Middlemarch and other stories

I was rewarded for my diligent scanning of the TV schedules when finding the 1994 dramatisation of Middlemarch by Andrew Davies on Wednesday night and the next two. It is a masterpiece of the genre.

I 'read' it as part of Victorian Lit at university but much of it passed me by, aged 19, it being far too mature a book for someone so jejune. Re-reading it several years ago led me into a year of George Eliot and I appreciated it a bit more but still this easy-access serving of it 'on a plate' is very much worth having. I realize it is not, as someone told me last year, 'just a soap opera' but one of the most complete novels in the language although I'll never have been adequately prepared to talk about it with our tutor, Prof. David Carroll, whose major achievement was editing the variorum edition.  

My sympathies are first with the gentle scholar, Edward Casaubon, and for a bit longer than they should be when he is revealed as a moody obsessive whose work is an escape from life designed not to have an ending. Dorothea is compromised between her frustrated devotion to him and the more dangerous glamour of Ladislaw. Her sister, Celia, is characterised in the succinct line that he is 'fonder of geraniums', in which the lack of ambition is a safeguard against hope, ambition and disappointment.

Juliet Aubrey is surely a bit too good-looking to be Dorothea, who must in some part be the scholarly Mary Ann Evans, but needs must in a TV drama and actors need to be much sexier than the characters they are playing or else there's a danger we won't sympathize with them enough. 

 

I remember Prof. Carroll telling us how he realized that Middlemarch would be his life's work and it must be great to have such a project. At Lancaster, a bit of a low grade backwater in the university system in the late 1970's, one could hardly blame the academic staff for using the opportunity to pursue careers beyond the teaching of students who hadn't been accepted by anywhere more prestigious. Richard Dutton worked on Ben Jonson, Norman Sherry on Graham Greene and Bill Murray talked about whatever he felt like which was often himself. 

I like the idea of having such a specialist area but there is too much of everything to spend too much time on one thing. Three books arrived this week that immediately go ahead of the two remaining Henry James books left over from that over-ordering. It turned out to be easy to decide in what order to read them.

The Anatomy of Melancholy can be looked at from time to time, in extracts, maybe by the bedside, and is too daunting to read from beginning to end. Considered by some 'the best book ever written', one needs to know about it in the knowledge that one is never going to know all about it. 

A biography is sometimes a better way into a writer than reading their books and Wittgenstein is likely to be a paragon example of that. So, potentially heavy going as it may be, it was obvious that The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain was the one to pick up first. 

A good decision. It will be good to have a review of a brand new novel on here shortly and then, quite likely, look through the back catalogue of Rose Tremain to find what I'd been missing.