Starvard.Starvard.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
A whole small town, followed life by life: a brilliant young woman who marries the wrong man, a doctor who wants to change medicine, people chasing money, status, love, and meaning, and mostly getting a mix of all four. It is long, wise, and famous for understanding exactly why good people make bad choices.
Dorothea Brooke, clever and hungry for a meaningful life, marries the elderly scholar Casaubon, certain she will share his great work. On their honeymoon in Rome she finds him jealous, petty, and terrified of her mind. Across the same small town, Dr. Lydgate arrives dreaming of medical reform and marries pretty Rosamond, whose spending quietly eats his future. Every life in Middlemarch bumps into every other, like threads in one web.
Eliot's big idea is that ordinary people deserve the attention usually saved for heroes, and that lives are shaped less by dramatic villains than by webs of small choices, debts, gossip, and timing. Good people fail here for believable reasons, and even Casaubon gets a paragraph of sympathy.
Many readers call it the greatest English novel because nobody in it is wasted. Watch the narrator, who can enter any heart in town and find the human reason inside, and notice how quietly the biggest disasters arrive.
In the little town of Middlemarch, everybody's life touches everybody else's. George Eliot follows the idealistic Dorothea Brooke, the ambitious young doctor Lydgate, and a whole town of schemers, dreamers, and gossips through love, debt, and disappointment. It is often called the greatest novel in English, and the case is strong: nobody has ever seen ordinary people more clearly.
The first chapter
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 Saint 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? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than anyone would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.
To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes,
in this nineteenth year of our blessed union.
Source: Standard Ebooks. Published 1871-72. Author died 1880. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp