A novel for grownups

It took me more than 50 years to finish Middlemarch.

George Eliot

I started George Eliot's novel as a college sophomore when it was assigned for a course in Victorian literature. Each week we had to read a different novel, and Victorian novels tend to be monsters. I got through most of them, and some, like Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Scott’s The Heart Of Midlothian, I greatly enjoyed. Middlemarch, however, gave me problems, and I gave up before I got very far into it.

Even 54 years later I nearly surrendered at about the same point in the book, that point where characters and plotlines multiply to the point where none of it makes sense. Fortunately, this time I was listening in my car to a reading of the novel by Nadia May, so even when I lost interest, May kept going. Eventually the various threads came together and the story became interesting.

Virginia Woolf once called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” and perhaps she was right. If, on the surface, it is the story of how the saintly Dorothea Brooke and other young residents of Middlemarch fight through trials to find love, it is also a novel, loaded with literary and historical references, about economic challenges in 19th century England, inheritance (always a popular topic in Victorian literature), morality, social progress and, as the subtitle suggests, provincial life. If it seems like a complex novel, that’s because it is.

I wasn’t ready for Middlemarch as a college sophomore, though perhaps I could have gotten through it if I had had Nadia May to read it to me.