On ‘Middlemarch’ and grown-ups

Every time I put down George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a quote by Virginia Woolf on the back cover admonishes me. Woolf famously lauded Eliot and Middlemarch especially, calling it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Naturally, publishers have splashed this quote on every edition of the novel as a ringing endorsement. It is, in fact, the only quote from a critic that is printed on the back of my version.

I can’t help but wonder if that’s true, and, if so, what it even means. Full disclosure: I have only read to the halfway mark, and so my wondering might be resolved in various ways in the next 400 pages or so (yikes). This is an enormous book with a sweeping scope that encompasses romance, politics, religion and morality while trying to present three compelling plots.

Right now, I am in the midst of a scene in which Mr. Brooke is trying to scold a tenant whose son has poached some sort of small animal — the tenant is not taking kindly to being told how to raise his son. While one feels for Mr. Brooke, who clearly views himself as a benevolent father-type figure to his tenant farmers, one can’t help but recognize that Mr. Brooke’s bumbling in this case is perhaps not as benign as first thought. The tenant farmer is incredibly angry, so much so that the reader comes to realize that Mr. Brooke is a terrible landlord, and his estate is in desperate need of management. He “collects his own rents,” as opposed to having an agent to do it for him, and this is viewed as a symbol of his lack of knowledge of how to run a successful country estate.

Wedding Cake for Breakfast

I have read this book three times now, and responded emotionally to different parts every single time. Wedding Cake for Breakfast is a collection of essays from both obscure and well-known writers about the first year of marriage. While that may sound like a very specific topic, the stories are as diverse as the marriages they represent; everything from unexpected May-December flings to green card marriages to third marriages overshadowed by the death of a previous spouse.

The first time I read this book, I badly wanted to be married. I spent a lot of time in my therapist’s office trying to figure out why my then-boyfriend hadn’t proposed. Unbeknownst to me, he was (in his wonderfully methodical way) already planning the proposal it would take him a year to fully execute.

I wanted to be married, I expected to be married, and I read this book as a primer. What could I expect once the wedding was over? What did people regret about their weddings? Did the relationships completely change? My main takeaways were that 1) people were more likely to regret big, fussy weddings than tiny ones and 2) marriage was awesome. I read it on my Kindle so no one could see what I was reading and feel sorry for the girl whose boyfriend wouldn’t propose.

The second time I read it, I was deep into my first year of marriage. Happy ending! But frankly, I was frustrated. I loved my husband — love was never an issue. But I secretly had hoped getting married would fix everything that was difficult in our relationship. We’d communicate better; we’d create some sort of chore system that would leave our house sparkling clean with little effort; the dog would suddenly become perfectly behaved, even.

Of course, none of this happened. We were married — why wasn’t everything perfect?