—even ardently—can fail to see or hear each other.
Yes! People can love ardently but in a way that still doesn’t see the other person. In the relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond, the takeaway, as it seems to me, is that Rosamond is the sort of person who needs to be “cherished” and taken care of, and that Lydgate is the sort of person who needs to provide that loving care (i.e. the “knight in shining armor”). That seems like the only formula for their relationship to survive and be stable. And I assume that still works in certain incarnations today. As the cliche says, “whatever floats your boat.” But my guess is GE, being the brilliant intellect and fighter for women’s rights she was, would prefer for roles between the sexes to be in greater symbiotic balance. In terms of perceptiveness and force of character, Will and Fred are less than Dorothea and Mary, and the men recognize this. Not sure what conclusions if any are to be drawn from this, but the other takeaway is their relationships will survive.
Sep 4, 2023·edited Sep 4, 2023Liked by Ann Kjellberg, Mona Simpson
I fell behind by two weeks, but boy, I'm glad I caught up!
And whatever piecemeal reading I'd done of this book as a student has been put to shame. I feel more grown, in that Virginia Woolf-this-novel's-for-grownups kind of way. Great thanks to Ann and Mona for really helping us (me) see things. You're like docents at the Met.
Some feeling of "provincial lives" has been echoing in my head since I turned the last page. Eliot's voice, how it seems to cover the whole town in this gentle protective way, makes such a Christian argument for seeing the worth, especially the wild complexity, of lives that will never be enshrined in, you know, Westminster Abbey. A month ago I mentioned how Dorothea's very specific-seeming ardor was exactly the sort of hopefulness many of us studious seminarians felt at divinity school, trying (and usually failing) to articulate a personal ethics that came down to Dorothea Brooke pleading, Good lord, weren't we put here to help each other? And if we fail to do just that much, haven't we shirked our simplest responsibility, as human beings? Somewhere Marilynne Robinson speaks about Christianity in similar terms, how every individual is somehow worthy, deep down, housing a spark of divinity that comes out most vividly when we make the effort to not be selfish.
Of course, there is always a caveat. We try to be our best, least selfish selves with people who cannot or will not see us clearly, our own Casaubons and Rosamonds. And yet, maybe the effort remains worth it.
I grew up in a small town and remember how much constricting pressure my mom and dad could feel, from time to time, since everyone in a small town knows just enough about you to form some kind of opinion, however faulty or half-assed, and much of your path in life is bent by those neighborly forces. Provincial lives, maybe, are the lives that almost inevitably end up shaped by public pressures, expectations, and the enduring power of gossip. Right? At seminary I was asked by a theologian what could shake my faith, such as it was: having grown up in a small town, I said: a mob. It's the inverse of what a community should be. This might be dopey or projecting, but I continue to believe that George Eliot had to have felt the same way. Pressures on her life, her ardor and loves. It's Dorothea's vision of community that feels like the truest religion, a philosophy of being generous, whenever we have the opportunity, before these little lives of ours end.
I mean, good gravy. Lydgate died at fifty!
Speaking of unvisited tombs, I went to Highgate Cemetery in London last Christmas and fought through some brambles to Eliot's grave. The lettering on the obelisk is soft and faded, and most visitors that day went to see Marx instead, but I sensed she didn't mind.
Thank *you* Paul for the expansive perspective you have brought here! One wonders if a part of the Christian side of the vision is that Dorothea's merit has to register invisibly, among people outside the scope of the novel ("real" people) in order to be selfless. Lydgate too ends up giving up something he cherished for himself for the benefit of another. And "the mob"—we do see such an analogue of its toxic force in our times!
You know, this is really an aside, but as we were finishing up here I was reading "Deacon King Kong" by James McBride, which I really loved, and in that book gossip is a much more benevolent force. It is kind of the chorus of mutual care and interest.
Mona was an invaluable guide for this book. I last tried to read it about 30 years ago, and only made it about 50 or so pages before giving up. She was especially good in pulling me through the Fred-Mary bits, which I initially considered a one way ticket to snoozeville.
[I am back from a forced Hurricane Idalia evacuation to Miami. The water came up to our back door but never went inside, thank goodness.]
Mona took this novel from something I never would have read, to a book that will forever be a part of my psyche. I had such hungry anticipation waiting in the hours leading up to Mona's summary and comments to be published each week. After the first couple of posts, it became a supreme exercise in self control not read past the assigned portion before proceeding further. When we reached Book Six, however, I could no longer control myself. I sped ahead to the end, and then to the introduction we were advised to read last, which brought even more insights. (The affect of chroniclizing the changes in religious views being chief among the items that added yet another layer of understanding to what George Eliot achieved with Middlemarch.)
