Reading Middlemarch in Quarantine

I almost didn't write this. It felt redundant and pretentious to review an enduring classic that stands as a 'cathedral' of Victorian literature. The greatest work by perhaps the greatest writer in the English language. But books aren't stagnant things. They shift and take on fresh meaning with every new reader, made relevant in novel ways as it is read in changing times. I read Middlemarch for the first time in quarantine in a world in the throes of a pandemic. This is what reading it in 2020 meant to me.

Reading Middlemarch seemed daunting. I was scared it would be stuffy and inaccessible. I could not have been more wrong. Its characters crave and are plagued with things common to being human: Dorothea's fervent young hopes to lead a life of meaning and purpose, Lydgate's grand career aspirations, Fred Vincy's college drop-out restlessness, Rosamund's exasperating shallowness and vanity. It's a novel about life and community. About the life one hopes for oneself and the life one eventually leads. How fates are shaped by one's community, one's own choices, and chance encounters.

Woolf's quip that Middlemarch is 'the only novel meant for grown-ups' accompanies the novel for a reason. It touches on every aspect of English provincial life: marriage, politics, agriculture, family ties, gossip, religion, inheritances. And it does all this without sacrificing romantic and scandalous intrigue. It also touches on murder, for crying out loud.

I approached the book with a plan: three chapters a day. It turned out to be unnecessary. Middlemarch has every ingredient for a page-turning read: intrigue, intricate character development, and astonishingly rich and eloquent writing. A wordsmith with profound insights on human nature. Eliot weaves personal victories and tragedies through sweeping historical and political changes. Every shade of life, each glimmer of nuance in human thought and emotion are on every page in immediate detail. Eliot shifts from board meeting rooms to parlours with a microscopic eye for the endless permutations of human thought and experience that mesh together into a society; how lives jostle against each other and destinies converge in the confines of a small town. It's eight hundred odd pages of enlightened, sublime writing.

Set over three years, the novel paints a portrait of a town and its inhabitants. Nineteen-year-old Dorothea longs for a life heightened by the pursuit of learning; Twenty-three-year-old Lydgate arrives brimming with ideals to revolutionise medicine. Dorothea presumptuously marries an elderly scholar, Casaubon. Lydgate prematurely marries the town beauty, Rosamund. Dorothea finds herself imprisoned to Causabon's stifling ego and insecurities; Lydgate finds himself unable to pursue his ambitions, imprisoned to petty worries of money and Rosamund's superfluous spending . Eliot tracks the infinitesimal steps that lead to the frustration of youthful aspirations, and the chance encounters that lead to a man's ruin or his salvation.

Middlemarch is filled with the small events that determine the arc of a character's life. It's a study in how one's fate is moulded by those one is surrounded by. My favourite case of this is Caleb Garth's mentorship of Fred Vincy. If Lydgate is a tragic figure whose ambitions are thwarted by his unhappy circumstances, Fred Vincy is his opposite. At the beginning, he is a directionless university dropout who spends his days on horses and gambling. He only knows one thing: that he wants to marry his childhood sweetheart Mary Garth. He falls into debt and, on Mary's father Caleb's security, cannot repay and deprives Mary's brother from his school tuition. He lounges around in the expectation of a hefty allowance from his relation, Featherstone. When this comes to nothing, he is torn: if he were to join the clergy, he would sacrifice a life with Mary and resign himself to a vocation he resented. If he tries to make his own way, he would continue to be an endless disappointment to his father.

Then comes a stroke of luck. He bumps into Caleb and saves his assistant from being attacked by farmhands angry at the development of a railroad. Despite the grief Fred had caused his family through his unpaid debt, Caleb offers him work. In so doing, he offers Fred the best advice on the virtue of hard work I have ever come across:

You must be sure of two things: you must love your work and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else. You must take pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not always be saying 'there's this and there's that - if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it.' No matter what a man is - I wouldn't give two pence for him [...] whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do.

Fred Vincy is ultimately saved by Caleb's belief in him, Mary's longsuffering patience with him, and the Vicar Farebrother, who sacrifices his own chances of happiness with Mary to ensure Fred's. In contrast to Lydgate's disappointing fate, Fred and Mary's eventual happiness, built on the trust and goodwill of generous men, seems to me a lesson in the ability of hard work, humility, and patience to turn one's fortunes around.

I initially found Dorothea's breathless, ardent idealism at the novels' beginnings annoying. But as this weathered through her stifling days with Causabon and her rocky days navigating her unrequited feelings for Ladislaw, her insistence on doing right and her belief in one's ability and duty to make life easier and better for others became enchanting ('What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?') Her constant striving to seek the good in others and to make no exceptions for her own behaviour became a welcomed lens through which to see oneself in relation to the world ('...she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.')

It felt like an anchor, reading Middlemarch during quarantine, when waking up to identical days threatened ennui. Its ever-expanding world and the ever accruing lines of intrigue buoyed me in a sea of uncertainty and boredom, never before had the escape of literature felt more like tonic. The certainty and reliability of Victorian values, gossip, and expectations. The eventuality of how these young lives warp against the harsh reality of their world that abides by established rules and values. Interwoven throughout are gorgeous descriptions of nature in the countryside.

Take this seamless sentence: where the sunlight fell broadly under the budding boughs, bringing the beauties of moss and lichen, and fresh green growths piercing the brown. Everything seemed to know that is was a Sunday.'

Or this glorious one:'Driving was pleasant, for rain in the night had lain the dust, and the blue sky looked far off, away from the region of the great clouds that sailed in masses. The earth looked like a happy place under the vast heavens...'

It was a haven in the midst of a world thrown into chaos, where there seems to be no normal to return to.

Reading Middlemarch in a quarantine bubble was also a comfort and an encouragement. Eliot is generous towards her characters and their flaws. If Dorothea could endure her claustrophobic marriage to Causabon, and find a fulfilling life at Ladislaw's side; if Fred Vincy could make a man of himself from honest work, surely I can weather fourteen days of quarantine, I can build a life beyond the disaster of this pandemic.

I found my copy of Middlemarch two months ago. It was a £2.99 Penguin's Classics' edition from 1994. Folded and tucked between it's yellow, sweet-smelling pages was an essay by Mary Gordon for the New York Times Book Review. In her essay, she gushes over Eliot's genius sentences, the ones that create the 'aha!' effect of reading Middlemarch. 'This is what the world is like' , she writes, 'this is how it is to live.' To my mind, there can be no better description of Eliot's extraordinary chef d'ouevre .