A review by sophieskilling
Middlemarch by George Eliot

3.5

listen i’m a jane austen stan and in my eyes she can do no wrong, but since all of her novels end in marriage, there’s definitely a question in what happens after the fact - enter middlemarch ! 

with dorothea getting married off almost immediately, a lot of this novel was an exploration into the downfalls of a courtship system that rushes into marriage and views that as the end point and i very much enjoyed that. george eliot is a smart lady with interesting things to say!!

my favourite thing about this was the way my love for the characters crept up on me. with such a long book it sometimes felt that not everything needed to be there, until something happening to a character would hit me right in the heart because george eliot had been secretly building my care for them through all these pages i’d read. i especially loved the girls - my love for flawed and almost unlikeable female characters remains strong in rosamund and celia - but eliot was so good at showing sympathy for all characters, even ones i didn’t want to like at all thank u!! (i’m looking at u, casaubon)

she was also especially good at including those universal emotions that come from just being human, proving that humans have always been humans that we can relate to even in very different circumstances - which is one of the main reasons i read classics <3