When my very good friend of 30 years, Luke Coles, told me he was going to read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, I was immediately intrigued. I had, of course, long heard of the novel. It was a favourite of my former spouse, and many times I looked at it on the bookshelf with a thought that one day I might tackle it.
“Why don’t we both read it and trade notes along the way?” I suggested.
Luke and I have enjoyed “trading notes” for the better part of three decades. Everything from relationships and family to careers and ambitions have been a part of our regular steak night agenda since the late 1990s. Doing so while reading Middlemarch would just add a bit more fodder to our meaningful discussions about life that have been the hallmark of an enduring male friendship.
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“For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them in much the same way as the tie of their cravats,” Eliot wrote, “there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.” We could discuss that one for a long time.
So, we had a deal – one that would also serve to help keep us motivated. Eliot’s Victorian masterpiece is 800-plus pages, after all, and was published in 1871-72. Undertaking such a read would not be easy, at least for us. In a world where men don’t read much fiction we were swimming upstream but determined to finish a novel that some have noted is more praised than read.
“I’m not sure I would get through it on my own, at least not in any meaningful way,” Luke said.
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I have no shame in admitting it took me six months to finish Middlemarch, a tale comprising more than 300,000 words. My mother threw a bit of shade by saying I must not have enjoyed it since it took me that long to read it. I protested that I had read half a dozen non-fiction titles while I was keeping pace with Dorothea Brooke, Will Ladislaw and the judging folks who live in Middlemarch.
I did enjoy it, but I am a reader who always has a novel and a work of non-fiction competing for attention on my bedside table. I am also the co-host of a podcast covering works in Canadian history, so my reading dance card is often full. Novels remain a great escape and an important part of my life, but this tome required a level of consistency I did not always have.
There is a connective tissue you become a part of when reading Middlemarch. For Luke, it was as obvious as the book he was holding in his hands, a copy that belonged to his now-deceased father, Don Coles, the Governor-General’s Award-winning poet from Toronto. It contained the marginal notations of his dad, who had read the book more than once – something not lost on Luke.
“I caught myself wondering what he noticed at different points in his life, and whether some of the lines would have landed for him the way they did for me,” Luke shared in an e-mail.
Lines such as: “People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools’ caps unawares.” Eliot was astute at exposing human frailty, self-deception and the way we often live a life without thinking about others. For example, sharing our favourite insights from the novel was an excellent idea, but my tardy reading schedule threw a spanner in the works. Luke ended up exchanging more with his mother than me, a happenstance that brought the two together in a special way.
“It felt like I was reporting back from a place she knows well,” he said.
From 2014: How George Eliot’s Middlemarch taught Rebecca Mead about life (over and over again)
But the connective tissue of Middlemarch runs beyond the personal. Once read, a classic novel starts to show up everywhere – similar to how you start seeing the same car model on every street once you start shopping for one.
In the first book I picked up after finishing Middlemarch – The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers – a character jokes about a women’s book club having read it “or part of Middlemarch, as the case may be.” And Margaret Atwood writes about Middlemarch in her memoir, recounting how she taught it in her Victorian literature course at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. The course was offered twice: once at night to an older demographic and a second time during the day to younger students.
“The younger group hated it,” she wrote. “The characters in it made the wrong decisions and married the wrong people, and they themselves were never going to make the same mistakes. The older group loved it: the characters in it made the wrong decisions and married the wrong people – it was just like real life.”
The recollection echoed Luke’s comment in which he wondered how lines from novels land at different points in our lives, a notion underscored by the great Robertson Davies, who advised that “a truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
Portrait of George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, at age 30 by Alexandre-Louis-François d’Albert-Durade.François D'Albert Durade/Supplied
Eliot addresses many different stages in life, including significant commentary on marriage, “the bourne of so many narratives.” She calls the institution “the beginning of the home epic, the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.” I will admit to some middle-aged melancholy as I underlined that passage, one that would likely have gone unnoticed had I read this as an undergraduate in Atwood’s Victorian literature class.
Is anyone even still teaching Middlemarch? I was fortunate to have a delightful conversation with Rohan Maitzen, an associate professor who teaches a Victorian fiction class at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Her enthusiasm for talking about the novel was infectious, and our dialogue reminded me about the power of literature to engage. I was curious about her thoughts on how this book might appeal to men, seeing as how the vast majority of students in her class are women.
“This really is a book that is about men, as well as women,” she said. “There is the sense of different possibilities for both men and women who are too ambitious and too aspirational. It highlights how men, too, can find their ambitions curtailed despite having all the advantages on their side.”
Luke and I would have been avid participants in Maitzen’s classroom. If there was one through line to our two-man book club (apart from occasional harrumphs about the labyrinth of characters) it was our mutual admiration for Eliot’s ability to regularly throw down a phrase of insight so compelling that it made us stop, record and share. And that really is the essence of fiction – to force us to look at ourselves and to look at others.
“I think I expected to admire it more than enjoy it,” Luke told me. “But somewhere along the way that shifted. Not in a dramatic way, more that I started to recognize people in it, and then bits of myself. That’s probably when it moved from being a book I should read to something I was actually into.”
Call up your best pal. Challenge him to read Middlemarch. Reap the rewards.
J.D.M. Stewart is the author The Prime Ministers: Canada’s Leaders and the Nation They Shaped