Middlemarch - George Eliot

[goodreads]

Title: Middlemarch
Author: George Eliot
Genre: Classic
Rating: 3/5
# pages: Audiobook ~33hrs
Date read: November, 2010

Dorothea Brooke can find no acceptable outlet for her talents or energy and few who share her ideals. As an upper middle-class woman in Victorian England she can't learn Greek or Latin simply for herself; she certainly can't become an architect or have a career; and thus, Dorothea finds herself "Saint Theresa of nothing." Believing she will be happy and fulfilled as "the lampholder" for his great scholarly work, she marries the self-centered intellectual Casaubon, twenty-seven years her senior.

Dorothea is not the only character caught by the expectations of British society in this huge, sprawling book. Middlemarch stands above its large and varied fictional community, picking up and examining characters like a jeweler observing stones. There is Lydgate, a struggling young doctor in love with the beautiful but unsuitable Rosamond Vincy; Rosamond's gambling brother Fred and his love, the plain-speaking Mary Garth; Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's attractive cousin, and the ever-curious Mrs. Cadwallader. The characters mingle and interact, bowing and turning in an intricate dance of social expectations and desires. Through them George Eliot creates a full, textured picture of life in provincial nineteenth-century England.

Took me forever to finish this! I read it as an audiobook, which I think was probably doing it a disservice, as it's very long and slow-moving, which makes it very easy for me to get distracted and let my thoughts wander. Also, since it was downloaded from Librivox, not all readers were equally inspiring to listen to, which didn't help keeping my attention captured.

I stuck with it though, and started really caring about some of the characters, wanting to see what happened to them, and feel very accomplished that I managed to finish! I do think it could easily have been quite a bit shorter though. My favourite storyline was definitely Dorothea's, whom I also thought was the most sympathetic character. I liked Rosamond well enough at first, but was really appalled by how she treated Lydgate when he came into hardship. I think Fred and Mary were the only people whose storyline I actually didn't care about at all.

I do wonder how different my opinion would have been if I had read it rather than listened to it though.