Preparations

I'm writing these posts in order to help make the reading a little easier for Jay—but also as a way to think more purposefully about the novel myself. This is my fourth time (in 12 years) reading this book, and I want to pause for a moment and think about why I'm inclined to keep coming back to this book.

My only regret with regard to Middlemarch is that I did not read it in my early 20s, so that I could now be reflecting on how the book feels at very different stages of life. Other writers have addressed this, and I'm envious of them. (I'm happy that Jay is still young enough that she will, I hope, have this experience over the next 40-60 years of her life.)

On this topic, I'm reminded of Rebecca Mead, who felt what I've been trying to describe so acutely that she wrote a book about it: My Life in Middlemarch. I haven't read it yet, but I think I'll do so after this. Here she is describing herself at 17: "I loved Middlemarch, and I loved being the kind of person who loved it. I knew that many critics regarded it as the greatest novel in English literature, and I wanted to be among those who understood why. Reading it, and beginning to comprehend it, was a step on the path to the life I sought."

I love that she pokes a bit of fun at herself in that first sentence, and I reluctantly admit that I feel something similar at well past 17. 

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I first read the book between the summer of 2013 and January 2014. And that was my third attempt; my first attempt, most likely in early 2012, stalled after 50 pages. Some months later I started again and made it through roughly 150 pages before again giving up. I remember being overwhelmed, slightly bored, and mostly confused about who/what I should be paying attention to. Too much detail! Too many characters! Sentences that went on and on, grammar that resisted my analytical but apparently undisciplined brain! 

After finishing the book, I remember being full of admiration, but also aware that I would need to read it again (and maybe numerous times). I did so in the fall of 2016—a conscious antidote to the presidential election dominating our lives at the time. I needed something out of our time, something wise, quiet, and reassuring: everything that was not on offer in American life in that period. 

I read it again just two years ago, and with this reading I finally felt that I was able to appreciate the book's subtle genius. Not that I had unraveled all its mysteries—but I was at least getting closer to identifying them. I knew it wouldn't be long before I read it again.

Now I am preparing to guide young Jay (Joni), a student at HCC, through the book as part of her 3-credit independent study (to replace a course that was cancelled). I'll need to do better as a mentor than I did as a reader myself (I can't have her putting the book down after 50 pages and coming back when the spirit moves her) and I'm hoping that this blog will help both of us make our way through this difficult but profoundly affecting novel.

A technical note: I'll be writing these posts to "you," who in this case is Jay. But I hope that others might find their way here, and if you are one of those people, I hope this conversation helps you make your way through the book. Also, this is a blog, and I intend to be informal rather than scholarly (not that "being scholarly" is much of an option for me anyway at this stage). I might get some things wrong. Feel free to argue with or correct me in the comments, whoever you are.

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Why do I love this book? Let's start with those sprawling sentences. Yes, they are occasionally a maze of clauses, interruptions, hesitations, meanderings. It takes time and patience to settle into their rhythms, their logic. But eventually they become a pleasure—though still occasionally a source of frustration as we have to yank our brains out of the fractured and frequently careless, inexact language of the American 21st century.

I also love Eliot's insights into human motivation, action, and interaction. More than any writer I've encountered, she sees human relationships in some penetrating way; rarely judgmental, never simplistic. She gives us human behavior in all its complex and contradictory reality. Never mind that this reality belongs to the Midlands of England circa 1830. The truths of human interaction seem not to have changed much. More than anything, the book prompts us to slow down our own judgments, assumptions, and misapprehensions of other people. We so often get it wrong, it seems. 

So the novel has ample emotional intelligence. But it is hardly lacking in other forms of intelligence: It examines science, industry, medicine, art, and culture in ways no other Victorian novel did. It is both an intellectual and emotional tour de force. Only now do I feel somewhat prepared to begin examining these aspects of the novel. I'm hoping Jay will do the heavy lifting in terms of scholarship in these areas....

Well, this feels like more than enough for a first blog post. Jay, what do you have to say as or before you begin reading the book?

Links: The quote from Mead above is from this piece in the Guardian; it is an adaptation of the opening chapter of Mead's My Life in Middlemarch (2014). Don't read either of these before you've read the novel itself at least once.