Books I love: "Middlemarch"

George Eliot has done it again.

I wrote earlier about how Eliot's "Silas Marner" brought me so much healing after a late pregnancy loss in early 2011.  Well, here I am three years later, face another (although very different) pregnancy loss, and this time Eliot's "Middlemarch" proved to be some of the best medicine I could find!

I've posted pictures today from a recent weekend of fun at my parents' house.
Here's Meghan an Nick at the bonfire.  Doesn't he look tired?

I actually came across "Middlemarch" at our library's annual used book sale.  I knew nothing about it -- I just saw it was by Eliot, thought fondly of "Silas Marner", and pick it up, along with her book "The Mill and the Floss."

"Middlemarch" is a very big book; my copy boasts nearly 800 pages of rather small type.

But once I got into it, I knew I would see it through.  (I also knew it would take a little effort to "get into it", but I was hooked much more quickly than I expected for such a large book!)  I cared so much about the characters; so many of them were so much like me.

Eliot knows human nature, and relationships.  What I found most compelling in this book was the many different ways she portrayed marriage.  The expectations we have prior to marriage versus its reality; the ways in which we can support or isolate one another; the beauty and strength that can be found when we continue to love, despite the fact that we are both weak and imperfect people.

For instance, when one character learns her husband is very ill, she goes to comfort him, but he refuses to accept her comfort, or even a soft touch.  Eliot writes, "It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are for ever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness...."

My Dad and I won the First-Annual "Golden Shoe" Horseshoe Tournament.
My husband Doug made this trophy to add to the fun.

This is so true!  The small things, like accepting or rejecting simple gestures of love, can do much to soften or harden our hearts toward each other.  And in "Middlemarch," we get to see characters struggle -- really struggle -- with how to (or even if to) continue extending such gestures, when they seem certain to be rebuffed.  Who hasn't struggled at times, in any relationship, to extend what sometimes seems like unmerited generosity.  Here, and in many other places, Eliot speaks not only to marriage, but to all human relationships!

Here is a line from one character I greatly enjoyed (but who also had his imperfections), speaking about work: "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."

Surely I am not the only stay-at-home mom who sometimes, not necessarily with wanting to do something else, but with feeling I should be doing something more.  And, at times, a mother may or may not be called to do something more.  But at no point is her role of motherhood lacking in honor.

And then this last line -- just one more I want to share, hoping I haven't created any spoilers: "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you or me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

"Middlemarch" encouraged me because imperfect characters achieved some very good things, through their hearts that desired good (although they often fell far short of the good they originally envisioned; such is life, right?), through their self-sacrifice, and through their attention to relationships.  Relationships do matter, and this book shows us that.  It encourages me to think all those "hidden" things do matter -- wiping bottoms with a smile, putting a healthy dinner on the table, using the suffering of a miscarriage to pray for those we love.