I had thought by the later part of the 800-page tome that its backbone was a contrast between Dorothea and Rosamond (each very beautiful and sheltered), and in a large sense this was true as the novel delineated the lives of almost everyone else who was caught in their orbits, and by the end, both ladies went on to second marriages that were more attuned to their true selves. We saw in detail how the men in their first marriages were destroyed by a clear mismatch of personalities (Casaubon by his short-comings as an author and clergyman; pettiness; jealousy; and pride - Lydgate by his attraction to the flesh, devotion to the best practices of marriage, and pride). But the camera lens clearly left Rosamond in the end and we only learned of her fate in the epilogue. Did Eliot not think her worthy enough to carry on within the backbone of the book, or did this mirror Book Seven when Dorothea disappeared? It would be wonderful if Mona could convince Aaron Matz to share his paper on the disappearance and reappearance of Dorothea. Many of us would appreciate his insights.
There is so much to say about this book. I am sure that Mona, Ann, Dan, Amanda, Janis, all of us, could expound for pages and never find an end to the rich meanings, understated humour, human insight, metaphor, historical importance, passions aroused, etc. Fascinating. Exhilarating. To be able to capture the words and commit them to print. What a gift.... but the party is over. Damn.
It's Monday morning and I sit at my desk in a house stuffed full of things we removed from outside, so much so that I can barely get to the backdoor and there are only two places to sit. But I wanted to weigh in before my wife and I leave on a three-week trip to Europe. This thread, so carefully tended by Mona Simpson, was one of the great joys of my 65 years. She took us on an amazing journey and never let the candle be blown out as we walked in the footsteps of a gifted female writer during Victorian times. It's meant so much to me that I took my copy of Middlemarch, inscribed with my own introduction and the URL where Mona's posts about it first began, and sent it to my daughter so she can read and follow along with Mona, too (so I can't post a picture of it here, Ann, but maybe my daughter will some day). I must say it again: Thank you Mona. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!
(The University of Iowa's Writers Workshop advised not to use exclamation points, but after reading this book, the hell with "rules." Eliot showed us that you can tell readers at great length what characters are thinking; you don't always have to minimize "telling" by "showing." So many "rules" were skillfully broken by Eliot, that I was forced to question many of my "lessons" from Iowa City.)
My sincere hope is for Ann Kjellberg to preserve this URL for as long as possible, perhaps with some kind of endowment for all time, so that future readers can always find Mona's words about Middlemarch and derive all the powerful benefits that her insights and efforts provide.
Forgive me for the cliche, but it fits so well and must be said in the spirit of Eliot's liberal use of quotations: "Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight until it be morrow."
I never would have guessed the draw could be so powerful, Amanda. I had just finished Dickens book, Hard Times, and I had no attachment to the characters at all, writing it off as a relic of Victorian Times. I would have done so with Middlemarch after the first couple of chapters, too, due to its length, but I’m so glad Mona lit the way and I followed it to its somewhat sad conclusion. I expected so much more from Dorothea, Lydgate, Will, Rosamond, every one of them!
Yes Mona (and Ann) made it all possible for all of us to stay the course! I'm so glad, too. I have actually read the book 3 times now, but this time feels like the first time (as the song goes). I never had much patience for the Raffles/Bulstrode parts before, I don't know why. And I never fully appreciated the majesty of the ending, either.
I think the pacing of the reading really helped, but mostly it was reading with others and such a great group of others.
You might have anticipated the comments I made in reply to Ann's post! I know what you mean about expecting more. And yet, I was annoyed at them for having such grandiose conceptions of themselves. But when I think back on my younger days, I see that I too had some of those same feelings, about what my life could be and what it was worth, to myself and to others. And .. definitely things did not go as I once hoped they might. One grapples with a sense of failure at all levels on some days. And then one tries to see things in a different light, too, and feel a bit more even-handed, even grateful and generous.
It's true I wonder how many books I feel like I've read I would experience so differently if I read them now. We gobble up these big classics when we're young and don't know anything about life!
I guess Eliot herself really struggled with depression and often felt like each book was the last she could write. Appreciating life on the human scale was something she was teaching herself to do. There is also the whole work-life thing for women. She probably worried that she had not given enough of herself to family.
It is so pleasing to us here that folks not only enjoyed participating but felt that it led them to something they might not have found otherwise! We are lucky in our readers.
So glad you're ok Doug! It was very suspenseful having a major weather event rearing up in our comments. How evocative to think of you writing with all your stuff heaped up around you. I have no plans to get rid of this URL any time soon. I hope that some folks who are still catching up will joins us in the comments as they arrive.
(They do seem to be running out of hurricane names! Is "Idalia" a common name somewhere?)
Not only did I burst into tears on the words "incalculably diffusive," I remembered very precisely bursting into tears at that exact moment decades ago.
