My "E" book took awhile to read because of finals and Christmas, but I'm glad I persevered. I read
Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). This is a long book, not just in the number of pages (over 700), but also in plot. It traces the history of perhaps a dozen characters in late 1820s/early 1830s provincial England. The focus though is on several different couples. What I really liked about this book was its thoroughness. Although Dorthea and Lydgate are perhaps Eliot's main protagonists, I did not finish the book feeling that any of the other stories were ignored, except perhaps that of Celia and Sir James. What I did not like was many of the characters themselves. It is no surprise to anyone who knows me that I do not suffer fools, and many of Eliot's characters are exactly that. They are too selfish to realize the consequences of their actions. Although several of them grow, especially Dorthea and Fred, I still feel that Eliot was overly generous to some of them. I think unassuming Mr. Garth was actually my favorite for his good sense and desire to do the right thing, an anomaly in this story.
In the introduction to this book, Margaret Drabble writes "There is certainly a tone of sober reality in the last pages of
Middlemarch: there is no fairy-tale ending". While I agree that the end is more realistic than those of many of Eliot's contemporaries, I contend that reality does not preclude a "fairy-tale ending". Rather, I think it is more fairy-tale like in that it seems to me to be the best possible realistic ending. I was not sure if I was going to be satisfied with the ending of this novel, but I was pleasantly surprised.
Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys 19th century literature the way I do. If it seems to drag on a little, skim some of the passages, because the last few chapters are worth the wait.
*Image from Amazon.com.
