The Brooknerian

[Completing a series on Middlemarch , Book by Book:] 'It's rather a strong check to one's self-complacency to find how much of one's right doing depends on not being in want of money,' says Mr Farebrother in chapter 63. Middlemarch , masquerading as a provincial Trollope-style novel, is strikingly political. Previously, in chapter 60, Eliot satirises the parochialism of the Middlemarchers, 'who sneered at [Will's] Polish blood, and were themselves of a breed very much in need of crossing'. I can think of nothing so Left-leaning (even in Dickens) elsewhere in Victorian fiction. * I'm interested in how the writing of one book leads to another. My favourite Eliot is Daniel Deronda , which follows Middlemarch . It begins with a memorable scene of gambling in a German resort - and surely the billiards scene in chapter 66 of Middlemarch has some connection with what its author would come to in her next novel. Likewise the Middlemarchers' react...

[Continuing a series on Middlemarch , Book by Book:] Rereading Middlemarch , indeed any novel, throws one into communication with one's earlier self. I used to love chapter 54, Dorothea and Will's sad parting, their slowly turning to marble in one another's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning... Now I respond quite differently, want to hurry on. The feelings, as Brookner says in Fraud , wither somewhat in the middle years. Will seems very much a less sympathetic figure, and the chapter has bathetic elements I hadn't previously noted. Altogether the parting feels stagy and artificial, as if Eliot were deliberately performing an exercise in this kind of writing. At one point Will is said to require 'a narrative to make him understand [Dorothea's] present feeling'. This is close to being metafictional. * Caleb Garth, land agent and Mary's father, is an interesting character - said to be based on George Eliot...

[Part of a series on  Middlemarch  - Book by Book:] Public and private: Not every novelist tells us about the public and working lives of characters. Trollope does so, and in detail, and George Eliot excels in it. Middlemarch comes alive when politics comes into play, or when such apparently prosaic events occur as Mr Garth taking on more land-agent duties. The hustings scene in chapter 51 is vividly horrible, especially to anyone who, like me, regularly has to speak to large groups. * Changes: Eliot continues to trace forensically the changes big and small that society is subject to: At that time young ladies in the country, even when educated at Mrs Lemon's, read little French literature later than Racine, and public prints had not cast their present magnificent illumination over the scandals of life. (Ch. 43) It's interesting to realise that Eliot thinks her own age so sexually knowledgeable. The mention of Racine recalls another innocent character, Betsy in Bro...

[Part of a series on  Middlemarch  - Book by Book:] Was it Barbara Hardy who spoke of Eliot's fondness for setting scenes of disenchantment in the full light of day? Eliot is the poet of disillusionment, and nowhere more so than in chapter 28 of Middlemarch , when the Casaubons return home. It's snowy, it's pitilessly daylit; and Dorothea is assaulted with the full force of her new knowledge. In particular she sees the limitations placed on her on account of her gender: 'the volumes of polite literature in the bookcase' that look like the 'immovable imitations of books'. She wants to be useful, to lead a useful and intellectual life, but she is allowed only 'the gentlewoman's oppressive liberty'. Even now these passages have the power to disturb. Eliot tries to be evenhanded, or she gives a show of evenhandedness: One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea - but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possib...

[Part of an occasional series on  Middlemarch  - Book by Book:] In chapter 14 Mary Garth teases Fred Vincy with a list of literary lovers. The modern reader is on familiar ground with Ophelia and with Juliet, but things soon become dicey. Mme de Staël's Corinne gets a name-check, along with characters from Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield . Then it's the turn of Scott. Most people have heard of Waverley and Flora MacIvor. But Brenda and Minna Troil, Mordaunt Merton and Clement Cleveland?! My edition of Middlemarch informs me they're to be found in Scott's 1822 novel The Pirate , which surely hasn't been in print for at least the last half-century. Did it have a better reputation in Eliot's time? Very likely. You can sense Scott's influence throughout - not just in the fact Middlemarch is to all intents and purposes an historical novel, but also in details such as the gnomic Scott-style epigraphs, not a few of which Eliot composed herself, ju...

[First in an occasional series on Middlemarch - Book by Book:] 'I doubt whether any young person can read with pleasure either Felix Holt , Middlemarch , or Daniel Deronda ,' wrote Anthony Trollope in his Autobiography . Well, I'm not a young person any more, and when I first read Middlemarch , twenty-five years ago, I possibly wasn't the young person Trollope had in mind. In any case he probably had a minor axe to grid against the clever Mrs Lewes. Middlemarch is, after all, a Trollope novel deconstructed; it is The Last Chronicle of Barset with an advanced degree from Heidelberg; it's Barsetshire on acid (or laudanum at the very least). But it isn't, as Trollope goes on to say, an easy read. It is Eliot's style he criticises her for. It is affected, it lacks ease, he says. Style is the great Trollope thing: that sly tolerant tone keeping the reader company through the inevitable longueurs of a classic three-decker. Eliot's voice is altogethe...