You should read Middlemarch

Fri, 13 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On my first attempt at Middlemarch, I made it about a hundred pages before Googling “does Middlemarch suck”, “does Middlemarch actually suck”, “do only pretentious people like Middlemarch”, and, my favorite, “emperor has no clothes Middlemarch”.

Middlemarch is a book you’re supposed to love. It’s the Godfather of novels. Virginia Woolf once famously called it a novel for grown-ups, which I take to mean “you’re an immature loser if you don’t like Middlemarch.” To me, though, it felt like one of those Lifetime movies my mother used to watch, where every time I walked into the room, a bunch of women were sitting around a dining room table talking and sometimes even tutting.

It didn’t help that I’d just finished Les Misérables. You know when you’re a kid and some other kid gets up in front of the class and absolutely nails their recitation, and you start praying you don’t have to go next? Well, Middlemarch had to go next. Les Mis was possibly my favorite book of all time. Shit happens in Les Mis. There’s grand moral philosophy, treatises on Parisian sewers, heroes, villains, and beautifully ornate prose that carries you across it all. How could a book about boring people doing nothing compete with that?

The opening of Middlemarch is predictable. Two wealthy sisters discussing the two most important things women can apparently talk about: jewelry and men. Dorothea immediately establishes that she isn’t like other girls. She’s above the jewelry, and when it comes to men, she prefers the older, scholarly type to the handsome young suitor. You’ve heard this story before. Yay, yet another romance about a woman choosing between two men who are really just “symbols of society’s competing expectations of women.” Hallmark recycles some version of it every holiday.

And Lydgate, the novel’s other protagonist, is no better. An urbane young doctor arrives in a small town, armed with modern scientific methods and determined to remain above the locals’ petty squabbles. But I can already see where this is going: with the help of an attractive local woman, he’ll eventually learn to appreciate the wisdom of small-town life and its homespun ways. And we readers will be treated to that familiar brand of humanities-trained equivocation that barely conceals its anti-intellectualism. Must all arrogance be humbled, even when the confidence behind it has been earned? Isn’t this just the plot of Doc Hollywood? Or Cars?

Or take Caleb Garth. I winced when he first appeared. Our stereotypical poor-but-honest pushover, so generous that he sometimes neglected not just his own interests but those of his family. You know how this goes. Some sophisticated novelist is going to make a fool of him, dress it up as profound social criticism, and call it wisdom. Or worse, justice. If he’s lucky, he’ll get some character development and learn to stop being such a pushover. If he’s not, King Joffrey will have him beheaded. Because apparently no one is good or noble. If they are, they’re a sucker.

And maybe none of this would have bothered me so much if the book hadn’t seemed so pleased with itself. I love Top Gun: Maverick, for heaven’s sake. I’m practically a connoisseur of cheesy entertainment. Familiar stories aren’t the problem. What I can’t stand is the feeling of being talked down to. How can Eliot sincerely write: “Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.” Is it profound, or does it just sound profound? It all struck me as that elitist nothingness of a certain kind of literary writing popular amongst East Coast generational wealth, where the point isn’t what’s being said, but that you get it, and, more precisely, making sure everyone else knows you get it.

My second attempt at Middlemarch came after reading Dostoevsky’s classics The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. It was a mistake to read them in that order, since Brothers K is such a better novel than Crime and Punishment, but still, that’s like comparing a three-Michelin-star restaurant to a two-Michelin-star restaurant. I started over with Middlemarch and made it barely thirty pages before zoning out and thinking about how dear Alyosha would do in Middlemarch. Would he be bored too, or was he too good for that? I’d gone from the psychological drama of Russian literature, the loud angst of honor and guilt, to the murmur of English gentry complaining about social standing and who’s invited to dinner.

Before my third attempt, I went on a nineteenth-century women writers kick. I love Emma. It’s easy, it’s satisfying, it’s gentle. Pride and Prejudice and Little Women were natural next steps, a little less rom-com, a little more slice of life, but still fun.

Then there was Jane Eyre. Like Twilight’s odd great-aunt, a book with a protagonist as naïve as Emma, as proud as Elizabeth Bennet, and as tempestuous as Jo March. But without any of their redeeming charms. Just a whole lot of self-righteousness. And yet I kept reading. Maybe I was just hate-reading, hoping everything would go tits up for her by the end. I won’t spoil it, but let’s say I was disappointed.

Coming fresh off of Jane Eyre, I made my third attempt. And reading the same words as before, there was a beauty there. A beauty I’d missed, and I wasn’t sure why. Had I just not been paying attention? I could say I appreciated the character development, but that feels insufficient. These felt like people whose lives I was peering into, not characters written for the page.

It was more than that, though. Dorothea seemed to embody everything that annoyed me about Jane Eyre. Except Eliot seemed to recognize it too. And I felt seen. Someone gets it. Jane Eyre sucks, and George Eliot knows why.

But Eliot played a trick on me. She drew me in, let me feel smug in my judgment, and then somehow made me love Dorothea anyway. Not just because she changed, which she did, but because of who she’d been the entire time. And Lydgate! Poor stupid Lydgate. I came away aspiring to be Caleb Garth, and suspecting Eliot was thinking too much of someone like me when she wrote Lydgate. What is going on here?

In plenty of novels, characters are just there to move the plot along. In better ones, they grow, like Elizabeth Bennet. Sometimes there’s a big revelation that makes you see someone in a completely different light, like Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester (iykyk).

But Eliot does something else. She just keeps showing you more of these people. And somehow, without some dramatic transformation or big secret (mostly…) coming out, things I was so sure about a hundred pages ago start looking different. I found myself reconsidering my judgments, sometimes even feeling bad for being so judgey in the first place. The characters grow, but maybe more importantly, I felt myself growing as a reader.

Oh, Dorothea! She’s naïve, and idealistic, and good-hearted. Sometimes her ideals blind her to what’s right in front of her, while at other times she’s the only one who sees clearly through the fog of cynicism. I kept expecting the world to knock some sense into her, but instead discovered how much strength it takes to live up to one’s ideals. And, as much as it pains me to admit, it made me wonder if I might have been oh so very, very microscopically unfair to Jane Eyre.

Eliot lets us see people beyond the filters we so often impose, not as we wish our heroes to be or curse our enemies to be. Flaws are allowed to be flaws. Goodness is allowed to be goodness. She complicates our moral judgments without turning everyone into morally gray mush. She shows us that our judgments might not only be wrong, but make it harder for us to recognize when we’re wrong. Yet in revealing how unreliable our judgments can be, she never suggests that the distinctions we’re trying to make are meaningless. The difficulty of seeing what is right doesn’t mean there’s nothing right to see.

And, sadly, the more I try to explain what Eliot is doing, the more inadequate I feel. It’s like having the most mind-blowingly delicious tiramisu of your life, and your review is: “It’s good. Tastes like coffee.”

I’m left with the unresolved question: How did I ever not love Middlemarch? It was right there the whole time. By the end, I was Googling “sequel to Middlemarch”, “what did George Eliot write besides Middlemarch”, and “what to read when suffering from Middlemarch withdrawals”.

You should read Middlemarch. It’s good.

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You should read Middlemarch