I am busy dabbing the edges of my nostrils with Vicks and drinking some honey, turmeric and lemon concoction. I should have been going for a walk in Hawarden with my walking group but have given them a pass on picking up my lurgy by staying at home.
This means that I have an extra day to read a bit more of ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot. In a little over two weeks’, we’re going to Stratford upon Avon to watch a dramatization of the book in two parts. That is unsurprising as the book is over 800 pages long. As in 800 pages of small, densely packed writing; the Victorians didn’t believe in short paragraphs.
I’ve never read the book before. I’ve never read anything by George Eliiot before, and I didn’t know much about her other than that her real name was Mary Ann Evans, that she was a nineteenth century novelist, and that she lived with a man without marrying him.
I didn’t know that she was a Midlands girl like me. She was born in Nuneaton and lived for a time in my hometown of Coventry, where she learnt some of her licentious beliefs around marriage in the ‘Rosehill Circle’. I had no idea that Coventry used to house such radical thinkers. I just knew it as a place that liked to build things out of concrete and the first place in the UK to make it illegal to drink alcohol in the streets.
She wrote under the male pseudonym because she wanted her work to be taken seriously, and not to be typecast. Joanne Rowling had the genderless initials (is there some current irony there?) for her books for the same reason, so not much has changed.
Normally, if there is a deadline, I know I can read something, but this is a brick of a book. I’m two-hundred pages in and I know that twenty-five pages takes me an hour and a half roughly, given that I often have to go back and re-read bits to try and get their gist.
Why am I putting myself through this and not just reading the plot summary on Wikipedia?
Well, every now and then I try and read a heavy book, and there’s nowt so heavy as a Victorian novel. Plus, I am intrigued because I’ve heard this title ‘Middlemarch’ given often as a favourite book by people. So, I felt like I had to have a go.
I’m two hundred pages in. And from about the second or third page, I knew that this was going to be a book that I was going to come back to. I’m reading it ‘fast’, so I know that I’m missing references that I want to pick up in later readings. I know that some of the sentences are long and convoluted by our sound-bite standards, so it takes me a while to understand bits of it, and, honestly, I’m sure I don’t understand all of it yet.
But I am absolutely loving it. It is funny. I was surprised at just how funny and witty it is. All the characters that I’ve been introduced to so far are drawn with all their peculiarities, so nobody is all good or all bad, even Casauban (so far). It’s like a high-end soap opera as there are a raft of characters, but I’m not feeling overwhelmed. Eliot seems to bed them in organically, so that I feel that I’m walking amongst them, despite the fact that this is the era of long skirts, big moustaches and shoddy education for women.
And talking about shoddy education for women, Eliot appears to be one of the exceptions because the breadth and depth of her knowledge is wondrous to encounter in this book. Apparently, she was considered too ugly for marriage, so was sent to school for a time.
I am limiting myself to an hour and a half a day on most days because the book does require concentration with its long words and sentences, and I’ve got other things to do, like prepping for a writing retreat (next week), and trying to rearrange the Premier Inn for Stratford as I booked the wrong dates. I don’t think I’ll finish it in time for the plays but that’s okay. I feel like I’ve got this book for life.
On top of that, a substack page I follow (APS: A Public Space) is doing ‘The Mill On The Floss’ at the end of October so I will have a double helping of Eliot after never tasting any of her work before. APS do slow read-alongs (you read a few pages each day and discuss it in the comments after a daily prompt). I did ‘The Odyssey’ with them and that was brilliant because there were some super-clever people in the discussion group that I learnt a lot from. My contribution to that conversation was referencing Suzanne Vega’s ‘Calypso’ at the pertinent point in the read.
I may do a post on the book when I finish it, or maybe I’ll wait for the second read in a year or two’s time. But either way, I can recommend it right now. I don’t know if her other books are this good but I’m looking forward to finding out.
