MIDDLEMARCH by GEORGE ELIOT

"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge."

PR: 9/10

Reading George Eilot's Middlemarch gives you not only the pleasure but the mental suspense and pleasure. No wonder one of the greatest novel of the Victorian era under the pen name, Mary Ann Evans, wrote one heck of a masterpiece.

Call it a novel for grownups, or a cult novel, but this never ceases to grab your attention.

The story is set in a fictional town of Middlemarch and the story, or rather the "study" is about the people living their. Its a provincial study of the lives of people, their goodness, misery, fraud, sins, characters, &c, Eliot tries her best not to miss any point describing the human behavior.

The fluent change of perspective in the narration is just so beautiful that one couldn't praise enough. It felt like she held the characters as puppets and was constantly pouring out her soul from one puppet to another.

The prime characters of this story are three couples: Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw, Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate, and, Fred Vincy and Mary Garth.

The key plot revolves around these six characters and the in the end she executes her novel with the Bulstrode and Raffles' affair.

Every page was golden crisp filled with her thoroughly justified evaluation of the characteristics of her character. There weren't much dialogues as much as there were psychological and charactorial evaluation, which makes it a wonderful delight for me. She takes her time pacing and formulating each chapter which she places one by one with such grand ardour that in the end everything falls into pieces.

I wouldn't say it was an easy read because it certainly was not. It was more of a study than a read, if anything. But I would greatly suggest to any Literature lover to go for it.

Thanks for reading!