George Eliot

I am a book addict. I go through periods of remission, and then I relapse. This is the problem: if the book is any good at all, I can't stop until I finish. I'm a pretty fast reader, so this usually just means missing dinner or a late night. Sometimes, however, I run into trouble. Most recently this trouble has come in the form of George Eliot, nee Mary Ann Evans. (The picture below is the most flattering one I could find.)


I read Silas Marner a few months ago without any trouble at all. I spent an afternoon reading it and thought it was a very good book--perhaps a little difficult to read at my usual pace, but worth making it through. Not much damage done.

Unfortunately, I started Middlemarch this week. I'm not sure I've ever had a harder time getting into a book (well, maybe David Copperfield), but once I was in I was hooked. It's an amazing book. It's interesting to read a book in which the plot revolves around the character development, rather than vice versa. And Eliot has a way of describing even very faulty people in a sympathetic way that makes it not so painful to realize that you share similar tragic flaws.*

There are two problems, though. First, Victorian English is difficult to read through quickly. Middlemarch was lighter on the colloquial conversations than Silas Marner and less digressive that anything written by Dickens, but it was still a slow read. Second, it's 800 pages long, in small print. These two facts together mean that I lost a full day of work and half a night's sleep. Nevertheless, I recommend the book to anyone who is patient enough to get through 200 pages before being drawn in and who has a good couple of days to spare reading (and then thinking about) the book.

*Unless you spend more than you make to try to impress others, in which case Eliot has no sympathy.