In Middlemarch, Miss (Dorothea)
Brooke, Miss (Rosamond) Vincy, and Miss (Mary) Garth all married against the
advice of the patriarchs and most everyone else. Though their marriages were
difficult, they persevered and followed their own paths to a happy life. Set about two decades after Jane Austen’s books,
this opus (800 pages) of village life expands on Austen’s themes and scope.
Read Austen first. If you love Austen, this is the next step.
The women
all have strong (and sometimes misguided) opinions.
“Surely,”
said Dorothea, “it is better to spend money in finding out how men can make the
most of the land which supports them, than in keeping dogs and horses only to
gallop over it.”
With small
changes this could be repeated in the 21st century.
“If anybody
was to marry me flattering himself, I should wear the [hideous mourning
clothes] two years for him, he’d be deceived by his own vanity, that’s all.”
“Oh, dear,
because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding anyone else so
well, and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.”
On the
subject of marriage, the author makes two strong points:
1) Never expect the marriage to be an
improvement over the courtship.
2) Marriage is work, but with love and perseverance
it can bring happiness.
The author
discusses privilege the same as someone might do today.
“When a
youthful nobleman steals jewelry we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with
a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of
correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips.”
Another
observation appropriate to the current day:
“But
oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at commend, which never
need stop short at the boundary of knowledge but can draw forever on the vasts
of ignorance.”
“For the
egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather,
the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.”
The scope of
Middlemarch includes UK politics of the 19th-century Reform Bills,
the risks of debt, gambling as a disease, the folly of class, and the history
of medicine.
Remember the
plot device where a play script calls for one actor to kill another actor, but
the second actor really dies? George Eliot used that plot device in 1871.
George Eliot
throws out many good one-liners. She would have been great on Twitter.
“Among all forms
of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”
“I think any
hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really
doing it.”
A novel of strong
women in the nineteen century for Austen readers who want more, much more.
