Book Three
Middlemarch
About the book
Middlemarch was published in eight parts between December 1871 and December 1872. Mary Ann Evans, writing as George Eliot, was fifty-two when she finished it. She was living unmarried with the writer George Henry Lewes, an arrangement that scandalised Victorian society and was the most settled partnership of her life. Subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life”, the novel is set in a fictional Midlands town in the years around the 1832 Reform Act. Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”.
Introduction by Robbie
My own reading experience of Middlemarch was interesting. I made several runs at it and never somehow felt compelled enough to press on. But then, as is good with long novels, I tried again on holiday (I’m honestly not sure now where I was), and the novel, with time to find its rhythms properly, absolutely took me up and I loved it.
I know that my mother had always loved George Eliot. Reading for her now, I was struck by how brilliantly Eliot writes conversations between people: those little bids we make to be understood, to show some contrition, that are misunderstood or ignored. How we can be talking to each other but not really hearing. It is a thought that comes up in George Saunders’ astonishing book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and I hope I will get permission to include that one day too.
Listen to the complete Middlemarch reading either directly here on the site or on your preferred platform
Episodes
182 recordings · Listen in order or pick a chapter