Middlemarch

“I can’t bear fishing.  I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour – or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.”  (from Middlemarch, by George Eliot)


A few weeks ago, at my wife’s prompting, I began reading Middlemarch a British novel, written in 1871 by Mary Anne Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot.  I read her short novel Silas Marner in High School and hated it, but what the heck.  Middlemarch is a highly regarded classic, considered by some to be one of the great British novels of all time.  With that in mind, I set out to fill a significant hole in my reading resume.   

Having found an edition with sufficiently large font, I began the journey, page one.  Usually, by page 50 I can tell if I like a book.  Page 50 is my point of no return.  If I don’t like a book, I stop at page 50 and go on to something else.  Otherwise, I feel committed to finish what I’ve started.  With its flowery and difficult to understand Victorian English, I wasn’t loving Middlemarch, but neither was it so bad that I stopped at page 50.  I kept on reading.

As I read, I was aware of George Eliot’s craftsmanship with language, her ability to generate memorable and quotable phrases (like the disparaging comment about fishing cited above).  But as I read further into the novel, I realized that I couldn’t have cared less about the well-intentioned but highly dysfunctional protagonists Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Tertius Lydgate.  Meanwhile, I was struggling to keep track of a rapidly expanding list of bland and mostly unlikeable characters.  And to make it all-the-more challenging, Middlemarch is filled with obscure references to 1830’s British politics, which can only be understood with the addition of frequent annotations.  And I hate reading footnotes.

Middlemarch is a dauntingly long novel, running over 900 printed pages.  I made my way to about page 400, and then started making excuses for putting the book aside, reading less and less each day.  I was not enjoying Middlemarch and there were so many other books I would have rather been reading. 

There is a great psychological truth:  the larger the investment, the harder the defeat.  A good deal of my time was invested in this book, 400 pages read.  However, more than 500 pages to go.  It wasn’t going to happen.  I could go no further.  Admitting defeat, I surrendered.  I felt horrible that so much of my time and effort had been squandered. And for what?  But I decided that it was time to cut my losses and move on to something different.

Fortunately, I didn’t feel horrible for too long.  I had an idea.  With an investment of only thirty-minutes more of my time, I finished Middlemarch chapters 43 through 86 and the finale, learned what happened to each of the characters, found out how the story ended, and was able to put the book up on my shelf with no guilt or regret.

Thanks to SparkNotes online.