Middlemarch Book Club: Part One

Spinoza, Feuerbach, and Rufus Sewell:

George Eliot’s dream team

Middlemarch (1872) is the greatest novel by Mary Ann Evans, the woman who called herself George Eliot. But, in encouraging news for all the novelists out there — it was by no means her first. She took a long run-up, with five previous novels and a book of starter-stories under her belt, plus translations of three obscure books of religious philosophy from German and Latin. And she edited a major literary magazine in which she knocked out numerous essays and reviews.

Eliot’s translations are seriously hard-core, as you’ll learn in our intro episode where we explain what Mary Ann did with her time before creating Dorothea Brooke (leading, inevitably, to the casting of Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw).   

Baruch Spinoza, Ludwig Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss were all philosophers of religion. Each of them in one way or another promoted ideas of free belief, free love and a progressive version of Christianity that understood God and the natural world as one. 

Throw in the fact that George Eliot was partial to married men and radical politics, and we find ourselves in the company of a fearless social provocateur.

But Eliot didn’t just sit around smoking and wearing black. She had a great sense of humor, as this hilarious letter reveals, in which she writes a mock-scene of meeting with a stuffy German scholar, Professor Bücherwurm [bookworm] of Moderig [moldy] University. He’s just like Mr. Casaubon, the ghoulish scholar Dorothea falls for in Middlemarch, ‘a tall, gaunt personage with huge cheek bones, dull grey eyes, hair of a very light neutral tint, un grand nez retroussé, and very black teeth.’

In Eliot’s parody, the Prof. tells her that he’s looking for a wife who can translate German. ‘I find them very abundant, but I require, besides the ability to translate, a decided ugliness of person … After the most toilsome inquiries I have been referred to you, Madam, as possessing the required combination of attributes.’

It’s a bit heartbreaking, that Eliot made fun of her own famously bad looks. But she’s so funny, so clever and quick that it’s impossible not to be captivated by her, now as then.

Notes from Book One:

The first episode of our Middlemarch Book Club is out now! Listen here.

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Super-smart listener feedback from the subscribers:

we're learning so much from your chat!

Loved hearing from Anne, who has been reading Middlemarch regularly since 1970. High-five to Judith’s shout-out to Shelley and the Romantic poets, on whom, she reminds us, Eliot based Will Ladislaw. Gold star for Michael, who spots the Milton reference in Eliot’s description of Casaubon’s research as “what indeed had been attempted before…” – in Paradise Lost, Milton says he’s writing “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.”