Middlemarch

Middlemarch is a gigantic, cat-crushing, end of the old guard and into the industrial revolution romance filled with incredible three-dimensional characters and a sprawling identity of a town, its politics, money, romances, and lives. Eliot’s book is incredibly precise - which in my opinion is somewhat long winded at times - but authentic to the bone.I finally decided to read the novel after two little coincidences finally led me to its door. First, I read Mead’s My Life In Middlemarch over the summer and felt like it was a beautiful musing on a general love of reading in addition to Eliot’s body of work. I was at a wedding halfway through the book, and one of the events was at an avid reader’s house where he offered the opportunity to climb through a mountain of books he was going to donate. I found some real gems, and as luck would have it, a copy of Middlemarch. Shortly after Mead’s book was finished, I began Eliot’s. My prior experience with the author is sparse and lacks cohesion, and there is little I remember from my undergraduate and secondary school reading (even though I know I had read her work), but Silas Marner was always the clear favorite prior to this undertaking.Middlemarch is a beautiful novel, and perhaps the most notable elements of it is the reality with which the characters, their concerns, and the overall atmosphere of life in this English country town is so vibrant and true. The characters are sublime in their humanness, and the lack of gimmick and easily reliable tropes of novels of the era is as refreshing as it is accurate to real life. The novel is a gorgeous portrayal of the transitional period in world history in many ways - when alchemy gave way to the scientific method, when medicine was treatment and not drugs, when politics was a matter of voting and public opinion and not inheritance, when women became emancipated from the constraints of love and marriage, when industry and new thought replaced old money and leisurely lives of waste, and when religion began to slip away into an enlightened skepticism. In many ways, the book is about a community in transition, growing through these major world changes along with understanding the impact on the minds and existence of so many different types of people.In the book there are many characters, and having a little community tree with their relationships at hand might be more helpful than trying to keep them all straight as I did (I found myself confused with Ladislaw and Lydgate at times, and usually was reminded once they opened their mouth which they were). Each character’s voice and presence is brilliantly crafted, however, and the attention Eliot paid to ensuring that education, culture, and origins was apparent in their dialogue and dialects. I think the volume of characters speaks to the realism that she was intending in the novel - and much like the in-between chapters in Mariner - she is attempting to show a wholeness to reality in the book and capture the essence of it as realistically as possible. This is not as sprawling as Dr. Zhivago with hundreds of characters, many of whom are not important, but rather many characters who are all important, none more important than another.This shouldn’t matter to modern audiences - reality in great literary writing of our time. But perhaps what makes this so unusual is the fact that this is an incredibly contemporary novel of today that was written in the Victorian era. A new mold was broken with Middlemarch - one that recognized that there need not be a direct arc or a single character or a plot trope or archetype that singly arches over the entirety of a novel. This is a period of time in the real lives of incredibly real fictitious characters - a reality that is painstakingly and beautifully constructed in the fibers of Eliots Victorian community. In a commercial sense, the book would be very unsatisfying to a commercial audience, but this is a portrait of marriage, progress, and money as the world changes around the characters, and it is a history that was likely to have been lost in many of the period’s literary and journalistic sources. She captures the community with the vision that it was an important time - and people were unsure whether the past dictated where this new world was headed. If there is any undercurrent in the novel, perhaps it is the opening and closing chapters that recognize a striking relationship to many of the people in the novel. As it winds down to its simplest relationships, so are we reminded of those the novel opened with, and as we opened the undertaking with a breath in with simplicity and a social care-free attitude toward some beautifully ignorant and simple characters, so we exhale at the end in the complexity of those who we thought so simple and free of burden as their eyes have been opened and souls chained down in the social meaning of the choices they have made.I enjoyed Middlemarch a great deal, although I may not ever pick it up to read in its entirety again. It is definitely an intellectual commitment that requires a great deal of stamina and patience to get through. For me, it took me a little over one month to complete (although I was reading some other material at the same time). I have very few complaints about the book - and perhaps my only consistent gripe might be the inconsistent chapter opening excerpts that seem to come from sources liberal in both time and geography. To me, it only rarely added to the work and did not seem to have a linear connection among them (even though they did to the text). I also felt a little frustrated at times that Eliot went from gorgeous prose in some of the longer portions of exposition to glossing over major details in others, and there was inconsistency with that as well. Besides that, I was entranced with the wit, accuracy, and attention paid to making the most visionary and realistic novel - in a time and place where such a novel was rarely written and had never existed prior.This edition had some illustrations, and the formatting was clean and easy to read on my Kindle Paperwhite.

