Darlings, Returning To The World From "Middlemarch" Is Like Emerging From A Paradise Where You Wish You Could Remain Forever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                             Not that I want to leave my friends and loved ones, darlings--not for a second!!!!!!--but, on a fourth reading "Middlemarch," by George Eliot is pure Heaven!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Even though I thoroughly know the outcome of its characters--though I had managed to forget Raffles, one of fiction's most fascinating villains, who seems like he skipped over from one of Dickens' works--the combining of them with Eliot's ahead-of -their-time ideas on philosophy, politics, marital relations, male and female roles, art, science, religion, and, of course, literature, make "Middlemarch" almost more contemporary today than when it first appeared, and more hip than some of the most so-called hippest works written today.

                                 So, what, the reader may ask, pray tell, does one glean on a fourth reading? Well, aside from Raffles, I had not realized that Dorothea Brooke is only a tender 19, when she marries Casaubon, as Eliot's portrait of her makes her comes off as  a spinster in her Thirties.  Then there is Rosamond Vincy, whom I still feel is the biggest bitch in the novel.  I had forgotten she was Mayor's daughter, just as I had forgotten that through Lydgate, Eliot is proving a point still valid today--by falling for Rosamond he is the very epitome of the typical heterosexual male, who, no matter how idealistic he may be, will fall for the first piece of you-know-what that says yes to him.  And the consequences of that union are fascinating to observe.

                                    Would that I could report a gay character in here, but there is none. Not because Eliot was homophobic; I am sure she knew gays and lesbians in her life. But in such a provincial place as Middlemarch, where secrets do come out, some are still skillfully kept.  I wondered about Mr. Raffles, though.

                                       Virginia Woolf famously has said it was "the first English novel written for grown up people."  I agree, but I will go further in saying that this actually foreshadows works like "Peyton Place" by Grace Metalious. I am not saying Metalious is as skilled a writer as Eliot, but, both, within the context of their own times, are essentially doing the same thing. Grace, a century later, could just push the envelope further, which she did. And it got her into a lot of trouble.

                                            No such trouble followed Eliot, when "Middlemarch" was published; it was hailed as being, what it is still considered--one of the greatest novels in English literature.  What many may not know is that it is highly readable!

                                            I expect that in the future, say, in another ten to twenty years, I will be tackling my fifth reading of it.  Dorothea Brooke was one, who, as her sister, Celia said, "likes to give up things," but readers who fall in love with "Middlemarch"--and I am one--are likely not to ever give it up, at all!!!!!!!!!!