George Eliot, Middlemarch ****

 Middlemarch is the epitome of what Henry James called a "large, loose, baggy monster": a 900-page 19th-century novel with an expansive number of characters and storylines. I first read it in college at the suggestion of my English professor, who said it was the finest novel of the period. Her recommendation overrode my prejudice against George Eliot, who had annoyed me with the melodramatic ending to The Mill on the Floss, which in my opinion shirked the writer's duty to resolve the central conflicts of the story. 

I re-read Middlemarch now because I found myself telling people that my post-retirement project would be a "Key to All Mythologies," which is a self-deprecating reference to the never-completed work of the ineffectual Mr Casaubon. The fact that no one catches the reference makes it a perfect reflection of Casaubon's work.

The book is too long, with too many subplots unfolding at too leisurely a pace to sustain any narrative drive. Individual scenes, though, are deeply felt and intelligently portrayed. Eliot captures the complexity of interpersonal interactions with great subtlety: characters don't have simple misunderstandings, they interpret each others' actions based on divergent worldviews. The novel is very well constructed, with themes and plot points echoing across storylines: frustrated idealists, questionable marriages, controversial wills, unjust suppositions, mistrusted outsiders, unexpected windfalls.

The prose style is dense in the 19th-century fashion, but with a quotable phrase every fourth or fifth sentence. I feel like Middlemarch has apt quotes most any situation; I wish I had some way to find the appropriate bon mots amidst the wealth of detail!

Of course, men know best about everything, except what women know bettter.

Severity is all very well, but it's a good deal easier when you've got someone to do it for you.

I don't always agree with Henry James (preferring his brother William), but his review of Middlemarch  seems spot on.

Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole. ... [Eliot's] novel is a picture -- vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression ... [Dorothea's disappointment] is analyzed with extraordinary penetration, but one may say of it, as of most of the situations in the book, that it is treated with too much refinement and too little breadth. It revolves too constantly on the same pivot.