George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ is an epic tale about people, mostly middle and upper class, set in rural England during the 1800’s. The characters are complicated and evolving and, like the town, fictitious.Eliot, tells the story from many points of view, allowing her to get inside many heads. In doing so, she proves herself to be not only a wonderful storyteller, but a gifted psychologist with an understanding of both sexes.The main character, Dorothea, is outspoken, strong-willed and trusting, but on a path she has set to becoming molded and compliant. She marries an older man of the church, a supposed great scholar, a man of superior intellect she looks up to, but who reveals himself to be controlling. His pomposity camouflages self-doubt and insecurity. Through Eliot’s insightful character studies, we feel for these characters, sympathizing with their imperfections; Casaubon a jealous old fraud, helpless and insecure; she, young, strong, faithful, more clever than he. Eliot brings us the inner workings of Casaubon’s mind and his torments, not only that he might not finish his life’s written work, but maybe after his death, Dorothea might marry the man he despises, a man who is young, dynamic and good looking. He has observed a growing attraction between them, and this for him is intolerable. While Casaubon smolders, he thinks that even after premature death, if it should occur, he will find a way of controlling her, and punishing her.‘There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as he could have obtained for a wife; but the young lady turned out to be something more troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general…Poor Mr. Casaubon! This suffering was the harder to bear because it seemed like a betrayal: the young creature who had worshipped him with perfect trust had quickly turned into the critical wife; a remark from her which he had not in any way anticipated was an assertion of conscious superiority; her gentle answers had an irritating cautiousness in them; and when she acquiesced it was a self-approved effort of forbearance.’Casaubon ponders his own mortality:‘To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons.’Characters develop beautifully – their arcs moving throughout the book. I especially like the beautiful Rosemond and Dr. Tersia Lydgate, a good-looking, young surgeon, a couple that fall blindly in love. What could possibly go wrong? Their love will see them through won’t it! But then again character flaws, come into play causing readers to become more curious and invested.‘Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing…But Rosamond had registered every look and word, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a preconceived romance—incidents which gather value from the foreseen development … If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.’Other figures are complicated and conflicted too, adding to the richness and suspense. This is not chick lit. It’s the work of genius. The plot is intricate, weaving, twisting and turning in unexpected directions. How could life in rural, Victorian England be so complicated! But like Forster’s ‘Howards End’, Austin’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, life can be a challenge! And no, it’s not fair.The actions of the characters revolve around love mostly, as well as ambition, deceit, greed, possessiveness, selfishness, fall from grace, and of course, money and death. Eliot peels back their skins and lays her characters bare, showing their inner weaknesses, their hopes and desires. At times, she pops in and talks to us directly, which I found antiquated, but nice.There are gems throughout Eliot’s writing, providing insight and worldly knowledge about life—a treat for authors. I often found myself thinking of situations in these modern times and saw similarities. Not much has changed and probably never will—given the nature of man.Through her descriptive prose, one gets the feel of the country, the rural, provincial way of life, life on the land and horses, cattle and corn. One can vividly imagine, the wrath and dissatisfaction among the locals at the coming of the railways, as land was commandeered all over the countryside for construction.Reading this, for me, was time well spent.

A minha avaliação não é para a edição do livro, adoro a Penguin. O fato é que livro chegou sem nenhuma embalagem plástica, solto na caixa, com uma orelha na capa e com algumas sujidades.O livro parece ser novo, a sujeira e a orelha na capa devem refletir a falta de cuidado na hora da embalagem e da entrega.

