![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. In an 1856 review essay that doubled as a manifesto, she proclaimed that How can this be? Sympathy, after all, not suffering, is the structuring principle of Eliot’s ethics as well as her fiction. But beyond its many beauties lurks a disquieting conclusion: that misery is the price we must pay for morality. Middlemarch is rightly beloved for its psychological acuity, wide-ranging social commentary, and philosophical insight. ![]() No, the menace of Middlemarch lies in its depths, not its breadth: there’s a dark shadow behind the humane wisdom and ironic wit that otherwise characterize this panoramic story of English country life that Virginia Woolf called “the only English novel written for grown-up people.” Perhaps Woolf’s enigmatic remark (which every critic since has felt entitled to turn to her own purposes, so why not I?) signals that she too felt uneasy about the novel, that she detected in it truths too painful for the short-sighted complacency of youth. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is kind of a terrifying book - and I don’t mean because of its length, though at 800 pages it is one of the longest novels in the English canon. The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision. Her Hands Full of Sugar-Plums: The Miserable Morality of Middlemarch ![]()
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