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 2025, 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 and move on to other mismatched couples from the well-to-do Middlemarch networks. Only in the last few chapters does girl meets boy again, and (inappropriate husband having finally died offstage) happiness ensures, even though the odious bore has provided in his will that when Dorothea marries her true love, she must forfeit 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 Christmas movie? In the first ten minutes the smart young thing from the city goes back to the small town, meets and marries the Christmas-tree lot owner. Then she spends most of the movie waiting for him to die....
Update, Jan 8 2026 I read over the holidays that young readers assigned to study Middlemarch often dislike it because the protagonists all marry the wrong people and make the whole story an endless downer, while their professors, being older, appreciate being confirmed in their view that people do indeed marry the wrong people. I'm probably older than most of the professors, but yeah, my reaction seems to match that of the kids.
