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Title: Middlemarch

Author: George Eliot

Narrator: Hannah Gordon

Format: Abridged

Length: 2 hrs and 24 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-19-12

Publisher: The Copyright Group

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: Classics, British Literature

Publisher's Summary:

Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-19th century.

Members Reviews:

Middlemarch

I read The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot when I was about 17 years old. I remember the experience because I almost literally could not put the book down. I read for 14 hours straight until I finished the book. I even remember cooking pork chops with one hand while holding the book in the other hand so that I could read while I cooked. I cannot tell you now what the book was about (that was almost 40 years ago), just that I loved it and devoured it, along with the pork chops:-). After reading Middlemarch, I plan to reread The Mill on the Floss and read all her other novels as well.

I loved Middlemarch, but I didnât devour it. I chewed it slowly - the writing too beautiful to swallow whole. It grabbed me right from the start and I knew I was in for a sublime reading experience.

In many of the reviews I have read people have mentioned that Eliotâs narrative voice was not to their liking, finding it too didactic or distracting. I found her narrative to be one of the things I liked best. It was through this technique that most of the wisdom and life lessons were imparted. The narrative became another character for me, seamlessly blended with the rest of the characters.

âWe mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts--not to hurt others."

Her ability to sum up a character in one beautifully written paragraph is remarkable.

In describing Mr. Casaubon, one of the main characters, Eliot writes. âIt is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self-- never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.â

In talking about another character, Dr. Lydgate, she says. âOnly those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life-- the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it-- can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul- wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.â

Her dry wit and humor are scattered throughout the book like sparkling gems.

âMiserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip onâ.

"He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James. "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

"Oh, tallish, dark, clever--talks well--rather a prig, I think." "I never can make out what you mean by a prig," said Rosamond.