Posted on 03/12/2015 6:23:10 AM PDT by C19fan
On Monday I finished reading George Eliot’s great Victorian novel Middlemarch for the first time. I have tried and failed to finish it several times; it’s not easy reading. At a few points it is, briefly, a slog. Although it remains a subject of debate, I believe the novel lacks a happy ending. Nevertheless, for me, the ending was happy. I finished the book.
What did it take? I sought permission to audit an undergraduate class in the Victorian novel at a local college and paid for the privilege. I needed a structure within which to read the book. Like paying for a smoking cessation program, it worked for me. I would nevertheless like to urge you to give it a shot on your own if you enjoy long novels of serious literary merit. I hope to post a a few short notes to share my enjoyment of the novel and perhaps interest you in giving it a shot if you haven’t yet.
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
Frankly, I find Dostoevsky the hardest slog.
I hope to read it as well. I’ve been trying to get to it, but just too much work.
I’ve been putting it off too and have been reading Trollope and Pratchett instead :)
As a FYI, if you enjoyed “Far From the Madding Crowd” there will be movie version starring Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdine coming out in a few weeks.
It was refreshing to be respected as a reader by the authoress, especially since her work and that of so many other truly great writers is 100 percent free, in html and other e-formats, at Gutenberg and from delightful Adobe facsimiles of library reproductions (that I've come to prefer) at Archive.org.
It's impossible to estimate the magnitude of the destructive influence high school English classes (as warped by so-called "Progressive Education") have had, even over television, upon many of us personally and upon the level of discourse in our civilization generally.
I should have read it more than 40 years ago, though would I have been a better person if I had read Eliot rather than having become a Gilligan's Island expert as this nation was sending expeditions to the lunar surface? That's difficult to answer, especially after reading The Gospel According to John, for example.
Still, raving liberal free-thinkers of the 19th century were a superior lot to many of our present-day self-appointed "conservative" leaders.
I’ve seen “Tess” in a number of incarnations, some good, some not so much. I’ve also seen “Bleak House,” “Great Expectations,” and most of Jane Austen’s works, again, some better than others. So I look forward to this production. BBC actually does these period pieces very well in most cases.
Ditto. Another dude who likes period pieces. :)
In the middle of the book, author Maryanne Wolf uses a single sentence from Middlemarch to demonstrate how much knowledge, context, and processing is necessary to understand even one sentence. She prefaces this by saying that Middlemarch is one of those books you can read at age 17, 37, 57, and 77, and still get more out of it each time, partly because of the life knowledge gained during the intervening decades.
Will I encounter Middlemarch for a third time today, or is this already a message to me to pick up the book (which of course my wife has) and actually read it?
And it's a far cry from the relativist, licentious, amoral cesspool we've allowed our world to become.
The funny thing is a lot of Leftists don’t like the results of them throwing away the social mores especially on college campuses. So they want to reimpose Victorian values but this time in a Maoist way of using the barrel of a gun.
Read it in high school half a century ago.
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