I am thinking about how she chose to end on the dark note of "unvisited tombs." Is she trying to hold a sense of solitude and grief and disappointed hopes alongside or within the expansive vision of the effects of love and generosity?
I think for me what is so touching in the first place about the Finale is the shift in Eliot's tone. As if she had just with a deep sigh dropped her work and turned at last to speak directly to us, the reader. It wasn't that she was so far away before, but the sense that she was using a narrator becomes more clear in comparison to the Finale, I think.
That shift for me signaled so many things about her knowledge and experience and the views she had come to hold through them. And that was very touching, too.
After all, the characters she created really were worthy of her highest praise, as well as her most calm and clear-eyed condemnation. She held them all in her hand as well as her heart.
And all my personal judgments and feelings about them, so enjoyable to ponder and experience in the moments of reading, were left behind in the vision she offered of their futures which was also already their pasts.
But what really got to me as with others here was when she says that Lydgate had died "when he was only fifty." I was very glad she said "only." The word "heavy" in the phrase "heavy insurance on his life" also carries a lot of weight. We know or think we know how much.
And then Dorothea .. it is so interesting where Eliot says that the times in which an individual lives also die with them and are an inextricable part of who they were, forming them just as much as any inner beliefs. "For there is no creature who is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it." This I found somewhat surprising given how much emphasis on character there is in the book. But the various pressures and realities of their lives were also being demonstrated.
I agree that "unvisited tombs" is a dark way to end, but I didn't find it too dark. More I think a comfort, almost. Hasn't she just told us that Dorothea's life turned out -comparatively -quite well, after all?
I, too, find the ending to be hopeful. Many more people are good than are famous and we all help construct what beauty and kindness there is in the world. That's what I thought she was saying. I found it to be a profound defense of the classical "female" virtues -- friendship, trust, caring for the emotional lives of those around us. One can be an ordinary person and yet have made life immeasurably better for a web of loved ones...
I first read MM alone, years ago. Couldn't remember anything about it except the last line which I found so profound that I read it at my dad's funeral: a life lived with quiet, unceasing goodness.
I find the ending inspirational, that our lives are so much better because of ordinary good people.
And, I'm not saying you're just ordinary, Mona and Ann, but "the growing good of the world is partly dependent" on you two and what beauty you have brought to us. I know it must have been a ton of work but well appreciated work. Thank you.
Oh my gosh thank you! That is so moving that you read the last line at your father's funeral. So grateful and honored to have had the close attention and care of you folks. Mona and I were marveling at how generous and kind our commenters have been.
I also experienced the “unvisited tombs” as not dark, but comforting. Even the Dorotheas of the world are not especially singled out: their goodness flows back into the general current and is shared in subsequent generations.
I see, I see. The essence of the "unvisited tombs" is that such people may not be remembered beyond their immediate generation but that does not make their influence less real. It sounded lonely to me, but I wasn't looking into the future.
So sorry to not be in a place to share much erudition or analysis. Suffice it to say for now that this is a particularly ironic year for me to read this book, which I consider, among other things, a literary masterclass in the marriage plot.
I just want to say thank you. Thank you to Mona for these beautiful shapes and wandering both insightful pieces. I loved that this was only your third time reading Middlemarch. Your pieces had a felt urgency to them. Omg your emotional state upon finishing. ❤️❤️
Ann, thank you, thank you, thank you!!! Bravo to you for this and Book Post!!
I’ve been wanting to read Middlemarch for years and even though this year was horrendous personal life timing-wise I wanted to do this. I feel expanded and enriched by the book but more so by reading it with all of you and for what you all shared in your great comments. ❤️❤️🌻🌻
Thank you, Mona, for your wonderful commentary. You kept me engaged and eager to continue reading each week. I did a slapdash reading of Middlemarch 35-some years ago and have been delighted to read it with not only greater attention but in the company of others and your guiding words. The novel’s last paragraph, which I am sure I barely took notice of the first reading, brought tears to my eyes this time as fortifying and ultimately comforting wisdom.
"Exiles notoriously feed much on hopes. . ." -- my favorite line in the book. GE quotes Aeschylus to reunite Will and Dorothea without a silly plot twist. The major characters flee Middlemarch to pursue their dreams. Celia puts her foot down and Mr. Brooke extends an invitation to build a bridge. How timely is the theme and the book.
Thank you so much Mona, Ann and the group. I'm looking forward to many more reading adventures.
Janice, so many great quotes in this book. My two favorites:
“I think that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
“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 grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul wasting struggle with worldly annoyances."
Thanks so much for this. It’s from Agamemnon 1668 for anyone who’s interested and spoken by the wicked Aegisthus (‘notoriously’). Eliot has been reading Aeschylus in the years leading up to writing Felix Holt and Middlemarch and relishing the sense of the inevitable in that trilogy but I missed this entirely! A similar thought is expressed at Euripides Phoenissae 396.
