Middlemarch

"If I had to take one thing to a desert island? Well, look, I would take water. Also you’ve got to take a book, and it would be [Middlemarch] because it’s a book of infinite depth."

"It took me too long to appreciate the subtlety and vision of Eliot [pen name for Mary Ann Evans] and the slow-burning pleasures of her storytelling. The rapturous intensity (and specificity) of the prose is formally stunning and deeply pleasurable."

"Glorious, sprawling, generous. It makes you wish you had not judged characters so quickly and that you could grow old with all of them. I read somewhere that it is a novel for adults, and it is, truly. It is a book I hope to read at every decade of my life, because I think each time it will have something new to teach me."

"One of the greatest books ever written by a woman, especially in those early days. Although Mary Anne Evans gave herself a male pen name, she showed incredible ambition and scope in her writing—the world she created, the characters she imagined. I love that line in the book that reads: “The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you Hebrew, if you wished it.” It was hard to be a woman in those days, but her storytelling was exceptional."

"I was required to read Middlemarch for a Victorian Lit class, and I groaned about it the whole time. But when I got to the very last page, it suddenly sank in for me, and I started weeping. Throughout that whole book, I’d been judgmental of the characters’ small, mundane worries and that last page made me realize that that was like, the point. The unvisited tombs! Just gorgeous."

"Despite its grand place in the literary canon, ‘Middlemarch’ is really a rich, gossipy boxed set of a novel. I first read this as a teenager in short bursts nightly with a torch after lights-out, and it gripped me like a soap opera. The foolishness of the human condition, the urgency of its whims and fancies, and the often blinding need to find meaning are unsparingly chronicled in this feast of a book."