Middlemarch

"I really like Middlemarch. It's very wise, and you're also learning."

"I'm willing to say it's the best English language novel period, without question. George Eliot is probably the smartest girl in the room ever as a novelist, and she has a great heart."

"Yes. I think one does often turn to novelists to get a sense of other people’s lives. It was written in 1871, but it’s written about a period 40 or so years before, the period when Ada Lovelace flourished. It’s about an intelligent woman trapped by the expectations and the circumstances of the society she finds herself in. She has this great belief in the intellectual project of Mr Casaubon, the clergyman she marries, and then her belief in that gradually dissolves. It’s about provincial society and how stultifying provincial society can be. When you read her letters, you see the sadness and—to some extent—misery of Lovelace’s later life. One of her early biographies has a lengthy appendix with a posthumous diagnosis of manic depression. Posthumous medical diagnoses are considered rather poor form for biographers these days. But she wasn’t actually the happy, crazy person of the Lovelace and Babbage book: that’s why it’s rather powerful because it recreates her as this person who does find fulfilment in all these crazy ideas. “She was thwarted by society’s expectations of her, her family’s expectations of her, and the expectations she had formed of herself” But, in reality, she was thwarted by society’s expectations of her, her family’s expectations of her, and the expectations she had formed of herself. That’s why Middlemarch sets the context and helps you understand what it was like to be Lovelace, if you like. And it also sets a context of the changes that technology was bringing. It’s a time of huge ferment with the coming of the railways, the coming of the telegraph, with old certainties being challenged. And that’s the world in which Lovelace lived. While Lovelace and her mother were passionate anti-slavery campaigners, they were not supporters of giving women the vote. As to frustration, she certainly writes, a number of times, of her ambition to make a major scientific or mathematical contribution. Towards the end of her life she was thinking about what she called a ‘calculus of the nervous system’, intended to be some way of modelling the workings of the brain, but there is no evidence she developed the idea. Perhaps she had in mind the calculus Babbage developed for representing the mechanisms of his engines, which he thought of as his finest work. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Throughout her life Ada Lovelace suffered from ill health, and was eventually diagnosed with uterine cancer. She was prescribed increasing quantities of narcotics, accompanied by alcohol to counter the side effects. This may explain the wild language of some of her private letters, particularly to her mother, where she made ambitious claims about her mathematical legacy. We don’t really know what form of legacy she was thinking of: textbooks and translations, like her friend Mary Somerville; or mathematical papers in her own right, like her teacher De Morgan; or unpublished but far-reaching innovations, like Babbage’s mechanical notation; or broader reflections, like Chambers’ Vestiges ; or even some form of ‘mathematical poetry’. Lovelace certainly had many advantages in pursuing her scientific interests: access to education and books; talent and ambition; support from husband and mother; and wealth and social standing. The greatest obstacle may have been a lack of mentors to work with her as intellectual equals, offering criticism as well as the flattery due to a countess; and reconciling her talent and ambition with her health problems, at a time when it was widely believed that good health was essential for mathematical exertion. Yes, although Eliot’s own life story was one of defying convention, in a way that Lovelace did not, for whatever reasons. Did she and Ada Lovelace ever meet? They were about the same age, but it seems unlikely. Did Lovelace meet the somewhat older Mary Shelley ? It’s circumstantially possible, but there is no evidence. Exactly. Coleridge was fascinated by mathematics. Shelley was obsessed with the powers of electricity, and that’s central to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Robert Southey and Humphrey Davy were friends. Lovelace wrote to her mother, “Will you give me poetical science?” It’s tantalising that only a page of the letter survives, so we don’t know the date or context. The phrase has been used to re-enforce sexist stereotypes, playing up Lovelace’s supposed imaginative and poetical contribution to the 1843 paper, and discounting her technical and mathematical ability. For intellectuals at the time, like Lovelace, there wasn’t much of a contradiction."

