Middlemarch

Author: George Eliot

One-sentence summary: The lives of the inhabitants of a small, provincial town in England in the 1800s intertwine through love, marriage, scandal and family, reflecting a detailed portrayal of timeless human relationships and emotions.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 6

Our favorite thing about it: We loved and appreciated the depth of description of the characters, their thoughts and their emotions. Despite the fact that there were many characters, the author used each opportunity to expound on the human condition in detail and some of those paragraphs were beautiful, enlightening, and profound.

Our least favorite thing about it: We all felt that parts of this book could have been left out with no damage whatsoever to its overall magnitude…namely, the boring political parts. It is not that we don’t appreciate a cultural and/or historical context to stories such as this, but more than most books, this one delved into way too much description of politics, which actually seemed irrelevant to the main story.

Main Topics of Discussion: Marriage, Family, Communication, Etiquette, Poverty, Wealth, Role of Women, Emotions, Relationships

Our favorite quote: “Of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.” (700)

Notes: Overall we enjoyed the story of this book. It had intrigue, scandal, love and other very interesting parts. It was hard to get into because of the slow start and the language barrier…that is, we all had to become accustomed to the nineteenth century way of speaking. Beyond those things, we generally felt that the book was too long. As mentioned above, we felt that many parts could have…in fact, should have…been left out altogether. We are not opposed to long books in general (and have read several long ones in which every word was necessary), but this one seemed to lag in places and lack relevance to the overall work. We discussed marriage quite a bit since it was the main focus of the novel. We were not surprised to find that many of the issues dealt with in the book are issues that marriages still face today. There were, of course, issues specific to that time and we discussed those too. We spent a bit of time discussing each character and how we identified with them or not or if we liked them or not. Most of the characters were well developed in the novel so we had a lot of material to reference.

Memorable Meeting Moments: This meeting took place during our lake house weekend. The book was brought up on several occasions although our main discussion took place on Friday night.