“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”
1 likes
Work
<p><i>Middlemarch</i>, by <b>George Eliot</b>, is part of the<i>Barnes & Noble Classics</i> series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of <i>Barnes & Noble Classics</i>: </p> <ul> <li>New introductions commissioned from today''s top writers and scholars</li> <li>Biographies of the authors</li> <li>Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events</li> <li>Footnotes and endnotes</li> <li>Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work</li> <li>Comments by other famous authors</li> <li>Study questions to challenge the reader''s viewpoints and expectations</li> <li>Bibliographies for further reading</li> <li>Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate</li> </ul> All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. <i>Barnes & Noble Classics </i>pulls together a constellation of influences--biographical, historical, and literary--to enrich each reader''s understanding of these enduring works. Often called the greatest nineteenth-century British novelist, <b>George Eliot</b> (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) created in <i>Middlemarch</i> a vast panorama of life in a provincial Midlands town. At the story''s center stands the intellectual and idealistic Dorothea Brooke--a character who in many ways resembles Eliot herself. But the very qualities that set Dorothea apart from the materialistic, mean-spirited society around her also lead her into a disastrous marriage with a man she mistakes for her soul mate. In a parallel story, young doctor Tertius Lydgate, who is equally idealistic, falls in love with the pretty but vain and superficial Rosamund Vincy, whom he marries to his ruin. <p>Eliot surrounds her main figures with a gallery of characters drawn from every social class, from laborers and shopkeepers to the rising middle class to members of the wealthy, landed gentry. Together they form an extraordinarily rich and precisely detailed portrait of English provincial life in the 1830s. But Dorothea''s and Lydgate''s struggles to retain their moral integrity in the midst of temptation and tragedy remind us that their world is very much like our own. Strikingly modern in its painful ironies and psychological insight, <i>Middlemarch</i> was pivotal in the shaping of twentieth-century literary realism. </p><p><b>Lynne Sharon Schwartz</b> is the author of fourteen books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including the novels <i>Disturbances in the Field, Leaving Brooklyn</i>, and <i>In the Family Way</i>, and the memoir <i>Ruined by Reading</i>. Her poetry collection <i>In Solitary</i> and her translation of <i>A Place to Live: Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg</i> appeared in 2002.</p>
Quotes
Showing 1-16 of 16
George Eliot
Canonical work source
“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”
1 likes
“She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.”
0 likes
“If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice a...”
0 likes
“The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we...”
0 likes
“The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in...”
0 likes
“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
0 likes
“Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”
0 likes
“I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.”
0 likes
“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chord...”
0 likes
“Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new tal...”
0 likes
“Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatibl...”
0 likes
“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
0 likes
“It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.”
0 likes
“When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.”
0 likes
“Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.”
0 likes
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you...”
0 likes