"Another from me! Middlemarch is staggeringly brilliant, but it’s a labour of love—it’ll take even the most diligent weeks to read. For those new to George Eliot and a little intimidated by this hefty brick, The Mill on the Floss is shorter and lovely, as is Adam Bede , also very readable. But just like there’s nothing wrong with getting to know Henry James by reading The Portrait of a Lady (rather than the shorter Daisy Miller or Washington Square ), there’s nothing wrong with starting with this one. Unlike Ulysses , the prose of this one isn’t difficult, per se ; on the contrary, George Eliot’s macrocosmic fictional world, perched on the cusp of the Victorian Industrial Revolution, is warm, welcoming, approachable, and enveloping. It’s one thing to enjoy a book, and quite another to to cherish the time spent with a set of characters. I’m envious of anyone getting to know Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, Mary Garth and Casaubon for the first time. If I could wipe my memory clean and go back and reread it fresh, I would. —Stephanie Kelley, Literary Editor"

"It’s partly the sheer ambition of it. Eliot was absolutely determined to paint a serious, detailed picture of provincial life. The other radical thing was to do it from the point of view of a disappointed woman. Dorothea is a very enthralling portrait. It’s not that explicit. It’s more about the choices that you might make as a woman—or indeed as a man. Yes. That’s another element of the book, that it has a very strong moral core. This is why someone like F. R. Leavis chose it in The Great Tradition . That’s a new development. Until Eliot’s time, the primary consideration was to be entertaining. Virginia Woolf famously said Middlemarch was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” I think that’s quite a good description actually. It’s also an amazing portrait of a moment, like a cathedral. It’s vast and seems to extend in every direction when you’re in it."

"I came to this at exactly the right moment in my life. I was in my early twenties and hungry for long, character-driven narratives. Dorothea Brooke was a wonder to me—Tolstoyan in her richness, truly good without a forced or irritating saintliness."

"Mary Ann Evans, who went by the pen name George Eliot, was not only a great novelist but also a fine philosopher, as American philosopher Rebecca Goldstein put it in her interview with us on the best philosophical novels. Not surprisingly, Middlemarch has been recommended multiple times on Five Books, whether as one of the very best novels ever written in English, or as one of the most helpful books for insight into the ethical dilemmas and pressures of our daily lives. For these reasons, deputy editor Cal Flyn chose to publish it for the Five Books Essentials range, though it’s also long (800+ pages), so also quite a good one to read as an ebook for convenience purposes. OK, it’s true that it’s not strictly necessary to read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty as an ebook, but we’ve included it because it is the first ebook published by Five Books. Our deputy editor Cal Flyn, who runs the ‘Five Books Essentials’ publishing project, chose it because it’s the book that’s been most frequently recommended by experts on Five Books. For the ebook, she’s written a really nice introduction, pulling together some of the reasons why it’s considered so important. And it remains timely: as the democratic world continues to impose heavy restrictions on citizens’ freedoms to prevent the spread of disease, On Liberty ’s arguments about the legitimate extent of government action may take on a fresh importance."