I learned about the Aeschylus quote from the book notes, but I did read the trilogy in college and was fascinated by the beauty of Aeschylus’ language. How timeless are some of these themes! I’m going to Greece in the spring and will revisit Mycenae, the scene of the crime.
Amazing that you are going to Greece! I read about Eliot reading Aeschylus in the old 1972 Penguin edition to Felix Holt, by Peter Coveney. But would like to know more. She also references Antigone at the very end.
It's interesting to think about her imagining the cruel workings of fate under the contingent, domestic scenes and stories she offers us. Like Dorothea's marriage, turning her aspirations back on her like a curse.
I was telling a friend about the ending, the way Rosamond plays this surprising role, changing herself, and becoming a conduit for Dorothea’s happiness with Will, and she said, “it’s about sisterhood.”
I wonder if Dorothea acquires a new sister in Rosamond. Mona offered a compelling reading of the real sisters in the opening books. However, Dorothea and Rosamond have a lot more in common! Consider, they are both beautiful, highly intelligent and ask more of their surroundings than is on offer. Still considerable self-overcoming is required on both of their parts to bring them into sisterly contact.
I don’t think two sisters like Dorothea and Rosamond could exist in the same family. Celia and Fred--accommodating, easy-going, satisfied--make more sense to me as siblings. I have a sister like Rosamond and she did become more compassionate over time. Experience does that. Maybe the women could have become friends.
I had thought earlier in the book that Eliot had held back from showing Rosamond the sympathy that she showed other characters and I felt at the end I saw why: Dorothea's candor and generosity brought out the best even in such a narrow person. Without Dorothea's courage in speaking openly to Rosamond the outcome would not have happened: failures of candor and listening cause so many of the book's problems. They are in a way two sides of a coin: when the door opens between/within them, the resolution comes.
I’d agree but urge that equal agency be given to Rosamond in the exchange. I don’t even know if she’s a narrow person anymore. I’m starting to wonder if her no nonsense claim for status and advancement isn’t the kind of thing women should be entitled to demand whereas Dorothea’s idealism is burdensome and unsustainable. Still shaken up by “Dorothea’s Lost Dog” a great and iconoclastic essay.
I'm sorry our summer of Middlemarch is ending. It's been wonderful. It does feel right, somehow, that Dorothea and Lydgate both leave Middlemarch, both because of their spouses.
Me too! Mona, deepest thanks for this wonderful experience! Your pieces have been such a deep and sympathetic immersion, and it was such a wonderful vision for a way to expand Book Post. I wonder, do you think Eliot meant to say, even accidentally, that a person like that has to get out of a small town to find a way forward?
Great insights, Mona and Ann. Middlemarch is a place named for the bleakest time of year. It is a time and a place one wants to move on from. In the same year that the novel was published, Christina Rossetti published the poem, "In the Bleak Mid-winter." Here:
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
Our God, heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty —
Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom Angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and Archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air;
But only His Mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am? —
If I were a Shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part, —
Yet what I can I give Him, —
Give my heart.
Wow, I guess they must have known each other? I never realized that Eliot and the pre-Raphaelites would have been contemporaries.
Thank you so much. How was Idalia? (I've lost track of Hurricane names. I had to make an earlier-than-expected departure from Mississippi to get home before LA's hurricane -- was it Hilary?)
Thank you so much for this nuanced note. I love the idea of analyzing the first and second marriages here...I'll ask Aaron Matz if he will share his paper.
ps -- I agree! Let's throw out all the rules
Thank you, Mona, for lovely, smart commentaries! They were generous and rounded toward the characters in a way GE would have approved. The only true villains were the gossips, but they were mere petty demons. I liken the social forces that turned against Lydgate in the latter sections of the novel to the Schopenhauerian “will” that Anna and Vronsky try to challenge in Tolstoy’s novel. Anna stubbornly, willfully, goes to the opera after her affair with Vronsky and is humiliated by the social set that used to admire her. This is the “will in the world” we cannot defeat with acts of our own will. Tolstoy was smitten by Schopenhauer when he was composing AK. Don’t think any of that is going on with GE; it was just Lydgate’s powerlessness before those social forces that struck me. Again, thank you!
The thing I wrestle with is: Eliot closes with a lesson that we should value the small ambitions of love and domestic good, that large ambitious encounter immovable social forces. She seems skeptical about political change and yet sends Dorothea and Will there. But the big "and yet": she herself has produced this, this capacious, global answer to "The Key to All Mythologies," and followed the other path.
I wonder, though, if GE could have written Middlemarch if she thought, every day as she sat down to work, that she was writing a grand all-encompassing masterpiece. Maybe it's only in small acts -- artistic or familial or social --that greatness is sometimes achieved.
