"Middlemarch" Contains the World

I recently re-read George Eliot’s masterpiece, the 1874 novel “Middlemarch.” I have read it several times over the years; it is for me a great source of wisdom, insight, and pleasure. It holds the whole world in it, as embodied in an English provincial town called Middlemarch. This town contains all the characters you can imagine, all the people you meet in your everyday life. There are the idealists, the realists, the dreamers, the moralists, the hypocrites, the confused, the pragmatic, the yearners, the creators, the disappointed, the disillusioned, the good, the evil, the scared, the complacent, the satisfied, the perpetually unsatisfied, and more. They are at every stage in life: children, young people, students, workers, married, parents, middle-aged, old, dying. In other words, the novel leads us to look deeply into the human condition. Despite my list above, very few of the characters are one-dimensional; Eliot’s characters are richly complex. She sets them into motion, watches them grow and learn or stagnate, find or not find their ways in life, succeed or fail, and interact or avoid interaction with each other. You might say any novel does all this, but I reply that the town, and by extension the world, that Eliot creates is both universal and unique. We ache for the wrenching choices some characters make, and for the sad consequences of some of their choices. We identify with the lovers, and we identify with those who have lost love. We are in suspense about how certain matters will turn out: matters of the heart, matters of business, and matters of the soul. Some have called Eliot’s work dry, but they are so wrong. Yes, the prose is precise and intellectual, and the tone is sometimes philosophical, but the novel represents all the life forces; it is full of passion, love, fear, hatred, grief, and redemption. Every time I read this novel, I learn more from it, and appreciate it in new ways. (I have often said that to read a great novel at different stages of one’s life is to understand it in a new way each time, because we bring our own experiences to each reading.) If I were limited to a small armload of books for the rest of my life, “Middlemarch” would be in that armload.