I finished this book a little less than a week ago. It was a doozy. It's my second George Eliot book and I didn't like it as much as Silas Marner. I liked Middlemarch ok. George Eliot's writing is not quite like the other Victorian writers. It has it's similarities, but there's something about it that makes it less smooth for some reason. The words seem to flow naturally off the quill pens of most other Victorian writers. Her writing is good, and I enjoy it for the most part, but it's just more difficult to read. There are several quotes on Middlemarch from others at the end of the book and Anthony Trollope (another Victorian writer) says quite well what I think is pretty accurate: "I doubt whether any young person can read with pleasure either Felix Holt, Middlemarch, or Daniel Deronda. I know that they are very difficult to many that are not young.... It is, I think, the defect of George Eliot that she struggles too hard to do work that shall be excellent. She lacks ease." Those last three words are perfect. She lacks ease. But she is pretty genius and I still appreciate her writing.
As for the book, the story definitely had moments that were quite interesting, but also had some lengthy dull moments. The last 150-200 pages of this near-800 page novel were the best part of the book. It reminds me of eating barbecue ribs. A lot of work to get to the meat on the bone. It's a lot of work to get to the meat of the story, but by the end of the meal I was sufficiently satisfied and would eat another meal of ribs (i.e. read another Eliot novel) in the future.
Because I feel bad for being somewhat critical of her writing, I will share several quotes that I like to make up for it:
"I can at least offer you...the faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find records such as might justly cause you either bitterness or shame."
"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, 'Oh nothing!' Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts - not to hurt others."
"[T]he mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it."
"I cannot regard wealth as a blessing to those who use it simply as a harvest for this world."
"There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet."
"The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same."
"[V]ery little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings."
"There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism."
"Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."
"[A] man could choose not only his wife but his wife's husband!"
"[G]oodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy."
"I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them."
"Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbors' lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness."
"I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands."
"[B]y desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil - widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."
"[T]he soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof."
"Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self."
"[I]t is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness - calling there denial knowledge."
"Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her - that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side."
"[O]ppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the casts of ignorance."
"A man conscious of enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping."
"[T]he little waves make the large ones and are of the same pattern."
"[W]isdom is not his strong point, but rather affection and sincerity. However, wisdom lies more in those two qualities than people are apt to imagine."
"Lydgate was in debt; and he could not succeed in keeping out of his mind for long together that he was every day getting deeper into that swamp, which tempts men towards it with such a pretty covering of flowers and verdure. It is wonderful how soon a man gets up to his chin there - in a condition in which, in spite of himself, he is forced to think chiefly of release, though he had a scheme of the universe in his soul."
"What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult to each other?"
"'[C]haracter is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.' 'Then it may be rescued and healed'"
"[T]he growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
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