Okay, wow, good grief, I really love what you said here, Mona. I think these small acts lack the self-consciousness that tends to transform, as in made worse, I guess adulterate, the original selfless motive?
Ah there it is!
I agree. It's immature on Will's part. He had participated in the friendship and probably had some sense of Rosamund's feelings. It's his colossal bad luck (and a bit of extended plotting on Eliot's part) to have been walked in on twice by Dorothea, but it's unkind to take it out on Rosamund. Although his raw, cruel explosion allows Eliot to begin to reconcile Rosamund to Lydgate, who shines in comparison and gives her what she needs.
He gives her tenderness.
Ann, your insights have been invaluable. This whole group has been great.
🙏🏼
True of course, Ann, but the Farebrother women are, we remember, generally ancient.
Indeed!
Yes, Sir James does NOT get better with age.
VERY true to life.
This, my dear, is left to our imaginations. Will does play a bit close to fire.
Mona has said a few times out in the world that she has struggled to get people in her life to read Middlemarch. I wonder what she was anxious for them to learn … Perhaps most urgently how catastrophically people who love each other—even ardently—can fail to see or hear each other.
Yes! People can love ardently but in a way that still doesn’t see the other person. In the relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond, the takeaway, as it seems to me, is that Rosamond is the sort of person who needs to be “cherished” and taken care of, and that Lydgate is the sort of person who needs to provide that loving care (i.e. the “knight in shining armor”). That seems like the only formula for their relationship to survive and be stable. And I assume that still works in certain incarnations today. As the cliche says, “whatever floats your boat.” But my guess is GE, being the brilliant intellect and fighter for women’s rights she was, would prefer for roles between the sexes to be in greater symbiotic balance. In terms of perceptiveness and force of character, Will and Fred are less than Dorothea and Mary, and the men recognize this. Not sure what conclusions if any are to be drawn from this, but the other takeaway is their relationships will survive.
I fell behind by two weeks, but boy, I'm glad I caught up!
And whatever piecemeal reading I'd done of this book as a student has been put to shame. I feel more grown, in that Virginia Woolf-this-novel's-for-grownups kind of way. Great thanks to Ann and Mona for really helping us (me) see things. You're like docents at the Met.
Some feeling of "provincial lives" has been echoing in my head since I turned the last page. Eliot's voice, how it seems to cover the whole town in this gentle protective way, makes such a Christian argument for seeing the worth, especially the wild complexity, of lives that will never be enshrined in, you know, Westminster Abbey. A month ago I mentioned how Dorothea's very specific-seeming ardor was exactly the sort of hopefulness many of us studious seminarians felt at divinity school, trying (and usually failing) to articulate a personal ethics that came down to Dorothea Brooke pleading, Good lord, weren't we put here to help each other? And if we fail to do just that much, haven't we shirked our simplest responsibility, as human beings? Somewhere Marilynne Robinson speaks about Christianity in similar terms, how every individual is somehow worthy, deep down, housing a spark of divinity that comes out most vividly when we make the effort to not be selfish.
Of course, there is always a caveat. We try to be our best, least selfish selves with people who cannot or will not see us clearly, our own Casaubons and Rosamonds. And yet, maybe the effort remains worth it.
I grew up in a small town and remember how much constricting pressure my mom and dad could feel, from time to time, since everyone in a small town knows just enough about you to form some kind of opinion, however faulty or half-assed, and much of your path in life is bent by those neighborly forces. Provincial lives, maybe, are the lives that almost inevitably end up shaped by public pressures, expectations, and the enduring power of gossip. Right? At seminary I was asked by a theologian what could shake my faith, such as it was: having grown up in a small town, I said: a mob. It's the inverse of what a community should be. This might be dopey or projecting, but I continue to believe that George Eliot had to have felt the same way. Pressures on her life, her ardor and loves. It's Dorothea's vision of community that feels like the truest religion, a philosophy of being generous, whenever we have the opportunity, before these little lives of ours end.
I mean, good gravy. Lydgate died at fifty!
Speaking of unvisited tombs, I went to Highgate Cemetery in London last Christmas and fought through some brambles to Eliot's grave. The lettering on the obelisk is soft and faded, and most visitors that day went to see Marx instead, but I sensed she didn't mind.
Thanks again, Bookpost--
Thank *you* Paul for the expansive perspective you have brought here! One wonders if a part of the Christian side of the vision is that Dorothea's merit has to register invisibly, among people outside the scope of the novel ("real" people) in order to be selfless. Lydgate too ends up giving up something he cherished for himself for the benefit of another. And "the mob"—we do see such an analogue of its toxic force in our times!
This prompts me to suggest it’s sufficient to say “they lived after” as opposed to “happily ever after”
Truly.
