Middlemarch (Oxford World's Classics)

Middlemarch (Oxford World's Classics)

By: George Eliot  

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Great Edition - Middlemarch is an enduring classic and I will always love it. I know the book is long, but it's one of those books that you will be proud to display on your bookshelf. This particular edition was really helpful; the editor's notes were illuminating and the book provided translations and context where needed. I have read the book before without editor's notes and having those explanatory notes really name a big difference. Also, this particular edition was really affordable.

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Horrible formatting for the Kindle edition - The book itself is fine. However, the font style and formatting used by the Oxford press is really unattractive, and there is no way to change the font style. You can change the size of the font but not the actual font style itself. It is a very old style and looks like something from the 1800s. I'm sure this was fine for printed books in the 1800s, but it looks horrible on a Kindle 2 screen in the 2000s. Come on Oxford, when you convert your books to an e-reader format, you need to put some thought into how the work will be displayed on e-readers. When given a choice, I always use the Oxford edition of classics, but for this book I switched over to the Penguin edition just because of the way the work is displayed on the Kindle 2 screen. Horrible job Oxford!

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Review of Middlemarch - Finally. Finally after four weeks of reading I finish this novel.

So, in summary, this is what I gathered from the book. This is a story about three couples - Fred and Mary, Dorothea and Ladislaw and Rosamund and Lyndgate. These six people live in a town called Middlemarch - and Eliot does not build a vague fictional town here, she details every last little thing down to pages upon pages of motives behind elections, decisions made and fainting spells. Every bit of gossip is laid out and every substantial movement of a main character dissected and looked at from all angles.

In short, this was the longest book I've ever read. And I'm sad to say I just did not like it all that much.

I often remarked to my family as I was trudging my way through this novel that, at times, it felt as if I was sitting and watching a snail decide which direction to move in. Now, don't get me wrong - the characters were vibrant. They could have sprung off the page, full of life if Eliot (to borrow a Tolkien term here) had not the patience of an Ent. So. Much. Detail. Ugh. I cannot get over how long this book took to read.

I loved the Epilogue though (and for more reasons than it just signifying the end!) and I'm proud of myself for sticking it through and for grasping the story and understanding the significance of why she wrote it the way she did. It had to be done that way - the actual "action" in the book would have been disappointing on its own without all of the build-up. But instead of feeling a triumphant release at the ending I felt more a calm sigh of relief and had a "thank God" moment (both for it being the end and for getting what I wanted at the end of the book).

I would not have read this book if I hadn't been involved in the 1001 Books to Read Before you Die challenge. And honestly, I'm dreading the next George Eliot I pick up, but at least I've armed myself with some knowledge and know how to approach it now. Bits at a time with plenty of action-filled books in between.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Don't be intimidated--it is truly transcendent - I must admit that I was intimidated for years by this novel. It sat on my shelf for ages, neglected in favor of "easier" books to read. Once I started it though, I couldn't put it down.

I generally read really quickly, but you really should take your time with every word of this novel. Otherwise you miss sentences like the following:

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." !!!!!!!!!!! AMAZING.

Not to mention a lushly romantic plot that really tears you apart. I couldn't believe how breathless I was during the interactions of two of the main characters. Deeper messages aside, this was an emotional experience. I read Middlemarch like I read novels that will not be in print more than 10 years. So don't be intimidated by the density of the prose like I was!

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
A Faithfully Hidden Life - This novel by Mary Ann Evans - nom de plume, George Eliot - who lived with a man out of wedlock for most of her life and who throughout her adult life was a confirmed nonbeliever - or "nullifidian" as she would say - proved a difficult one for me to spend a week rereading. I am, no doubt, overly impressionable about literature and oversensitive to the world in which I inhabit whilst in an author's grasp. But I was clinically depressed through, say, the last few hundred pages of the book, and then felt my eyes tear in tender exultation through the final thirty. Those few hundred pages are necessary, I see again now, for making this book into a true work of art rather than a soap opera or soap box speech, but the strain on the reader - or this reader - is well-nigh unbearable. What Ms. Evans does here is to build up a moralistic universe in her provincial Middlemarch filled with humbug and cant and then bring it crashing down around the sometimes tawdry cast of characters which she deftly creates.

For, make no mistake, the true heroes of this book are Dorothea ("Gift of the gods" in Greek) and Ladislaw (an obviously somewhat domesticated version of the poet Shelley). They are the hub of the wheel around which all the other spokes revolve. They are, with their ardent natures and spiritual longings, the characters that linger - at times like guttering candles - in the back of the reader's mind all through this heavy weave of a novel. We are conscious all along of the "real" life going on as it does in the "pallid quaintness" of Dorothea's "blue-green boudoir":

"Nothing had been outwardly altered there; but while the summer had gradually advanced over the western fields beyond the avenue of the elms, the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an inward life which fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels, the invisible yet active forms of our spiritual triumphs or spiritual falls."

In the meantime (i.e., through the greater part of the novel) Ms. Evans painfully yet deftly guides us through what she at one point calls "the irony of events." So immersed do we become in the tedious banalities of the inward lives of the characters, the human misery and spiritual stolidness of these village worthies that the entire world comes to seem a very washed-out realm indeed. So that when things finally do come around for Dorothea and Ladislaw, the cosmos of Middlemarch is turned upside-down in a wondrous moment:

"The wind was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind: it was one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle pause with a certain awe."----For Lo! The two soul-mates of the novel have - the ultimate taboo in a world ruled by class, money fears and concerns, petty gossip and scandal that can ruin one - tremblingly, kissed!

The reader can have no idea how breathtaking and world-shattering this moment is from this review. It comes after hundreds of pages in which the one has been dragged through the spiritual wasteland of Middlemarch, in which men and women have had their souls and livelihoods crushed by the mundane and quotidian, described by Ms Evans with Inquisitorial detail. One has begun to wonder if love, yes love, exists at all in the world.

For, again, it is exalted, Romantic love with which Ms. Evans is primarily concerned, thrown into sublime relief by her detailed, plodding description of the drab world. To lift a phrase from the last sentence in the book, it is for those who have "lived faithfully a hidden life" - much as Ms. Evans did - which the rest of the world scorns, for whom this book is written.

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