A edição é linda! Capa maravilhosa, chegou em perfeito estado e bem embalado. Folhas amareladas e me parecem ser daquelas q não oxidam. Tamanho de fonte confortável, o que é bem importante pq o livro é longo. Quanto ao conteúdo, não tenho como fazer resenha pois ainda não terminei de ler.

A young woman is going to have a good life.It's the kind of story that makes you want to read more about how this woman lives her life.

Cheio de erros , os quais atrapalham o sentido do texto. Palavras trocadas. Não vale a pena. Tem edições melhores disponíveis na Amazon, inclusive de graça se for formato Kindle, considerando que é uma obra de domínio público.

Make no mistake, Middlemarch is a book I found, at times quite challenging. It is a book written for a different age and a different mode of reading. It is a book written for people with more time on their hands, and fewer demands on that time. It is a book originally published in eight instalments over the course of a year, not necessarily devoured in less than an eighth of that time on a Kindle. George Elliot often writes in long, elliptical sentences whose meaning only becomes clear the second time through. In short, it is a book which takes a heck of a lot of reading.And yet, and yet.I think something else in my personal top ten favourite novels is going to have to give way to Middlemarch. It is an absolutely glorious novel which repays the dedication it demands of the reader with a rich, profound, deeply moving, tale of life in a provincial English town in the pre-Victorian era.There are many intermingled plot strands, but the basic structure of Middlemarch is built around four sub-plots. Primary amongst these is that of the young, fervently religious Dorothea Brooke and, initially her choice of husband between the older, austere clergyman, Casaubon, and the rich, younger but more trivial Sir James Cheetham. Lydgate is an ambitious young doctor with dreams of undertaking medical research alongside establishing a rational, scientific practice. Fred Vincy is a feckless young man, devoted to his sensible, grounded childhood sweetheart, Mary. The spider at the centre of the Middlemarch web is Bulstrode, a wealthy businessman with an unknown past who controls much of the financial life of the town.The true glory of Middlemarch is that it was written in the 1860s, but the characters are instantly recognisable and utterly credible and its themes are incredibly relevant and contemporary. This is a world where the railways are the new technology and the Reform Bill is the great political upheaval, but in describing people’s reactions to them, the author could be talking about HS2 or indeed 5G and any number of current pieces of legislation. This relevance goes further, extending to Twitter - small town gossip might be slower, but the malicious consequences of ill-informed capricious public opinion are identical. It is equally easy to find parallels for fake news and for the prosperity theology of the evangelical US, with a notable self righteous character seeing his wealth as a godly reward.Elliot is a supremely humane writer, her characters are not paragons, they are normal flawed people, jealous, prone to moodiness, not always acting for the best. The perfect illustration of this is Casaubon. His influence on the other characters is not benign, and yet he is ultimately a figure of tragedy rather than villainy. He is a man lacking in emotional intelligence who makes bad decisions on the basis of societal pressure, while at the same time he is realising that his life’s work is turning to dust. Or there is a troubled young married couple who behave dreadfully towards each other, and yet Elliot creates an empathy for and an understanding of them and their motives. And again, Lydgate is pompous arrogant but also one can understand his desire to better the human condition, and feels sympathetic when he is brought low by Gove-ian anti-intellectual, populist attitudes.On an emotional level, Elliot is a writer of extraordinary power. Nothing shows this more than some of the scenes involving Dorothea where, beneath the buttoned up pre Victorian exterior, sexual tension and desire burn incandescently.The final thing to bring out is that Middlemarch is a surprisingly funny book. It is not a comic novel per se, but it is littered with little blink and you miss them phrases where Elliot skewers the motives and pretensions of her characters. A description of Dorothea going out into the town wanting to do good for some unfortunate, bur being frustrated by lack of opportunity is capped by the glorious phrase “nobody’s pig had died”.Having mentioned Dickens, I would say that Middlemarch is up there with the best of his work, and surpasses the majority. Where George Elliot wins out is in her realism and the believability of her characters, there are no cartoonish caricatures here.