I'll miss my Middlemarch

After more than two months of listening to the novel, at a rate of about a chapter a day, it feels weird to have it finally end.  I'm going to miss it.

What a story.  What a masterpiece.  And what a reader--each chapter started off with a quote, and the quotes were usually in English--but sometimes German, Italian, Latin...I don't even know.  She sailed through them all.  And the various speakers with their varying tones, diction and dialects--she did 'em beautifully.   You could usually tell who was talking by the narrative voice alone.

The book was set in a place and time where people's lives were extremely different from ours, yet it was written with such skill and feeling that I actually cared about the people.  They pained me, poor dears, and I sadly wished I could help them.  Some things are truly universal--youthful idealism, disappointment, jealousy, gossip.  Crying all night and waking up determined to be a better person than the one who wronged you.

George Eliot was a woman but you can't tell that in her characterizations.  Both men and women are gently ridiculed and an occasional gentle joke at the expense of each is allowed--

"....And, of course, men know best about everything, except what women know better."

Is Celia being sarcastic?  In her own mind, not at all, as she goes on to explain.  But she makes her sister--who clearly feels differently--laugh and cheer up.

I find it interesting that she doesn't explicitly make the point that the regulation of womans' role to hearth and home is what almost caused the intelligent and ambitious Dorothea to throw away her life.  Dorothea was never able to imagine her life's path being more than a helper in a man's great work.  We all feel the phrase "what a waste!" in the back of our minds.  On the other hand, George Eliot doesn't denigrate the lifework of wife and mother; it was certainly suitable for Celia and Mary Garth and her mother.  I think she believes the chief evil in the world is to fail to be true to our chosen path.

I even enjoyed the author's periodic interruptions to moralize or instruct, which is one of the hardest things to endure in 17th and 18th century novels.

To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!

>Nowadays, writing a novel doesn't give you permission to preach.

I have this one warning.  Don't--halfway through--get confused about who's related to whom and look up a family tree on the Internet.  It will be a spoiler.