Middlemarch

⚖The case for it

"Best. Goddamned. Book. Ever." Reviews of this novel keep abandoning punctuation norms, because something about eight hundred pages of provincial life turns careful readers evangelical. The famous verdict calls it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," and the growing up is the subject: two mismatched marriages run in parallel like a controlled experiment in how people misread themselves. Eliot's narrator is the best company in Victorian fiction, dry, precise, forever puncturing self-regard, and her supposed villains, Rosamond, Bulstrode, earn real sympathy by the late chapters. "Oh, the slow burn of genius," one reader sighs; "a novel of intense, dedicated craftsmanship," says another, and the closing tribute to quiet, unrecorded lives pays the whole structure off.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

"Dorothea is an insufferable, stuck-up know-it-all and I hate her." So runs one reader's verdict on the moral center, and even an eminent admirer of the book conceded she can strike a modern reader as "a blue-stocking bore." The logistics wear people down before the philosophy does: one reader "confused a lot of the characters because everyone's name begins with F," and the middle is a dry flat of introductions and essayistic asides indistinguishable from plot. Two hundred pages of marriage-prospect arithmetic pass before anything resembling an event. "Totally unnatural, asexual characters," complains another; nobody in the county appears to have a body. And underneath it all, the simplest objection: "I am sick of books being too long." The wit is real. The wait is unconscionable.

— the honest librarian

18h

honest hours

26

sittings