Paul, thank for sharing your thoughts here. The mob. The part about provincial lives being shaped more by the pressures of that gossip.
You know, this is really an aside, but as we were finishing up here I was reading "Deacon King Kong" by James McBride, which I really loved, and in that book gossip is a much more benevolent force. It is kind of the chorus of mutual care and interest.
Mona was an invaluable guide for this book. I last tried to read it about 30 years ago, and only made it about 50 or so pages before giving up. She was especially good in pulling me through the Fred-Mary bits, which I initially considered a one way ticket to snoozeville.
It's so interesting how different everyone is! Some folks on here find Fred/Mary the most sympathetic.
Yes, interesting. I loved the Fred-Mary stuff!
[I am back from a forced Hurricane Idalia evacuation to Miami. The water came up to our back door but never went inside, thank goodness.]
Mona took this novel from something I never would have read, to a book that will forever be a part of my psyche. I had such hungry anticipation waiting in the hours leading up to Mona's summary and comments to be published each week. After the first couple of posts, it became a supreme exercise in self control not read past the assigned portion before proceeding further. When we reached Book Six, however, I could no longer control myself. I sped ahead to the end, and then to the introduction we were advised to read last, which brought even more insights. (The affect of chroniclizing the changes in religious views being chief among the items that added yet another layer of understanding to what George Eliot achieved with Middlemarch.)
I had thought by the later part of the 800-page tome that its backbone was a contrast between Dorothea and Rosamond (each very beautiful and sheltered), and in a large sense this was true as the novel delineated the lives of almost everyone else who was caught in their orbits, and by the end, both ladies went on to second marriages that were more attuned to their true selves. We saw in detail how the men in their first marriages were destroyed by a clear mismatch of personalities (Casaubon by his short-comings as an author and clergyman; pettiness; jealousy; and pride - Lydgate by his attraction to the flesh, devotion to the best practices of marriage, and pride). But the camera lens clearly left Rosamond in the end and we only learned of her fate in the epilogue. Did Eliot not think her worthy enough to carry on within the backbone of the book, or did this mirror Book Seven when Dorothea disappeared? It would be wonderful if Mona could convince Aaron Matz to share his paper on the disappearance and reappearance of Dorothea. Many of us would appreciate his insights.
There is so much to say about this book. I am sure that Mona, Ann, Dan, Amanda, Janis, all of us, could expound for pages and never find an end to the rich meanings, understated humour, human insight, metaphor, historical importance, passions aroused, etc. Fascinating. Exhilarating. To be able to capture the words and commit them to print. What a gift.... but the party is over. Damn.
It's Monday morning and I sit at my desk in a house stuffed full of things we removed from outside, so much so that I can barely get to the backdoor and there are only two places to sit. But I wanted to weigh in before my wife and I leave on a three-week trip to Europe. This thread, so carefully tended by Mona Simpson, was one of the great joys of my 65 years. She took us on an amazing journey and never let the candle be blown out as we walked in the footsteps of a gifted female writer during Victorian times. It's meant so much to me that I took my copy of Middlemarch, inscribed with my own introduction and the URL where Mona's posts about it first began, and sent it to my daughter so she can read and follow along with Mona, too (so I can't post a picture of it here, Ann, but maybe my daughter will some day). I must say it again: Thank you Mona. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!
(The University of Iowa's Writers Workshop advised not to use exclamation points, but after reading this book, the hell with "rules." Eliot showed us that you can tell readers at great length what characters are thinking; you don't always have to minimize "telling" by "showing." So many "rules" were skillfully broken by Eliot, that I was forced to question many of my "lessons" from Iowa City.)
My sincere hope is for Ann Kjellberg to preserve this URL for as long as possible, perhaps with some kind of endowment for all time, so that future readers can always find Mona's words about Middlemarch and derive all the powerful benefits that her insights and efforts provide.
Forgive me for the cliche, but it fits so well and must be said in the spirit of Eliot's liberal use of quotations: "Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight until it be morrow."
I'm sorry too that the party is winding down. I'll remember this summer --
Glad to hear all is well with you, Doug!
Yes, there does seem to be a ceaseless conversation going on inside of Middlemarch which we could carry on here, as well!
There is something truly alive in it.
I never would have guessed the draw could be so powerful, Amanda. I had just finished Dickens book, Hard Times, and I had no attachment to the characters at all, writing it off as a relic of Victorian Times. I would have done so with Middlemarch after the first couple of chapters, too, due to its length, but I’m so glad Mona lit the way and I followed it to its somewhat sad conclusion. I expected so much more from Dorothea, Lydgate, Will, Rosamond, every one of them!
Yes Mona (and Ann) made it all possible for all of us to stay the course! I'm so glad, too. I have actually read the book 3 times now, but this time feels like the first time (as the song goes). I never had much patience for the Raffles/Bulstrode parts before, I don't know why. And I never fully appreciated the majesty of the ending, either.