"It’s like several novels in one. It began as two separate novels, one about the town of Middlemarch and its new doctor Lydgate, and another about Dorothea, a young woman who has great intelligence and even greater emotional needs and aspirations. George Eliot started to join these separate novels together, and to bring in new elements, so that there are four or five things going on at the same time. The wonderful thing about that is the novel stops being linear. Suddenly you move from one character or partnership to another, across the novel rather than along. It is a web shape. While you’re thinking about the relationship of Dorothea and her scholar husband Casaubon, you are suddenly taken back to the relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond, who (like Hetty in Adam Bede ) is a beautiful but selfish young woman. It’s as if you are being taught to move from one life to another and you become, as a reader, a sort of novelist: somebody who can understand different people across different classes, ages and genders. The idea is that, while you read successively, the events being narrated happen simultaneously. It makes you appreciate that there are so many lives interconnected and separated going on at the same time in this little world. It’s only a provincial town, but it’s an image of the whole world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That’s why George Eliot has the metaphor of the web—of things interconnecting across different stories. That is the complicated form of Middlemarch which, I would say, must be the greatest novel in the language. Because it’s a novel that you would go to in terms of ordinary troubles, troubles of vocation, or marriage, all sorts of purpose and loss and frustration. Here is Dorothea who, in an earlier age, might have been a great religious figure, but there’s no religion and there’s no role for women. So, what happens to that content in a person when they haven’t got form? Here’s Lydgate, a doctor with a strong sense of vocation but with certain weaknesses, particularly sexual weaknesses. Will he manage to do the great thing that he wants to do? It’s not as if ordinary people simply begin ordinary and remain ordinary. There are extraordinary things that happen, and there are also great disappointments. It’s the hidden story of what doesn’t happen that constantly runs throughout the novel. In terms of the relationship between Dorothea and Casaubon, Dorothea makes a bad choice in marrying him. She stupidly choses to marry an aged scholar who isn’t anything like the idol she had been looking for. And clearly, sexually, he’s as impotent as he is in his work which he never finally produces. You feel for Dorothea because Casaubon is unattractive and he’s horrible to her. Yet, George Eliot also manages to make you feel for Casaubon. It’s an almost impossible feat. This is how your mind is going to be expanded by reading the novel: you feel for Dorothea, you feel for Casaubon, and you feel for both of them almost simultaneously, in the space between them all at the same time. She begins a chapter by simply asking: ‘but why always Dorothea?’ All the neighbours think that Casaubon is dull and unattractive: Dorothea’s sister objects to his blinking eyes and white moles. But then George Eliot intervenes, and says suppose we turn from outside estimates to wonder what is actually going on within Casaubon. Suddenly you see, for example, that his unkindness to Dorothea when she offers to help him with his work does not constitute a simple rejection. It comes out of his fear that she knows that he’s never going to be able to finish this work. She doesn’t think that—it is his own fear, projected. So, they are people who should be within inches of each other within their marriage, but are separated across a vast gulf of misunderstanding because her love seems to him like criticism, and his criticism of her seems to be hatred rather than something pitiful. Dorothea, in the midst of her victimisation, chooses to help him. This is not female submissiveness. She doesn’t love him, she only pities him, but she realises that she is the greater body. “It’s as if you are being taught to move from one life to another and you become, as a reader, a sort of novelist: somebody who can understand different people across different classes, ages and genders” Casaubon is going to die, and Dorothea wishes to be ‘the mercy’ for his sorrows. She doesn’t say ‘merciful towards’. She thinks she should be ‘the mercy’, as if there were a thing called mercy that can exist in the world, and should be embodied. So, she thinks that whatever has happened to her, she will be the mercy for Casaubon, as George Eliot often is for her characters. Yes. Hetty would read novels, if she read at all, to have the fantasy of running off with Arthur. When you read Middlemarch —this novel for grown-ups, as Virginia Woolf says—you get the sense of a complicated human geometry: you move around different angles, perspectives and dimensions. Beneath the conscious behaviour, or the words that are spoken, lies the depth of the unconscious, the small things that happen in transition. So, suddenly, you’ve got the most powerful working model in fiction of what human life is like. It’s as if somehow George Eliot has found the building blocks—the DNA—of existence. She can see all of that framework, all the underlying stuff, all the different connections, as well as producing the individuality of feeling within each separate person. This amounts to an almost superhuman activity: to be able to feel with people, but to criticise them; to be able to imagine radically different people, while seeing how radically different they are; to be able to put them together in a marriage and feel for them both at the same time. It’s constantly creating a content that bursts through simple containers and makes you have to think more difficult things than are quite comfortable. To give just one example, in the marriage between Lydgate and Rosamond, the doctor knows they’re in financial difficulties and asks his wife to economise. Rosamond doesn’t want to do that and she takes no notice. Lydgate desperately wants to keep their marriage together although he knows that it is falling apart. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . We read that ‘his marriage would be a mere piece of bitter irony if they could not go on loving each other’. And then comes this devastating sentence: ‘In marriage, the certainty, “She will never love me much”, is easier to bear than the fear, “I shall love her no more”’. He daren’t think to himself that he will love her no more. He daren’t even think the sentences that George Eliot’s syntax is producing, though they are there in his own consciousness. So, instead of thinking that he will love her no more, he has to think that ‘She will never love me much’. Isn’t it wonderful that that ‘much’ would be the most powerful, hurtful thought, the one he has to bear? It’s not the black-and-white extreme that she will never love him at all, but rather a deep grey middle-area that is typical of Middlemarch : ‘never much’. Those are the terrible compromises that people have to live with."

