Middlemarch isn’t an easy read. I stumbled over the speech of Casaubon until I realised that was partly the point. I partially glimpsed that the novel works on several levels and encapsulated the individual with the social. F.R.Leavis would applaude our efforts!!
“I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as it comes, and shall be much obliged if the town will take me in the same way” – (the all too fallible) Dr Lydgate
I tried to read Middlemarch in January, but my poor addled brain refused to decipher the text or concentrate on the storyline. Have I spend so much time scrolling through Instagram that I can no longer focus on huge, dry Victorian tomes?
Finally, determined to see this through, I switched to the audio book. It was nearly 40 hours long and it took me three months to get through. My kids would wander into the kitchen (listening was usually an accompaniment to domestic tasks) and marvel: “are you STILL really listening to that?”.
It’d odd that I was quite so compelled to persist with Middlemarch, given my longstanding aversion to Eliot’s Silas Marner
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