I think the pacing of the reading really helped, but mostly it was reading with others and such a great group of others.
You might have anticipated the comments I made in reply to Ann's post! I know what you mean about expecting more. And yet, I was annoyed at them for having such grandiose conceptions of themselves. But when I think back on my younger days, I see that I too had some of those same feelings, about what my life could be and what it was worth, to myself and to others. And .. definitely things did not go as I once hoped they might. One grapples with a sense of failure at all levels on some days. And then one tries to see things in a different light, too, and feel a bit more even-handed, even grateful and generous.
You describe beautifully why reading M. has been so different from when I read it 50 years ago.
It's true I wonder how many books I feel like I've read I would experience so differently if I read them now. We gobble up these big classics when we're young and don't know anything about life!
I guess Eliot herself really struggled with depression and often felt like each book was the last she could write. Appreciating life on the human scale was something she was teaching herself to do. There is also the whole work-life thing for women. She probably worried that she had not given enough of herself to family.
It is so pleasing to us here that folks not only enjoyed participating but felt that it led them to something they might not have found otherwise! We are lucky in our readers.
Now I don’t have to say anything about this book. You’ve said it all so well!!!
And I’m so happy that Idalia wasn’t as bad as she could have been.
Who is Idalia?
Not sure I spelled it right but it was last week’s hurricane on the Florida gulf coast
So glad you're ok Doug! It was very suspenseful having a major weather event rearing up in our comments. How evocative to think of you writing with all your stuff heaped up around you. I have no plans to get rid of this URL any time soon. I hope that some folks who are still catching up will joins us in the comments as they arrive.
(They do seem to be running out of hurricane names! Is "Idalia" a common name somewhere?)
It went slow .. and then too fast! The summer of Middlemarch. I cried reading the Finale yesterday. And again reading Mona's post!
If we feel dazed at being forgiven, is it because we are too used to being judged, and sometimes, often? wrongly?
Marriage - "the beginning of the home epic" - had it ever been dealt with as honestly and humanely before this book?
Someone should write a novel called The Home Epic.
Not only did I burst into tears on the words "incalculably diffusive," I remembered very precisely bursting into tears at that exact moment decades ago.
I am thinking about how she chose to end on the dark note of "unvisited tombs." Is she trying to hold a sense of solitude and grief and disappointed hopes alongside or within the expansive vision of the effects of love and generosity?
I think for me what is so touching in the first place about the Finale is the shift in Eliot's tone. As if she had just with a deep sigh dropped her work and turned at last to speak directly to us, the reader. It wasn't that she was so far away before, but the sense that she was using a narrator becomes more clear in comparison to the Finale, I think.
That shift for me signaled so many things about her knowledge and experience and the views she had come to hold through them. And that was very touching, too.
After all, the characters she created really were worthy of her highest praise, as well as her most calm and clear-eyed condemnation. She held them all in her hand as well as her heart.
And all my personal judgments and feelings about them, so enjoyable to ponder and experience in the moments of reading, were left behind in the vision she offered of their futures which was also already their pasts.
But what really got to me as with others here was when she says that Lydgate had died "when he was only fifty." I was very glad she said "only." The word "heavy" in the phrase "heavy insurance on his life" also carries a lot of weight. We know or think we know how much.
And then Dorothea .. it is so interesting where Eliot says that the times in which an individual lives also die with them and are an inextricable part of who they were, forming them just as much as any inner beliefs. "For there is no creature who is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it." This I found somewhat surprising given how much emphasis on character there is in the book. But the various pressures and realities of their lives were also being demonstrated.
I agree that "unvisited tombs" is a dark way to end, but I didn't find it too dark. More I think a comfort, almost. Hasn't she just told us that Dorothea's life turned out -comparatively -quite well, after all?
I, too, find the ending to be hopeful. Many more people are good than are famous and we all help construct what beauty and kindness there is in the world. That's what I thought she was saying. I found it to be a profound defense of the classical "female" virtues -- friendship, trust, caring for the emotional lives of those around us. One can be an ordinary person and yet have made life immeasurably better for a web of loved ones...
I first read MM alone, years ago. Couldn't remember anything about it except the last line which I found so profound that I read it at my dad's funeral: a life lived with quiet, unceasing goodness.
I find the ending inspirational, that our lives are so much better because of ordinary good people.
And, I'm not saying you're just ordinary, Mona and Ann, but "the growing good of the world is partly dependent" on you two and what beauty you have brought to us. I know it must have been a ton of work but well appreciated work. Thank you.
Ditto!
Oh my gosh thank you! That is so moving that you read the last line at your father's funeral. So grateful and honored to have had the close attention and care of you folks. Mona and I were marveling at how generous and kind our commenters have been.