"Both the first two books that I’ve chosen— Middlemarch and Moby Dick, by Herman Melville—grew out of their authors’ preoccupations with Spinoza. George Eliot produced the first English translation of The Ethics . Because of an altercation between her partner, George Henry Lewes, and her publisher, it wasn’t actually published until 1978. Eliot has that intimate, translator’s knowledge of Spinoza, and she takes issue with him on precisely the point that would lead her to write a philosophical novel rather than a philosophical treatise. Not only is Eliot a great moral thinker—you feel the movement of a philosophically sophisticated ethicist moving behind the scenes of Middlemarch— but it’s also about the use of literature in moving us morally forward. This is an aspect that Middlemarch shares with all the novels I’ve chosen. I began my second career as a novelist in spite of my disapproving philosophical other half. All the five novels I’ve chosen were important in persuading that other half that it had a lot to learn and to shut up and listen. “There has been a professionalization of philosophical thinking that is completely separate from the question of how we live our lives. So you can be a brilliant ethicist and a complete asshole.” There are so many ways in which Eliot is a Spinozist and so, for her, the general problem is the same as for Spinoza, which is, ‘What do we do about human nature? We are stuck with human nature. How can we nevertheless make moral progress, become something more, given the smallness of human nature?’ Eliot has this wonderful quotation in Middlemarch : “We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.” In The Ethics, Spinoza famously says that the only way to move forward is through pure reason: “For the eyes of the mind, whereby it sees and observes things, are none other than proofs.” So there’s his answer to the question that Eliot also addresses. Spinoza doesn’t discount emotion—in fact to make cognitive progress is to make emotional progress is to make moral progress—they’re all collapsed together for him, as well as for Eliot. But for Spinoza, it has to begin with tracing out and replicating, in our minds, the pure logical connections that constitute the nature of reality. It is this pure logical deduction and objectivity that will transform our emotions and expand us so that we take in more and more of reality, and become less identified with the very small creatures that we are. For George Eliot, what is morally relevant is not your making your way into an impersonally objective reality constituted of logical connections, but rather into the reality of others — to gain some insight into what it is like to be them. That’s the knowledge that’s essential for moral progress. For both of them moral progress is cognitive, but the relevant knowledge is different, as is the associated cognitive means. Eliot makes imagination central, which also makes the narrative arts central. In Spinoza, the arts are not particularly central. They are mere pleasures. He liked theatre and mentions it on a list of innocent pleasures that “none but the superstitious” (i.e. the religious) would condemn: nice clothes, beautiful plants, perfume, and going to the theatre. I think that’s the only time he mentions the arts. But for George Eliot, the artistic imagination is key to the answer she offers to the question she shares with Spinoza: how do we make progress beyond our deplorably small selves? She’s trying to morally transform us through her fiction. So this is very ambitious literature, coming out of philosophical conviction. It’s not only my favourite philosophical novel, it’s my favourite novel. I teach it again and again and each time I am flabbergasted by what she’s able to accomplish and what my students get out of it. Both of them promise us that reading their works in the right way will be a deeply emotional experience. That reading Eliot’s fiction arouses our emotions isn’t surprising, but The Ethics ? But actually when you get to Part 5 and the kind of transcendence that it both deduces and induces—viewing things sub specie aeternitatis —you can lose your sense of self in the grandeur of it all, and it is profoundly emotional. But there is this substantive question that lies between the two books: what is the kind of knowledge that morally transforms us and how do we acquire it? For Spinoza it’s objective reality itself; only reality in its infinite complexity is powerful enough to enlarge the smallness of our nature, and for George Eliot the essential knowledge comes about through the imaginative grasping of others, who are no larger than we are. “She makes the limits of imagination—not the limits of reason— essential to how much moral progress a character can make.” Middlemarch is deeply ethical. The differences between her characters are ethical differences which are shown as differences in the limits of their capacity for sympathetic imagination. All of her characters are driven by ‘conatus,’ the drive to persist and flourish that Spinoza talked about. They’re after their own wellbeing, but, for some of them, their characters are such that they are able to imagine themselves into others. They are the characters who undergo moral progress and moral expansion. She makes the limits of imagination—not the limits of reason— essential to how much moral progress a character can make. Dorothea Brooke, who is her heroine, is a very real, and very flawed, character, especially in the beginning. She undergoes morally transformative experiences, and they’re experiences of imagining the inner reality of others, in particular the sad, small character of Casaubon, whom she marries. He’s a scholar, a dried-up pedant with no imagination whatsoever. Eliot is also demonstrating the dangers of the life of ethically unimaginative scholarship, of sterile pedantry. It’s a great novel. Every time I re-read it I think, ‘Gee, I know this by heart. Am I going to have the full experience?’ And I always do: I always have the huge experience and find something else to admire in it."

