12/4/2023 0 Comments Free downloads Middlemarch![]() ![]() Like most Great Literature, this isn\’t an easy-breezy book to read. This Harper Perennial edition is the paperback version to buy of this enduring classic of 19th-century English literature (published: 1871-72). Review #4 Audio Middlemarch narrated by Juliet Stevenson ![]() But I enjoyed MIDDLEMARCH so much more than I expected I would. ![]() Some might think this an unlikely comparison, but MIDDLEMARCH is much like Joyce\’s ULYSSES in the manner in which Eliot, like Joyce, gives us a novel of epic proportions, not around kings and heroes, but around those of the provincial life, the ordinary folk, something that is echoed in the final line of the novel, in Eliot\’s brief Finale: “… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Unlike most novels, there is no single protagonist: MIDDLEMARCH itself, the communal web, holds everyone fast, in all their varied interconnectedness. ![]() And so it goes for the inhabitants of MIDDLEMARCH amid the larger events of the time, cholera epidemics, political and religious upheavals, and the rapid English industrialization. Calumny ruins physician Lydgate, even as his wife, Rosamond, schemes behind his back to retain her lavish style. Banker Nicholas Bulstrode\’s past deeds return with a mysterious man with catastrophic consequences. Dorothea and Casaubon marry for the wrong reasons, trapped in misery. Reading MIDDLEMARCH, one realizes how little we\’ve changed over the last 146 years. The predominant themes of marriage, gossip and rumor, debt and finances, chance and self determination, prejudice, pride, and conformity run through the novel, as they do our lives today. It is considered by many to be the greatest English language novel ever written, a “cathedral of words.” What more could I add? The Victorian prose style and historical references aside, MIDDLEMARCH, at its core, seemed to me a perfectly modern novel. Much has been written about MIDDLEMARCH since its publication in 1871-1872. ![]()
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