Category Archives: george eliot
“Not Fitted to Stand Alone”: Deborah Weisgall, The World Before Her
I had a deeply and perhaps irrationally ambivalent response to Debora Weisgall’s The World Before Her. I think that on its own terms, it’s quite a good novel. It’s atmospheric, interesting, and thought-provoking, especially about the pressure marriage puts on identity: like so many characters in Middlemarch, Weisgall’s protagonists are struggling in relationships with partners who don’t [...]
The Stage Swarmed with Maggies: Helen Edmundson’s The Mill on the Floss
Last night I attended the Dalhousie Theatre production of The Mill on the Floss that I mentioned here: I was invited to give a short talk to the “Patrons” on opening night. As I explained to the attendees, I wasn’t there as an expert on Helen Edmundson’s adaptation, though I had read through most of it in [...]
Ahdaf Soueif: “We all seem to have given up – for the moment – on fiction”
Ahdaf Soueif had a thought-provoking essay in the Guardian recently about fiction and activism in general, and the effect of the Egyptian revolution on Egyptian novelists in particular: In Egypt, in the decade of slow, simmering discontent before the revolution, novelists produced texts of critique, of dystopia, of nightmare. Now, we all seem to have given up – for [...]
Middlemarch for Book Clubs: Update
I have started building the ‘Middlemarch for Book Clubs’ site I boldly promised to create in response to the whole ‘Middlemarch kills book clubs’ story that got so much linkage a week or so ago. Here is a list of the pages and subpages I’ve set up so far. Let me know if you think they [...]
Madame Bovary II: The Doctors and Their Wives
It’s difficult to compare two books that are very, very good at what they do but that do very different things. Must such a comparison be evaluative, hierarchical? Of course not. Does it often end up that way? Of course. We’re only human! We like different things, for reasons that often say more about us than [...]
Your Book Club Wants to Read Middlemarch? Great Idea!
A stupid article about how Middlemarch is the kiss of death for book clubs has been getting a disappointing amount of linkage in the past couple of days, including from sites you’d expect to be above that kind of pandering to the lowest common denominator (I’m looking at you, New Yorker!). I’d like to think [...]
This Week in My Classes: Middlemarch Everwhere!
After all that concentrated activity in February, I found myself quite out of energy at the end of last week. I deliberately took it fairly easy over the weekend, to help myself recharge, and it was nice to putter. I did some reading–my book club is discussing Tender is the Night on Saturday, so I [...]
This Week in My Classes: Close Reading Middlemarch
You can’t really do it, of course, or not and finish the novel in a few short weeks. I’ve been rereading it for years and I know I still haven’t read it closely enough. Still, if you can slow down and really pay attention, I don’t know a book that’s more fun to try reading [...]
This Week in My Classes: The Morals and the Stories
Though everyone is looking a bit peaked around the department these days–students and faculty alike–and I’m certainly feeling the usual pressures as we move into the term’s final phase, I am also finding myself intellectually invigorated by the novels we’re working through in all of my classes. It is just such a pleasure to be [...]
Mrs Tulliver’s Teraphim
One of the many things that make reading George Eliot at once so challenging and so satisfying is her resistance to simplicity–especially moral simplicity. It’s difficult to sit in judgment on her characters. For one thing, she’s usually not just one but two or three steps ahead: she’s seen and analyzed their flaws with emphatic [...]
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