Middlemarch

  Middlemarch

HappyHomemaker of Oregon, 5/4/2011

Wow. I just finished this book, and what a ride it was.

Dorthea, the idealist, sees only what she wants to see in the old scholar who asks for her hand.
Dr. Lydate, with dreams of medical greatness, wants a wife for the sole purpose of having a pretty ornament to welcome him home at night.
Fred Vincy, a lazy, aimless young man desires above all the approval of his childhood friend.

Middlemarch is a story of four marriages, how they begin, and how their beginning affects how they turn out.
There were times I was tempted to give up, because George Eliot and I have different opinions on what random details are important in a book. HOWEVER, she does an AMAZING job of making you both love and hate her characters. I'm used to having the freedom to either despise or completely like a character, but Eliot doesn't give you this freedom. There's no one who does so much wrong who she doesn't also give you reason to pity, sympathize with, and sometimes even LIKE. This was irritating at times, because it's just so much easier to write off a character as a bad person. But that's not what life is really like, is it? I saw a few of my own temptations in many of the characters' flaws, especially in the one character I have yet to forgive.
All in all, I'd say this insight into human strengths and flaws was worth reading all 838 pages.

It should be noted that Eliot doesn't not seem to have a Biblical worldview. There is much of a Romantic worldview in it. Just so you know.