Middlemarch by George Eliot

*contains spoilers*

I shall start this blog as I mean to go on: I think this book is awesome. And I am in good company – Virginia Woolf once remarked that ‘Middlemarch’ is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. This is true: George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) has a way of writing that assumes the reader is as clever as she, and each word is imbued with an experience and an understanding of the truth of things – we feel assured that we are in the hands of a master. Only recently I have been inwardly debating the power of the signifier and the effect of the signified (thank you, Ferdinand de Saussure), and Eliot, with barely a sideward glance during the consideration of a character’s knowledge of surrounding events, relates her viewpoint on this matter as a freebee; “Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable…”

The place, Middlemarch, is itself a boundary that is always crossed by its inhabitants and outsiders, local or no – from penury to safety, from maidenhood to marriage, from innocence to experience – but often nothing is initially learned from these endless crossings for the characters at play. This is Eliot’s mastery; the Middlemarch microcosm represents the true nature of human experience much more than any of Eliot’s female contemporaries managed to conjure amongst all their neatly-tied-up happy endings. I hate to speak in this gender-relative way, but when male critics of the time stressed that a book such as this should be the work of no woman, I feel that I have to actively vindicate Eliot’s genius in my own, paltry, worthless little way. According to many respectable contemporary critics, Eliot was the smartest living writer at the time of this novel’s publication, and it was right that she should have felt confident enough to propagate such talent through such an equally profound vehicle as this text.

Often, however, Eliot also explores our own uncertainties explicitly in the run of her narrative – particularly as she contemplates the novel’s core, Dorothea Casaubon (nee Brooke); “One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea – but why always Dorothea?” This is less of a rhetorical than it looks, and comes across at the time of reading as though we’re genuinely expected to answer. Again, Eliot believes that the reader can and should be able answer, and in doing so she lifts us all up to her level making us feel just that bit more special. I genuinely finished this novel feeling like I had a better insight into – what, life? I at least felt like I understood a little better what it is to be good – and bad; “Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such a killing is no murder.” I’m ashamed to say that I have felt this perverted sense of shameful joy, even against those closest to me, and I knew then (and know still) that such lowly conduct must be averted. But literature in general is a very effective means of constantly reminding us of how good and bad we can be, and Eliot makes this painfully apparent in the fractured relationships and the barren coldness of certain matters of social rejection. The novel’s virtuous core, Dorothea, transcends but does not completely avoid these burdens – but then who can?

The lingering effects of this novel on me, I am sure, will last my lifetime. It’s a book that not only asks you about the nature of art, as all great art does (reflexively or no), but the nature of being: of money, marriage, brotherhood, sisterhood, parenthood, politics, vocation, location, health… What kind of human do we want to be to other humans inside and outside our social web? The Middlemarch community is awash with the good, but is swamped in the bad. There are bankers with clergymen pasts who are rotting on the memories of their own sins, there are poverty-stricken blackmailers intent on bringing justice through misdeed – but the echoing trill of this masterpiece is the love that lingers through Dorothea’s social and moral humanity; “I cannot bear to think that any one should die and leave no love behind.” Amen.