George Eliot, aka Mary Ann Evans, "Middlemarch"

What a terrific book!

I made no headway with this in my youth, partly because it begins with one of the subjects I find it painful to read about: the clumsy efforts of a doomed suitor. (He makes so little headway with the woman he is wooing that she assumes he must really be there to court her sister.) I got an audio copy a couple of years ago but I had just done two other 19th-century novels and set it aside out of Victorian fatigue.

But this time I finished it, and loved it.

I already said here, apropos of The War of the End of the World, that I like novels by people who know things. Mary Ann Evans knew a lot. She had the abilty that we look for in a domestic novelist, to precisely dissect and describe the feelings of people for each other in many relationships. The description of the Brooke sisters is magnificent, and the various courtships and marriages are each different from the others but all compelling.

But so knows so much more. She gives us the political wrangling surrounding the great Reform Bill of 1832, agricultural laborers chasing off surveyors for the first long-distance railroads, progress in medical science and the rivalries it creates among doctors, reforming landlords, and scholarly disputes. Her first publication was actually a translation of Strauss' anti-miraculous The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1846), and she knows enough about historians and religious scholarship to give us one of the best pedants in literature, and show clearly why his effort to produce The Key to All Mythologies was doomed. 

I wonder why there isn't a better television version? There is a BBC one from the 90s but my female relatives dismiss it.