In a personal profile that appeared in The New Yorker magazine last year, the article author said that her father re-read "Middlemarch" every year. Never having read the novel, that intrigued me. We have a very old paperback copy, but the little print doesn't work well for me at age 75, so I added it to one of my Kindles. So glad I did.
Action-wise, not an awful lot happens in a very long book, and most of what happens is confined to a small and isolated district of England in the 1830s. But each character (and there are a great many of them) are so well-drawn that each comes to life. Every character is flawed in a fundamental way, but I came to care about each of them. The level of insight into personality and character is continually astounding, and the writing is unfailingly graceful and lacking in cliche. I have a personal dictum that there is more truth in good fiction than in most factual books, and "Middlemarch" is evidence for that.
I haven't said anything about the plot. It's thin and soapy, and takes its sweet time getting where George Eliot takes it. If there's a theme, it lies in each of several characters making a bad personal decision early on that shapes his or her life for most of the book. Their lives weave together as they deal with, and attempt to recover from, those decisions. In proper Victorian fashion, chance plays a big role both in moving the story along and in resolving the tensions Eliot sets up. The people are so real and ultimately endearing that the contrivances of the plot are irrelevant.
In summary, don't read this for the action; read it for the people. After you've read it, take a look at "Middlemarch and Me", by Rebecca Mead, in the February 7, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
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