I also experienced the “unvisited tombs” as not dark, but comforting. Even the Dorotheas of the world are not especially singled out: their goodness flows back into the general current and is shared in subsequent generations.
I see, I see. The essence of the "unvisited tombs" is that such people may not be remembered beyond their immediate generation but that does not make their influence less real. It sounded lonely to me, but I wasn't looking into the future.
So sorry to not be in a place to share much erudition or analysis. Suffice it to say for now that this is a particularly ironic year for me to read this book, which I consider, among other things, a literary masterclass in the marriage plot.
I just want to say thank you. Thank you to Mona for these beautiful shapes and wandering both insightful pieces. I loved that this was only your third time reading Middlemarch. Your pieces had a felt urgency to them. Omg your emotional state upon finishing. ❤️❤️
Ann, thank you, thank you, thank you!!! Bravo to you for this and Book Post!!
I’ve been wanting to read Middlemarch for years and even though this year was horrendous personal life timing-wise I wanted to do this. I feel expanded and enriched by the book but more so by reading it with all of you and for what you all shared in your great comments. ❤️❤️🌻🌻
Beautifully “shaped”
So sorry about your horrendous year! I hope this may be the beginning of a turn for the better.
Thank you, Mona, for your wonderful commentary. You kept me engaged and eager to continue reading each week. I did a slapdash reading of Middlemarch 35-some years ago and have been delighted to read it with not only greater attention but in the company of others and your guiding words. The novel’s last paragraph, which I am sure I barely took notice of the first reading, brought tears to my eyes this time as fortifying and ultimately comforting wisdom.
"Exiles notoriously feed much on hopes. . ." -- my favorite line in the book. GE quotes Aeschylus to reunite Will and Dorothea without a silly plot twist. The major characters flee Middlemarch to pursue their dreams. Celia puts her foot down and Mr. Brooke extends an invitation to build a bridge. How timely is the theme and the book.
Thank you so much Mona, Ann and the group. I'm looking forward to many more reading adventures.
Janice, so many great quotes in this book. My two favorites:
“I think that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
“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 grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul wasting struggle with worldly annoyances."
Lovely!
Thanks so much for this. It’s from Agamemnon 1668 for anyone who’s interested and spoken by the wicked Aegisthus (‘notoriously’). Eliot has been reading Aeschylus in the years leading up to writing Felix Holt and Middlemarch and relishing the sense of the inevitable in that trilogy but I missed this entirely! A similar thought is expressed at Euripides Phoenissae 396.
I learned about the Aeschylus quote from the book notes, but I did read the trilogy in college and was fascinated by the beauty of Aeschylus’ language. How timeless are some of these themes! I’m going to Greece in the spring and will revisit Mycenae, the scene of the crime.
Ooh jealous.
Amazing that you are going to Greece! I read about Eliot reading Aeschylus in the old 1972 Penguin edition to Felix Holt, by Peter Coveney. But would like to know more. She also references Antigone at the very end.
It's interesting to think about her imagining the cruel workings of fate under the contingent, domestic scenes and stories she offers us. Like Dorothea's marriage, turning her aspirations back on her like a curse.
I was telling a friend about the ending, the way Rosamond plays this surprising role, changing herself, and becoming a conduit for Dorothea’s happiness with Will, and she said, “it’s about sisterhood.”
I wonder if Dorothea acquires a new sister in Rosamond. Mona offered a compelling reading of the real sisters in the opening books. However, Dorothea and Rosamond have a lot more in common! Consider, they are both beautiful, highly intelligent and ask more of their surroundings than is on offer. Still considerable self-overcoming is required on both of their parts to bring them into sisterly contact.
I don’t think two sisters like Dorothea and Rosamond could exist in the same family. Celia and Fred--accommodating, easy-going, satisfied--make more sense to me as siblings. I have a sister like Rosamond and she did become more compassionate over time. Experience does that. Maybe the women could have become friends.
I had thought earlier in the book that Eliot had held back from showing Rosamond the sympathy that she showed other characters and I felt at the end I saw why: Dorothea's candor and generosity brought out the best even in such a narrow person. Without Dorothea's courage in speaking openly to Rosamond the outcome would not have happened: failures of candor and listening cause so many of the book's problems. They are in a way two sides of a coin: when the door opens between/within them, the resolution comes.
I’d agree but urge that equal agency be given to Rosamond in the exchange. I don’t even know if she’s a narrow person anymore. I’m starting to wonder if her no nonsense claim for status and advancement isn’t the kind of thing women should be entitled to demand whereas Dorothea’s idealism is burdensome and unsustainable. Still shaken up by “Dorothea’s Lost Dog” a great and iconoclastic essay.
By Nina Auerbach
Thank you! Will look up.