So it’s going to have to be you, dear readers
warning spoilers for this *checks notes* 150 year old novel
Hello from the other side. There are two weeks and 839 pages between me and the person I used to be, and I’m not sure I know her anymore.
I picked up Middlemarch during a recent aimless bookshop mooch, feeling in the mood for a classic and vaguely remembering watching the 90s bbc adaptation when I was a kid. I quite enjoyed it, though not as much as Pride and Prejudice; there wasn’t as much dancing and no one was striding majestically out of a lake. The sheer weight of the book is daunting, the preface inscrutable. I went in only half believing I’d make it through the first few chapters.
The absolute tome of it barely left my grip for the next two weeks. I read it during every spare moment, and quite a few that weren’t (belated apologies to the customers who tried to get my attention while I was deep in it with Dorothea). This was it, the big one. It doesn’t feel hyperbole to say that reading Middlemarch was akin to a spiritual experience.
And I’m struggling now to really explain why, even to myself. The plot is fairly standard stuff: marriages, a death or two, money lost and won. For those of you unfamiliar, the story generally follows two disastrous marriages: naive idealist Dorothea to the nightmarishly dry scholar Casuabon, and the would-be pioneer Dr Lydgate, a newcomer in town, to shallow and self-serving beauty Rosamond. Within and between these main threads George Eliot weaves an exceptionally intricate portrait of small town life circa 1830, with reams of supporting characters each with a full story of their own to colour the tapestry. Perhaps it’s unfair to call this ‘standard’ - to begin, rather than end, with marriage was perhaps unheard of in literature at time of publication. I just meant that it can’t be the plain facts of the story alone that made reading Middlemarch the seminal experience in my life that I think it will prove to be.
Perhaps it’s that I read it at the perfect time. Middlemarch is subtitled ‘a study of provincial life’, though could just as easily be ‘lower your expectations’ or ‘in praise of a small life’. Two things I find it useful to hear as I inch towards 30 with very little in terms of great achievement to show for it. I finished the book feeling torn, half wishing I’d read it earlier, in my teens, to have had it with me during my discontented and unfulfilling 20s, and half wishing I’d never picked it up and still had the joy of discovering it for the first time ahead of me. But I think the lessons, such as they are, speak - firmly but kindly - to my specific time of life.
Middlemarch is often characterised as a sad book - unfairly, in my opinion. True, by the end all the principal characters have failed in what they originally set out to do. Idols are shattered, beliefs are broken. The town of Middlemarch is peopled by characters desperately trying to do good who are simply not allowed to; by circumstance, by design, by their own folly. Lydgate’s story is undoubtedly depressing but Dorothea’s, while melancholy, is more hopeful.
Eliot punishes her characters for aspiring to greatness. Lydgate is knocked down again and again, his high intention to bring about scientific progress and medical reform is gradually pinched and diminished, until he ends the book the kind of doctor he originally despised. Dorothea, who doesn’t crave greatness for herself but longs to be part of some ‘great work’, is taught a thorough lesson by her suffocating marriage to a man who believes himself to be great, and whom she quickly realises to be deluded. Her punishment is to have to continue doing her ‘duty’ of assisting him in a work she knows to be valueless.
Both these characters want to do ‘good’, but cannot manage it. But while Lydgate is indisputably punished, Dorothea is given a second chance. Not to be ‘great’, but to do as much good as she can with the tools she has been given, what she has learned through bleak experience.
Modern feminist readings criticise Dorothea’s ending as yet another submission. She marries again after Casuabon’s death, and spends her life assisting him in his work of political reform. It’s hard not to think, as a woman in the 21st century, that she deserved better. The book’s closing paragraph impresses upon us the smallness of her life hereafter. Many people find it a disappointing ending, but I think it’s one of the most beautiful I’ve ever read.
Her finely-tuned spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature… broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependant on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Yes! Yes to a hidden life faithfully lived! The lesson of Middlemarch - or the one I will take from it - is that no good work is wasted, and that we must continue doing it even when we see no reward. Anyway, greatness is overrated.
The paradox in all this though is that Middlemarch, and George Eliot, are undoubtedly great. Like seriously, dazzlingly great. One of the facets that made this such a sublime reading experience was that it felt like bearing witness to the stunning capacity of human invention. I was constantly in awe throughout the novel, genuinely uncomprehending as to how this could have come out of somebody’s brain. As I said, the plot is fairly simple and unchallenging, but propelled along by such crystalline understanding of the human psyche as to make even the most inconsequential actions riveting. And nothing is inconsequential in Middlemarch - every moment is stitched precisely into place, every word poised at the point of hitting the water, every ripple accounted for.
I feel I could talk about this forever, but I’ll leave you with my favourite passage:
Thank you for listening if you’ve made it this far - now go and read Middlemarch.
You write beautifully about this book! I've had so many misses with the books I've checked out recently, I'll have to see if my library has this one :)