·
What
is the significance of the nature of Casaubon’s work A Key to all Mythologies? If
Casaubon’s abortive magnum opus had been, say, a survey of soil composition in
England, how would that have affected the novel?
·
Jerome
Thale in The Novels of George Eliot (Columbia
University Press, 1959) writes “Aspiration in Middlemarch is both noble and
ridiculous.” Is this valid? What aspirations do the many different
characters have?
·
In
Jennifer Uglow’s George Eliot (Virago,
1987), she points out that Eliot poses the question “why we never tire of ‘telling over and over again how a man comes
to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted
from her’ yet are comparatively uninterested in an intellectual passion like
Lydgate’s?” What is your answer for
Eliot?
·
The
last sentence of Middlemarch:
“But
the effect 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 and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who
lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Of this, Rebecca Mead (My Life in Middlemarch) says, “A vein of melancholy runs through
the sentence.” Do you agree?
