Early in 2025 I reported here that I was reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, and suggested i might report in on progress from time to time.
Well, there's more than a week left in the year, and I can report I did indeed finish the book. I must say I was pretty bored and may have skimmed a bit while going through those long twisting perfect sentences, but I can say this: Middlemarch is a rom-com.
Not a million laughs, but it's about young Dorothea who marries the wrong man (a historian, for God's sake, old and pedantic and controlling) and then promptly meets her true love while on her honeymoon in Rome -- easy to do since the old bore is off doing research all the time. Then we leave that whole plot for about 500 pages about various other well-to-do people from the Middlemarch neighbourhood. Then in the last few chapters girl meets boy again, and (husband having conveniently died offstage) happiness ensures, even though the dead bore has provided in his will that when Dorothea marries her true love, she forfeits the comfortable fortune she inherited at his death.
People are always making modern updates of the Pride and Prejudice story. (It was Jane Austen's 250th birthday the other day.) Has anyone ever thought of Middlemarch as inspiration for a Hallmark movie?
