My text, Penguin English Library, paperback
For Christmas, I requested and received a copy of Middlemarch. It's eighty-four chapters, Read a couple of chapters a week, and I could be done by the end of the year even if I skip a few weeks.
Not yet two weeks in, and I'm almost on schedule. The preface is off-putting, but I warmed up to the first chapter.
It is amazing what writers could get away with in the nineteenth century. Long rolling complex sentences that go on for lines and lines before you reach the conclusion and find out what the sentence is all about, endless paragraphs without dialogue, and of course a cast where everyone is rich and leisured. (It's catching.) It wouldn't survive a moment in a 21st century editor's hands.
But already George Eliot is delivering sentences that make me laugh and want to read them aloud. I'll carry on.
Plotwise: I have already encountered Dorothea Brooke and had a glimpse of Mr Casaubon, who I knew without having read a line is the ideal type of the historian who is (therefore?) a pedantic windbag and a bore. Well, I have met some of those IRL.
More to come. Maybe I'll deliver a report on progress every few chapters.
