189. MIDDLEMARCH

George Eliot 1874

The Book Blurb:

     Middlemarch is a town on the rise. With its old country gentry, middle classes, and tradesmen, it is ever growing and changing with the times, circa 1830. Vast and crowded, rich in irony and suspense, the novel Middlemarch is richer still in psychological insight. One of the best loved works of the nineteenth century, it introduces two of the era's most enduring characters -- Dorothea Brooke, a passionately idealistic woman who traps herself in a loveless marriage, and Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor betrayed by his wife's egoism and his own weakness -- and explores the complex social relationships in a town that moves and breathes with a life of its own.

What Hooked Me:

     I was astounded as to how much this classic, which explores the many facets of marriages in the provincial town of Middlemarch amazingly parallels the different marriages that still exist today: the Rosamonds who seek the prestige of marrying a man like Lydgate to find wealth and inch up higher on their social standing; the Dorotheas who remain trapped in a loveless marriage, married to a man like Mr. Causabon; and the Harriet Bulstrodes who stand by their husbands amidst scandals and ruined reputations. Truly timeless and worth the time you need to invest on reading it's almost thousand pages! I also particularly love the unique foreshadowing of each chapter with fabulous quotes from both the author and other famous writers.

The Quotes:

'Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of St. Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand in hand with her still smaller brother to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?' (Prelude, opening lines)

'We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime, keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us, and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts -- not to hurt others.'(64)

'After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.'(86)

'She is grace itself; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished. That is what a woman ought to be; she ought to produce the effect of exquisite music.'(99)

'Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae in her hand.'(100)

'That basket held small savings from her more portable food, destined for the children of her poor friends among which she trotted on fine mornings, fostering and petting all needy creatures being so spontaneous a delight to her that she regarded it much as if it had been a pleasant vice that she was addicted to. Perhaps she was conscious of being tempted to steal from those who had that she might give to those who had nothing and carried in her conscience the guilt of that repressed desire. One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!'(179-180)

"Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humouring everybody's nonsense till they get despised by the very fools they humour?" said Lydgate ... "The shortest way is to make your value felt so that people must put up with you whether you flatter them or not."(185)

'I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight -- that; in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.'(209)

'Art is an old language with a great many artificial, affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing.'(220)

'Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.'(237)

'It is an uneasy lot at best to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy; to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small, hungry, shivering self -- never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted.'(299)

'Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.'(446)

'Was never true love loved in vain,
For truest love is the highest gain.
No art can make it: it must spring
Where elements are fostering.'(497)

"I still think that the greater part of the world is mistaken about many things. Surely one may be sane and yet think so, since the greater part of the world has often had to come round from its opinion.'(570)

"You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else. You must have pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying there's this and there's that -- if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is, I wouldn't give twopence for him... whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher if he didn't do well what he undertook to do.'(595-596)

'News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar.'(635-636)

'The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outward preparation of the present; it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life; it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.'(653-654)

'In marriage, the certainty, "She will never love me much," is easier to bear than the fear, "I shall love her no more."(693)

'Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until the fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?'(733)

'Ou deeds still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.'(748)

'... an old friend is not always the person whom it is easiest to make a confidant of: there was the barrier of remembered communication under other circumstances -- there was the dislike of being pitied and informed by one who had been long wont to allow her the superiority.'(795)

'Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague, uneasy longings sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.'(801)

'Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth...'(825)

"Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not? How can we live and think that anyone has trouble -- piercing trouble -- and we could help them, and never try?"(844)

'Marriage, which has been bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic -- the gradual conquest of irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.'(883)

a Signet Classics Edition, December 2003
890 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 2011 Victorian Literature Challenge
                                 100+ Reading Challenge