"It is a fantastic book. I think Virginia Woolf described it as the only English novel written for grown-ups. It’s got everything – it’s beautifully plotted, the characters are wonderfully drawn. When I come to the end of a semester I always treat myself to a big, long classic novel, and I just reread Middlemarch . What struck me is what a wonderful psychologist George Eliot is. One very nice thing about her is that, for instance, Casaubon, the dry, self-centred scholar who Dorothea marries, and the banker, Bulstrode, who is a pious hypocrite… she calls on the reader to pity them, because she sees they’re trapped in their way of being. No one in the book likes Casaubon – except Dorothea – and I don’t think any reader ever likes him. But several times she says, pity him, because he’s stuck. I love the sympathy with which she portrays characters that, from a moral point of view, we have to be very critical of. Casaubon has got no business asking Dorothea to marry him – it’s very much a self-centred, self-interested request. Eliot is very good at showing how people act against their best interests because of subtle social pressures that lead them a certain way. One of the central characters is Lydgate, the doctor, who marries a rather shallow woman. He’s trapped into this marriage and they get into debt. He’s a noble character, who is ambitious in his profession, who wants to do good work in the world, and he finds himself dragged down. With the best will in the world, and very noble intentions, he can’t prevent the subtle social pressures of people’s expectations of him from dragging him down. Another thing I noticed in the novel is that time and again social expectations prevent people from talking directly to others about difficult matters, such as whether they love each other or are critical of each other. But when they do, when they break through those social expectations, then something good happens. Lydgate, for example, is suspected of having taken a bribe from the banker Bulstrode. Dorothea crosses the threshold of social convention and says to him: “Just tell me directly. What happened?” She’s warned against doing this by her friends, who say, “You can’t do that.” But she does, and the fact she is very open and honest and truthful makes a big difference to Lydgate’s life. That happens several times in the book. The most admirable characters are people like Caleb Garth, who always speaks very directly and openly. For him, there is no fannying around, no dithering, no masking of intentions or euphemisms. It’s true they are a lot more relaxed and we probably find it easier today than in the 19th century to be straightforward and open because of the growing informality of social life – something I talk about in my book. There’s still a fair bit to be learned from Middlemarch though. The moral I’m drawing isn’t that everyone in all cases should always be straightforward and open and blunt. There are times when you have to make difficult judgements about what will be useful, and what won’t be. What Eliot is getting at, the need to cultivate the difficult, practical wisdom of knowing when to be blunt and truthful and when to hold back, still applies today. I’m pretty chicken about that kind of thing. It all depends on the relationship. In the case of my wife, if she asks me, I just tell her the truth as I see it. She’s got used to that. She doesn’t like it; she’ll get annoyed when she asks me about a sweater and I say, “Nah. It makes you look fat.” She might protest a little, but she’ll take note. But that kind of honesty is only possible in certain relationships. If it was someone I knew less well, I wouldn’t say that necessarily. If it were someone who I thought was sensitive, someone I thought it would hurt, I’d perhaps be less honest. I wouldn’t want to hurt someone. I have a difficult time lying, but yes, I’d probably say, “Oh yeah, it’s nice…” Another thing about Middlemarch I noticed as I reread it is how acute George Eliot is on the subject of self-deception. Almost everyone is guilty of self-deception, and there are about a dozen different forms of self-deception in the book. Dorothea’s self-deception comes through a kind of idealism, Rosamond’s through callow self-centredness, and Bulstrode’s is a kind of religious hypocrisy. This is interesting to me, because there is a lot of philosophical literature on self-deception. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a lot about it. There’s a kind of mystery as to how we’re able to lie to ourselves given that we actually know the truth in some sense. Eliot offers not so much an analysis of self-deception as a very clever, insightful portrayal of the different forms it takes, and how it’s often linked to people’s self-interest. In the book, often the solution comes from someone else. Self-deception tends to be shattered by other people, or by circumstances. Bulstrode’s is broken by circumstances; he’s exposed as a crook. But Rosamond’s self-deception never does get shattered. Yes, but fortunately he dies. One very interesting moment in the book is when he asks her to make him a promise about how she will behave after he dies. She agonises over whether she should make the promise. She thinks the promise is that she will carry on with his work, which she thinks is pointless, though in fact the promise is probably that she won’t ever marry Will Ladislaw. She goes out to the garden, having resolved to make the promise, and she finds Casaubon dead. If Dorothea hadn’t found him dead, she would have made the promise, and then, being Dorothea, she would have felt obliged to keep that promise. And she would have spent years and years engaged in an activity she thought was pointless, just because she made a promise to a dead man. George Eliot really invites us there to say what we think: “Don’t do it, Dorothea, don’t make the promise! And if you do, don’t keep it!”"

