A long time ago a writing teacher suggested George Eliot to me as a writer who could teach me a lot about character. I was intimidated by the 800-page length of her novel Middlemarch, so I avoided it for years. Recently, though, I thought it was time to take the plunge. As someone who thrives on schedules, deadlines, and basically any other form of structure available to me, I've found it very worthwhile to set page goals for myself each day, especially with long books. I turn the corner down on the page I intend to read to on a certain day, and this really helps me make progress because I have a finish line. Then I also record what I read each day, which serves absolutely no purpose other than to pat myself on the back. But it works, so I keep doing it!
Using this system, I managed not only to finish Middlemarch but to finish it in 25 days. With long books, it's really necessary to push through and finish them, because otherwise you lose a lot of your momentum and are unlikely to finish at all. So I'm pleased to have finished it, if only because it was a daunting task but turned out to be a very satisfying one.
Middlemarch is the name of a typical English country village in the 1830s. The novel deals with the typical class struggles that always existed in those villages, as seen through the eyes of an enormous number of major characters. One of Eliot's achievements is the way she balances her characters, giving each of them equal time to deal with the consequences of their choices, immersing the reader in each of their stories to the point of forgetting what anyone else is up to, and tying the story lines together masterfully. Perhaps the most interesting part of Eliot's plotting is the way she sets up the marriages of the characters Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate. These are the two we see most often, and both of them marry people they thought were perfect for them, only to be unpleasantly surprised as time goes on. This is certainly not what you see in Austen's work, which most often presents a couple at the beginning who will face numerous obstacles but ultimately live happily ever after. It was far more interesting to read about couples that seemed to start out okay but then found they weren't up to the task of being married to each other anymore. At no point did I feel any sort of ending was a foregone conclusion, and that kept me turning the pages.
Even the class conflicts and political agenda-pushing I find so boring and tiring in work from this era felt fresh in Eliot's hands, because she used them to move the story forward and bring out her characters. It was especially interesting to see how she portrayed men and women. "George" is obviously a pseudonym, and people of her time assumed she was a man. So seeing how she depicted both male and female characters as a woman contemporary readers thought was a man was great as well. And she is brilliantly poetic in her descriptions, never overdoing it but always knowing just when to linger a little longer on the setting. A sampling: "Dorothea had now been five weeks in Rome, and in the kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go hand in hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would presently survive in chillier loneliness, she had driven about at first with Mr. Casaubon, but of late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced courier." Wow.
Read this book. Give yourself deadlines so you don't take too long. It's worth it.
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