A few quotes to set the stage for our Read-Along of Middlemarch by George Eliot.
BBC History Website:
“She used a male pen name to ensure her works were taken seriously in an era when female authors were usually associated with romantic novels.”
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From “George Eliot: A Celebration” by A. S. Byatt, as introduction to Modern Library’s edition of Middlemarch:
“She had no real heir as “novelist of ideas” in England… Her heirs are abroad—Proust in France, Mann in Germany. Which brings me to another reason for loving her: she was European, not little-English, her roots were Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, not just, as Leavis’s “Great Tradition” implies, Jane Austen. She opened gates which are still open.”
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From “Why Read George Eliot”, by Paula Marantz Cohen in American Scholar, Spring 2006:
“Eliot’s voice, in its assumption of a wiser, juster, more all-encompassing perspective, is the ligament of her novels. It elevates them from ingenious storytelling to divine comedy…
As Virginia Woolf observed, Eliot wrote novels for grown-up people. Our society and our relationships would be saner and better if more grownups read her.”
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Last but not least, let’s kick off Middlemarch in May with Henry James’s lively reflections on George Eliot, as quoted in Colm Tóibín’s article “Creating The Portrait of a Lady” in The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007 Issue:
“A specter haunted Henry James: it was the specter of George Eliot. He visited her first in 1869, when he was twenty-six, and wrote to his father:
‘I was immensely impressed, interested and pleased. To begin with, she is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous…. Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end up as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking.’
Three years later, when Middlemarch appeared, James wrote from Rome to his friend Grace Norton:
A marvellous mind throbs in every page of Middlemarch. It raises the standard of what is to be expected of women—(by your leave!) We know all about the female heart; but apparently there is a female brain, too…. To produce some little exemplary works of art is my narrow and lowly dream. They are to have less “brain” than Middlemarch; but (I boldly proclaim it) they are to have more form.”
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Let the fun begin!
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Other posts from Read-Along participants:
Middlemarch Has Me Laughing So Soon by Gretchen at Gladsome Lights
My invite post:
My Middlemarch Review Posts:
Middlemarch Book I: What are siblings for?
Middlemarch Book II to IV: Inkblot Test
Middlemarch Wrap: You be the screenwriter
Ripple Effects 