"Many people will be familiar with this book. The main story concerns a young woman named Dorothea who is hungry for an intellectually and spiritually expansive life but not sure how to secure it. Given the time she lives in, the early nineteenth century, her first thought is to marry the man who can teach her the most, and this leads her to an unfortunate marriage with the dry pedant Mr. Casaubon. Casaubon turns out to be not only an impoverished thinker but a rigid and small-souled person. Sterile scholarship can be just another form of self-deception. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter George Eliot was not only a great novelist but a fine philosopher. You feel, underneath the workings of the plot, a superb philosophical mind thinking things out in an original and moving way. The fact that her writing is moving, working us over with the artistry of the novelist, is essential to her conception. “George Eliot was not only a great novelist but a fine philosopher.” Only recently, when I was writing a chapter for the Oxford Handbook on Spinoza on the philosopher’s literary influences, did I discover that Eliot had translated Spinoza’s work from the Latin into English. She is, in many ways, deeply influenced by Spinoza, with the intimate knowledge of his work that a translator must have. But she is also post-Hume. She knows the ethical gap between rational demonstrations and ethical actions. She offers up her chosen art form, the novel, to stir in us the requisite passions for the ethical life. She demonstrates, in the very way that we react to her novel, that the development of the empathetic moral imagination is necessary to fully acknowledge and care about the reality of others."

