Originally Posted by
Jim Kelly
I finished MIDDLEMARCH last week and I was very proud of myself. Back in the 1980s, George Eliot's THE MILL ON THE FLOSS was on the reading list for a university course and I struggled. In fact, I never read the whole thing, just skimmed it, and had to fake it when we discussed the novel in class. I've had MIDDLEMARCH on my bookshelf for a good thirty years and always feared cracking it open. But during the pandemic I've gotten around to reading books I've had for a long time and never read, so I thought I'd give MIDDLEMARCH a go. It was tough--as I wrote to a friend, you could time an egg on how long it takes to get from the beginning of a sentence to the end--but once I got into it, I read it fairly quickly (for someone of my slow reading speed).
I didn't like how a few of the characters ended up. She does that thing in the finale where she tells you what happened to them later in life--and I don't think the novel needed that. Once a writer has told their story, they need to get out and let readers imagine for themselves where the characters could go from there.