Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life by George Eliot is one of those classics of English Literature that show up on most "you must read these novels before you die" lists. Published in installments in 1871-72, it was historical fiction even in its own day. The story is set fifty years earlier during what was apparently a time leading up to great changes in English political life.
Full disclosure: I started reading this novel last summer on a very long daytime flight to London. It seemed like a good idea at the time. On my previous trip to London I had read an Anthony Trollope novel and enjoyed it. But this time I found Eliot a bit of a slog and I got about 300 pages in when circumstances outside my control made me stop. I wasn't enjoying it enough to pick it up again later. But then I saw there was to be on-line read-along on BlueSky and thought it would be a good way to finish it. So I read the first 300 pages twice, once last year and then again last month.
The novel follows the stories of a multitude of characters living in and around the fictional town of Middlemarch. However, at its center are two characters: Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate. Theirs are essentially stories of self-deception and coming to terms with reality. They each enter into marriage (not with each other) believing that the person they are marrying is different than they actually are, with unhappy results. I am told that Eliot was the first novelist to take the story of marriage past the wedding day . I don't know if that's true but it is certainly what she does in this novel. (And she certainly wasn't the first story teller to do it as the play Medea takes the mythological story past the fairy tale wedding to tragic results.)
In addition to these four characters there is the story of Fred Vincy, who is in love with a local girl named Mary Garth. There is also a small plot involving the local banker, Mr. Bulstrode. Along the way we meet many other folk including the entire Vincy family and the entire Garth family as well as the local vicar and a variety of medical men. Eliot intertwines all of the stories but she always comes back to the main stories involving Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, but especially Dorothea.
While I know that this is a novel that is loved by many people, I have to honestly say it was not for me. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why it didn't work for me and I think it has to do almost completely with how I take in novels that I enjoy.
First, let me say that I think Eliot's prose is sublime. She created a narrator character that leads us through the stories and comments on the other characters and forces the reader to consider things about the other characters that they may not have otherwise taken into account. Sometimes the narrator mocks the other characters; sometimes the narrator has empathy for characters who don't seem to deserve empathy (and Eliot's use of the adjective "poor" is used both ways). Sometimes the narrator simply opines upon the world the characters live in. The narrator is often very funny. The voice of the narrator is clear and distinct and is a joy to read.
Those who have read my blog for a long time will recall that when I read novels I don't see a "movie in my mind". The visual images I see are indistinct. If there is a forest, I have a general impression of trees but could not give you any specifics. I generally don't play the movie-casting game with novels because I never see the characters clearly enough to care what actors look like. But in novels that work for me, I can specifically "hear" each character's voice, including any narrator.
I have never heard a narrator's voice as clearly as I did with this novel. The voice of Eliot's narrator is so clear to me that I think of it as a character in the novel separate and apart from Eliot herself. But the narrator, in addition to having a distinct point of view and commenting upon the action, is also omniscient and tells us what the other characters are thinking.
And therein, I think, lay the problem for me. I don't have a problem with third person omniscient, in fact I like third person more than first person almost all of the time. But I consistently felt with this novel that I could not clearly "hear" the main characters. They didn't seem to have their own voices. It was like I was hearing them, especially Dorothea, from a great distance where I could occasionally directly hear what they said but more often it was the narrator telling me what they said and what they thought. I felt as if all of Dorothea's thoughts were filtered through the viewpoint of the narrator and the narrator was such a distinct character for me and was so opinionated that it was as if a separate opinionated person was telling me what Dorothea was thinking rather than me feeling that I was eavesdropping on Dorothea's thoughts. And I think that meant that Dorothea was never "real" to me. I felt the same way, but to a lesser extent, with Lydgate . To a lesser extent because Eliot gave Lydgate dialog more often than Dorothea. I could judge Lydgate a little more on his actions and words rather than solely on the perception of the narrator. But Dorothea spends a lot of time with interior thoughts; she spends a lot of time holding her tongue, especially in the middle of the novel, because she's trying to be "good".
I would say that, of all the characters, I never heard Dorothea's voice clearly at all - which was a big problem for me because so much time is spent on Dorothea. I grew tired of the narrator telling me about Dorothea - I never had to figure anything out about Dorothea because the narrator always told me what I was supposed to know about Dorothea at any given time. I never related to Dorothea possibly because she is so young and naive and I am no longer young and was never naive. I never felt like I saw life directly through Dorothea's eyes, only as mediated through the narrator's eyes. I found Dorothea tiresome and I found the parts of the novel that dealt with Dorothea boring and usually I couldn't wait until they were finished and we could move on to other characters. It's a real problem for a reader when they are bored by the plot concerning the main character. I remember being on the plane to London and wondering how Eliot was going to sustain an 800+ page novel about such an uninteresting character and being so relieved when the attention shifted to Lydgate, who ended up being only mildly more interesting but was surrounded by other characters that I found interesting. My re-read of the first 300 pages didn't change my mind.
Interestingly, I did not have that problem with the minor characters. They seemed very real to me and I could hear their voices clearly. I think this was because the narrator spent less time telling me about these characters and more time describing what they did and what they said. Their character was revealed by a combination of their actions, their words and the narrator's commentary. The best part of the novel for me was the story of Mr. Bulstrode which ended up being gripping. But, alas, it is only a very small part of the novel.
So rather than have empathy (something the narrator kept preaching) for the main characters, I mostly thought they got what they deserved based simply on the setup of the story. When you marry someone under a delusion, you are going to be disappointed. Your life is going to be unhappy. That's just the way it is. And much of modern literature is about this, which may have also been part of the problem for me.
I look at it as the Citizen Kane problem. Citizen Kane was a groundbreaking film in which Orson Welles used innovative cinematography techniques. But those techniques have been copied so many times that we, the viewers, are used to seeing them. So Citizen Kane viewed outside of a film class may seem dated to the viewer. Perhaps in a seminar on Victorian literature, reading my way up to Middlemarch, I would appreciate it more as a groundbreaking novel. But I'm long past the days of seminars.
So, in the end, it just wasn't for me. It never engaged me and I didn't greatly care what happened to the characters. But I am not sorry I read it because I very much did enjoy Eliot's use of language when observing life through the character of the narrator.
Who might like this novel? If you are looking to be transported to another time and place, this isn't for you. Eliot doesn't spend much time on world-building so "setting" is not a big part of this novel. Middlemarch is set in a fictional town and fictional county in England that could have been anywhere in the midlands. If you are someone who wants a page turner, this probably isn't for you either. In terms of story, there is a plot but it meanders over the 800 plus pages. It seems to me that most people who enjoy Middlemarch relate to the brilliant writing and identify in some way with the main characters and don't need to hear their voices directly as I do. I also think they like the psychology of the novel - Eliot's take on life in general as exemplified by the characters and (probably mostly) by the narrator's commentary. Others in the read-along were consistently raving about how Eliot captured the essence of life in perfect language (and she did, in the narrator's voice using the characters, in my opinion, mostly as examples.)
Be warned that if you aren't engaged in the first few hundred pages your reaction probably won't change much. Mine didn't. But, in fairness, know that for many people this is their favorite novel of all time.
