🗣️ The dissociating to great literature will continue until morale improves 🗣️
Me right after I typed the title of this month’s Report
What I read in March:
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-1872)—If there is a novel that better understands people and relationships, and that more beautifully conveys its understanding of those subjects than Middlemarch does, please tell me what it’s called, because I’ve never heard of it.
As suggested above, the best part about Middlemarch is everything about its narrative (content and form). The second best part about Middlemarch is that it is life-changing every time I read it, which is to say that both when I first read Middlemarch 15 years ago1 and when I reread it this month, I emerged from the experience almost in shock from my encounter with genius. This 831-page behemoth is to me what The Way of a Pilgrim (1884/1930) is to Franny Glass, what Toxoplasma gondii is to mice, what the spice melange is to the Dune (1965) universe. Meaning, anyone who talked to me at any point during the three and a half weeks I was recently reading Middlemarch could escape neither from hearing about how Middlemarch related to whatever we were talking about nor from listening to/reading the quotations I had to prove it.
Before you start worrying whether I’ve had a break with reality,2 let me explain why it makes a lot of sense that Middlemarch is so relevant to so many aspects of contemporary life. It’s because 1) in order for Eliot’s novel to be what it is—“a study of provincial life”—the narrative necessarily covers a wide range of people at different stages of life; 2) as a SoCiEtY, we’re still living that provincial life over 150 years later, baby! (if not literally, then spiritually); and 3) Eliot really was so trenchant an observer of the lives of others and the systems that governed those lives3 that her characters/characters’ lives have clear contemporaries in the twenty-first century.
In other words, as Francine Prose better puts it in her introduction to my copy of the book, Middlemarch is “a novel written about a period that had been gone for decades before Eliot brought it back to life on the page, but whose characters are continually having experiences and confronting situations much like the experiences and situations we may find ourselves facing now” (viii).
We’re talking experiences and situations like:
Being a twenty-year-old woman “enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed . . . to have those aspects” (8), which includes running straight into the arms of the first man who appears to take her thoughts seriously
Being a middle-aged man who is so deep in the delusion of the importance of his scholarship that it has taken him decades to begin to admit to himself that a) he might never write his Key to All Mythologies, because b) he might actually be an intellectual fraud,4 and therefore, c) he fr might really have straight up wasted his life
Watching that bright young woman stubbornly pursue that man, who absolutely does not see her as an intellectual peer, and gossiping about it in horror with anyone and everyone
Gossiping, generally
Being the not-middle-aged second cousin of the above-mentioned man and falling in love with the above-mentioned woman after running into her in Italy on her honeymoon
Being a young professional with scientific training and a boundless—because not yet tested—belief in progress and the common sense of learned adults, who moves to a new town for a job
Being the most beautiful young woman in a small town, the daughter of a striving (redundant—Ed.) middle-class merchant and his ambition wife (herself the daughter of an innkeeper), bored with all the local boys and locked in on the goal of marrying the richest and handsomest man she can find
Practicing one of several trades suddenly under threat of extinction from new technologies eagerly adopted by greedy (also redundant—Ed.) capitalists
Getting a little too swept up in the excitement of engagement to the most beautiful woman in town to notice that you’re spending much more on housewares, clothes, and entertaining than you’re making at the job you moved to town for
More things that young people do in their youth because “young people are usually blind to everything but their own wishes, and seldom imagine how much those wishes cost others” (574)
Also things that older people experience later in life, long after they imagine that they have successfully avoided consequences for risky choices made in their youth, when the consequences catch up to them, because an important theme of this novel is that “a man’s character is his fate” (that’s Heraclitus, not Eliot), and “[m]en outlive their loves, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness” (513, THAT’S Eliot)
As well as things that people can experience at any point in time, when a situation or person inspires them to change their lives—”for character too is a process and an unfolding” (149) and “is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable” (734-735), suggesting perhaps that if one can change their character, they can change their fate (?)
Everyone just trying to live in this world, hoping to experience some comfort, happiness, love, and purpose, and having to make some hard decisions along the way as they work toward that goal
There was a point this month as I was reading where I was so high on Eliot’s narrative that I thought “how did I ever say this was one of the top 5 all time greatest novels? WHAT ELSE COULD BE BETTER?” And then I remembered Ulysses (1922), and Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale (1851). Which, now I am thinking, surely those three are at least in a tie for best novel written in English. Anyway, it’s not a competition! But Middlemarch did change my life 15 years ago and also this past month. Changed my life by communicating, in some of the most practically beautiful prose, deep and real truths about what it means to be a human being living in a society (what a concept!!).
Me ever since I finished my reread of Middlemarch
Perhaps you are thinking “wow, this book sounds amazing!” Yeah, it is. Maybe you’re also wondering “when is the Report going to get to the inevitable part where the experience of reading [a certain book] is compared to the experience of reading it [x-many] years ago?” I’m here to tell you, the time is now.
I dug up my 2011 copy of Middlemarch to see whether I had annotated any differently in 2026 and, more broadly, what any comparison of my underlining habits across the years might reveal.
2011 and 2026
I can tell you one thing I learned from this exercise. A line like “[i]f youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new” (547), resonated just as strongly with my 24-year-old self as with my 39-year-old self. But it resonated strongly for different reasons, because 15 years of additional experience that I’ve accumulated between my first and second times reading Middlemarch now inform my perspective. I used to use exclamation points to signify any number of strong reactions to a text.5 I’m sure I added one in the margins of that paragraph in 2011 because I was stunned by the clarity and truth of the insight. I guess in 2026, after having survived enough crises to see that they were not final, I admired the passage enough to mark the most meaningful part and move on.
It really is just like Francine Prose says in her introduction—”Middlemarch perpetually renews itself, taking on new meaning along with the current age, experience, and mood of the reader” (viii). I already can’t wait to read it again :)
What I’m looking forward to reading in April:
Bothayna Al-Essa, tr. Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, The Book Censor’s Library (2019/2024)6
Solvej Balle, tr. Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell, On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV) (2022/2026)7
1 Nearly to the day! A parallel I only discovered when I set about to factcheck the exact year I first read the novel.
2 Whatever that is these days!!
3 Capitalism, I’m talking about capitalism.
4 He one hundred percent is and more. As Eliot’s narrator puts it: “For my part I am very sorry for him. 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 ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted” (280).
5 I still do.
6 Book Club selection for April.
7 BTW shout out to Friend of the Report, Eileen, for hipping me to the Met’s exhibition on Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck. Even though I read Middlemarch this month, I’m still very deeply in my Scandinavian/Nordic “philosophy” era, so I naturally found much to ponder in Schjerfbeck’s work (example—se llama “Silence”—pictured in thumbnail for this post).
