Just Finished Reading Middlemarch by George Eliot

George Eliot was the pen name for Mary Anne Evans, an English writer who felt the need to make it seem as if a man wrote her stories in order for that male-dominated nineteenth-century literary society to take them seriously.  I just finished reading her novel Middlemarch, which I encountered a little while ago while browsing through my local Books-a-Million...the paperback edition has a whopping 1,436 pages!  So yes, this was an epic of a book...just finishing it gave me a feeling of accomplishment.  The story, set in the imaginary English town of Middlemarch and the outlying rural areas, centers around the families Vincy, Brooke, and Garth...along with the idealistic young physician Tertius Lydgate and the sanctimonious and parsimonious banker Nicholas Bulstrode.  While the novel, set around 1830, treats various issues like class distinctions, land reform, religion's role in society, and making the responsible practice of medicine more science-based, the intertwining stories of three couples drive the narrative.  Dorothea Brooke is a "higher class" young woman who eschews her privileged position to marry a much older man, Edward Casaubon, a frustrated Biblical scholar whose writings are already considered obsolete before they are even submitted and published...he curtly rebuffs her attempts to assist him and the marriage slides from there.  Casaubon's younger cousin Will Latislaw develops an impossible, painful love for Dorothea...sounds like a conflict brewing here. Doctor Lydgate finds and marries Rosamond Vincy, pretty, immature, and self-absorbed...each of the two eventually find their previously held adoration of the other falling into disillusionment.  And then there is Rosamond's brother Fred, a financially irresponsible young man with a bad habit of owing other people money...will he be able to win the heart of his childhood sweetheart Mary Garth?  And then there's something fishy going on with Bulstrode: what's he trying to hide, anyway?

I only scratched the surface of some of the many characters and subplots in Middlemarch.  The author did a masterful job of presenting the perspectives of the major participants and showed them to have a depth and complexity that reflected how people really are: a mixture of good and bad, strong and weak...I think that was my favorite thing about it, along with how often people make the wrong assumptions about others' motivations.  It was also interesting to see how people can fall under faulty reasoning and make momentous, often disastrous, decisions that effect them for years and even a lifetime.  Middlemarch is considered to be a masterpiece in English fictional literature: I liked it, but have to admit that it probably would have carried more meaning to me had I been an Englishman reading it back in 1871 when it was first published...