Who is George Eliot?
and some musings through chapter 11
Hello Readers,
I hope you have had a wonderful week of reading and enjoying the other leisurely things of life. I come to you this morning with much fewer musings than I had intended because my chapter or two of Middlemarch a day plan somehow slowed down this week. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I am very much enjoying the novel at this slow pace and I hope you are as well! Between that and having a child who is sick this morning (different child and illness than last Saturday) this may be a shorter newsletter than usual…or maybe not, we shall see.
George Eliot Biography and Resources
I thought I would share with you all a few articles about George Eliot if you’re getting into your reading and wondering why she wrote under a pen name (long after the Austen and the Bronte’s were successful novelists) or other details about her life.
This article on George Eliot from the Literary Ladies Guide was a very helpful refresher on her biography (and it is pretty short). Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite…
“Eliot saw fiction as a vehicle for grappling with the largest questions of her day.”
“she was filled with doubt about whether she could create scenes that would elicit the emotional responses from her readers that would motivate them to sympathize with the very ordinary and flawed people she planned to portray in her work.”
“Charles Dickens famously saw through the ruse. In a letter thanking “George Eliot” for sending him a copy of Scenes of Clerical Life, he said, ‘I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself so mentally like a woman.’”
I know I mentioned this before, but this Literary Life Podcast episode was a helpful introduction to Mary Ann Evans (Eliot) as well!
Mary Ann Evans was an essayist prior to “becoming” George Eliot and writing fiction and she wrote this essay, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, right before her first fiction novel was published and it might help explain why she took on a male “alias" as well.
But, just in case you read the above essay and are worried that Eliot doesn’t respect Austen, go read this article and feel at ease again!
Chapter by Chapter Musings
Chapter 9
In this chapter we are still following Dorothea and Mr. Cassubon during their engagement. Her and her uncle and sister are going to look at the house before they get married to see if she wants anything changed.
“A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.”
I find it so interesting that Dorothea doesn’t appreciate art and can’t reconcile it to her puritanical worldview, while Cassubon is trying to reconcile the whole world’s mythologies to Christianity. We also get to meet Will in this chapter and he may be the first character to not have a favorable first impression of Dorothea. I can’t help laughing with Will at the ridiculousness of Dorothea and Cassubon together. In contrast we then find Dorothea wanting to find a favorable explanation for Will and his wanderings.
“…people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves…they may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other I think.”
Then Celia in turn calls her out for being much more patient with Will than she is with anyone else who doesn’t fit her views. I wonder if we should see Celia’s calling her out as growth in Celia’s character or not.
Chapter 10
I find the contrast between Cassubon’s “plodding application” with Will’s general wandering interests very interesting. The two characters almost seem to embody vices on either side of a “virtue.” I am wondering if we will see one or both of them come more to the center and find a balance or nuance. Eliot uses the beginning of this chapter to illicit our sympathy for Cassubon. I am wondering if it works…I don’t find myself very sympathetic towards him. I am still finding Dorothea such a relatable young woman in her desire for knowledge and deep work, however misguided. We find out here that Cassubon is going to use their honeymoon to work and Dorothea gets irritated at him for the first time (and blames herself).
The tea party scene is hilarious and we meet a lot of new characters. If you skimmed by this thinking that these characters wouldn’t matter, you might want to go back and reread some of their character descriptions because after this chapter we will actually leave Dorothea and Cassubon for a while and get to know the rest of the Middlemarch neighborhood. I noticed that a lot of people commented on Cassubon’s health. I also appreciated Lydgate’s opinion of Dorothea.
“She is a good creature- that fine girl- but a little too earnest….It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of any question, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle things after their own taste.”
Chapter 11
Now we find ourselves in Lydgate’s (the new doctor in town) head for a bit and then at the Vincy household, the father being the manufacturing mayor we keep hearing about. We get to know two of his children, Fred and Rosamond. We get to see George Eliot at her best in introducing more characters to us. We come to see them in their humanity with the good and the bad and love them anyway. She gives us a lot of family names and relations that are tempting to skip over, but I promise they are important so here is a family tree I found on the internet!
I thought Fred and Rosamond’s conversation about slang was hilarious and now also want to play the game he suggests of writing down bits of Honor and bits of slang and see if I can tell them apart. This sounds like a fun book club game if someone wants to make it. Fred’s definition of a prig is great!
“…a prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.”
The scene at the end of the chapter when Fred is playing the flute poorly seems to be important as well!
More Books and Things
I am reading A Literary Education by Joseph Epstein because I really want to read his new book, The Novel, Who Needs It?, because it came so highly recommended by
and Sean Johnson on the Year in Reading Podcast (which you all already know is my favorite podcast every year). But, the library doesn’t have it yet and I really don’t need to buy any more books right now because I have so many that I’ve yet to read. All that to say, they did have this collection of essays at the library so I picked it up to see if he is as great of an essayist as I have heard. He is! It is a pretty big collection and I have only finished the essay that the book is named for and it is worth it just for that essay, but I’m enjoying his writing so much that I think I will read the whole thing (or at least try before the library calls it home again!Our local Mom’s Group is doing a study on Thomas Aquinas so I got Josef Pieper’s (famous for Leisure: The Basis of Culture) Guide to Thomas Aquinas at the library and it has been a very readable part biography, part history, and part guide to Thomas’ thought. I very much recommend so far.
I discovered a new reading category this week, and it is called “books I can easily read with sports ball and kid chaos happening”…A lot of times I try to sit down with an old classic or a book of essays that I want to write down lots of quotes and take notes. So I end up reading a few pages max. But, when I have gone to a lighter book, like a memoir or a page turner more modern fiction book I have read a ton and still been able to hang out with my family and half pay attention to the game. Last weekend I picked up
’s book, Notes from a Blue Bike and read the whole thing over the weekend (and a little into Monday). I normally take a while to plod through books little by little so this was a fun experience to just fly through a good book in a weekend. I recommend! So if anyone has some good memoir recommendations I would love to hear them!I thoroughly enjoyed this article by
from , Shouldn’t Children’s Books Still Be Beautiful?“We love beauty because our Creator loves it and has created a world that is filled with it.”
“what we read with our children matters, because our time with them is so short, and how we spend it will form their tastes and character for life.”
Apparently collecting books is now a home decor trend…..I think I’d be okay with acquiring “bookshelf wealth” especially if it means having more built ins! Now, what to do with all the piles of books that sometimes look more like clutter?
With that I will leave you all to your weekend plans. I hope some of them include curling up with a book on the couch. Apparently our sports ball watching plans don’t start until tomorrow so I can have some time for more contemplative Middlemarch reading today! Tomorrow I need to decide what short/easy book to plow through. Maybe a play I’ve been meaning to read! I wish you all beautifully written books and some quiet moments to read them in.
Enjoy your reading till we meet again!
“What we’d never see except in a book is often what we go to books to find.”
-Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination)
A Few Reminders
Next up for Literature Book Club is The Innocence of Father Brown for April and then Crossing to Safety for May.
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