Middlemarch

One of the things I set out to do at the beginning of the year was to read more and cut a wider swath through some of the classic books which I missed out on and have been meaning to read for many years. While I am delighted to have found modern gems like Annie Dillard and David Sedaris, the wonderful characters of George Eliot’s Middlemarch have, in one 800 plus paged volume wildly surpassed my expectations for the year.

Dorothea Brookes stands out amongst the many heroines of the books I’ve read over the years as a perfectly complex and endearing character. Middlemarch centers around three main characters: Dorothea Brookes - an idealistic wealthy young woman who marries a boring and elderly scholar for all the wrong reasons, Dr. Tertius Lydgate - a newcomer to Middlemarch with innovative modern ideas about medicine and an earnest desire to do good but who makes an unfortunate marriage which is nearly the ruin of him, and Nicholas Bulstrode a successful landowner and pompously pious town banker with a dark secret.

Virginia Woolf is supposed to have said of Middlemarch that it is one of the few English novels written for grown up people. With love, politics, evil doing and scandal, class struggles, characters whom you root for and those you loathe filling the pages of Middlemarch, I can see her point. As study in character development, George Eliot has given every aspiring writer a master class. More importantly though, for all readers, she has left us with a classic to be treasured.