"What is it about this “study” of provincial life, as George Eliot called it in her subtitle? What continues to draw readers to the story of Dorothea Brooke’s miserable marriage? Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as one of the few English novels written for grownup people. It is such a richly layered text, with oddball characters desperately trying to live in meaningful ways. Middlemarch takes up more than just romantic entanglements and failed marriages. It reminds us of the challenges facing women living in that era, especially if they wanted their lives to be of any consequence at all. Dorothea Brooke wants to apply her intellect and energy to something beyond life at Lowick Manor (has there ever been a more telling name for an estate?), but she can find no outlets for her passions. “I am always at Lowick,” she tells Will Ladislaw, who provides an instant translation: “That is a dreadful imprisonment.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’m not alone in my love for the last sentence of Middlemarch . Eliot tells us that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.” Despite all the obstacles to “doing good,” some courageous souls still manage to be profoundly philanthropic in the best sense of the term, that is, caring for others and invested in the welfare of those around them. There has been a seismic shift in our understanding of the hero/heroine archetype. A new generation of writers has turned our attention to the poetry of the ancient world and explored how we have created gospel truths, as it were, out of myths and epics that are mysterious, complex, and multilayered. Just as Angela Carter and other writers turned fairy tales upside down and twisted them inside out in the 1970s and onward, women writers today have taken up myths and epic poetry, tapping the Muse on the shoulder and channelling new versions of old stories, telling them now from the point of view of the women in them. I think here of Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiade , which must have been the moving force behind works like Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls , Madeline Miller’s Circe , Ursula LeGuin’s Lavinia , and Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships . Ancient tales were once treated with reverence, but now we recognize that they were just one version of a story, a single perspective that blocked us from seeing all the other ways of looking at war, sacrifice, enslavement, and carnage. Joseph Campbell told us about the hero’s journey and its attendant ordeals in The Hero with a Thousand Faces . While reading Campbell, it dawned on me that all the virtues Campbell celebrated in his pantheon of heroic men were demonized in women. Look at Eve and Pandora and how their adventurous curiosity led to trouble in paradise. Pandora lifts the lid of a jar, and what does she do but release sin and evil into the world? Eve bites into forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and she too brings sin and evil into the world, making us all subject to mortality. She becomes known as a seductive temptress in search of carnal knowledge more than anything else. There’s another way of looking at Pandora and Eve and, in my book, they are cultural heroines who embody curiosity and remind us of the value of hope and, yes, change in our fragile world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Because women were confined to domestic spaces, they were rarely able to undertake the hero’s journey. But that does not mean that they were without a mission, for they wove tapestries, spun yarns, and plotted stories to get the truth out and to broadcast injury and harm. They were determined not just to survive but to mend, repair, and heal. Scheherazade is exemplary in this regard. She volunteers to marry Shahryar, a ruler who was betrayed by his wife and who, ever since has been wedding a succession of women, each beheaded the morning after. To save her neck, Scheherazade tells cliffhangers, stories that keep her alive each night. After some years, she triumphs, not just surviving but also convincing her husband to abandon his violent ways and live in domestic contentment."

"A work of genius. But more important—and from a purely selfish point of view—a woman wrote it. That might seem ridiculous to male writers, but a man never has to think twice about the gender of genius. He’s got too many examples on his side of the fence. Eliot was the first woman I read who could go toe-to-toe with, say, Tolstoy. I was 15. Since then, I’ve learned how many grand achievements in the novel have been female, but when I was a teenager, that was news to me."

"For no-weight-gain inspiration, I reread aloud the first chapters of certain favorite novels."

"That is so exactly like being asked which is your favorite child. 'Middlemarch,' because I think of it as perfection, although I am not as enamored of Eliot’s other work?"

"I'd start with George Eliot because Middlemarch is my favorite book, and she's said to have been sort of magical as a conversationalist."

"I just reread George Eliot's Middlemarch."

"Maybe something like “Middlemarch,” just to take his mind off things and remind him that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”"

"I get to revisit 19th-century novels such as 'Pride and Prejudice,' 'The Portrait of a Lady' and 'Middlemarch.'"

"Suddenly, magically, on the morning of Jan. 20, all this space in my brain freed up and I was able to settle right back in. I decided to read a few chapters every morning before I did anything else."

"During Covid I finally sat down to read both Middlemarch and War and Peace and it was such a luxury."

"It was so moving to look for what this beloved person had loved when she was in her 20s — almost like getting to hang out with her younger self."

""Middlemarch," by George Eliot — one of the books that cracked me open."

""Middlemarch"! Can you believe I read the whole thing? When I finished it I expected a Publishers Clearing House-type van to pull up to my house and some British people to pop out and present me with a medal and a case of sherry."

""Middlemarch," because Virginia Woolf was on to something when she called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.""

"I read George Eliot's "Middlemarch" a few years ago and although there were moments where I got lost in the language, I loved the book."

"I would venture to say "Middlemarch," because its philosophical and penetrating character studies might resonate more deeply for a reader with decades of perspective and experience."

"I read "Middlemarch," by George Eliot, at least once a year because I want to curl up inside Eliot's warm intelligence."

"On a list of favorites I'd put everything from some of the great Victorian novels, such as George Eliot's "Middlemarch.""

""Middlemarch." If historians could show the dynamic interaction of people in a society the way George Eliot does, we'd have a much better understanding of humanity."

"I think she would have to be my favorite heroine. (Just as "Middlemarch" is my favorite novel.)"