Eliot, George "Silas Marner"

Eliot, George "Silas Marner" - 1861

I have read several novels by George Eliot and liked them all. So, it was no surprise that I also enjoyed reading about Silas Marner and his life. There are a lot of books set in this location and time-frame (English Midlands, French wars of the early 1800's) and I always compare this author to Charles Dickens who lived at the same time and described similar lives.

But, you can tell that this is a woman who wrote the book, she makes different observations, I don't want to say they are deeper or better, just different. And thereby, she adds a lot to the understanding of people from that era.

Maybe we could say this book is about karma. As Oscar Wilde said: "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily That is what fiction means." Stories like this one confirm this.

I will certainly have to read more books by George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans).

From the back cover:

"Although the shortest of George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England - and how he is restored to life by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie. Silas Marner is a tender and moving tale of sin and repentance set in a vanished rural world and holds the reader's attention until the last page as Eppie's bonds of affection for Silas are put to the test."

Eliot, George "The Mill on the Floss"

Eliot, George "The Mill on the Floss" - 1860

As a big admirer of classic literature, I always look forward to another one I have not read, yet. George Eliot has given us many novels, and I have read "Middlemarch" and "Daniel Deronda", so far. I enjoyed both of them, and I also liked this novel.

The first part was particularly interesting, a story about a childhood in the early 19th century, not a poor family, but also not a particularly wealthy one. You might want to call them middle class nowadays.

There is a lot in this book about the education at the time but it is also a great story about a family relationship, not just the sibling rivalry between Maggie Tulliver, our protagonist, and her brother Tom but also that of her parents and their respective siblings. As so often when reading a classic story, I think that not much has changed.

Then there is the love triangle which we see in many novels but here it is especially poignant, makes us think a lot what it means to fall in love with the right person who also falls in love with you and is free. How many coincidences have to come together for a great relationship!

George Eliot was a very early feminist and she cannot deny this in either of her novels. Same as George (or Mary Ann Evans), Maggie struggles with the limitations that are put on girls. In that respect she very much resembles my favourite author, Jane Austen.

The mill plays a huge role in the whole story but the Floss seems to flow aside the novel for a long long time until it comes back in the end to bind the beginning and end together. Not a happy ending, the story didn't really "flow" towards that but I didn't expect this one.

A great read.

From the back cover: 

 

"George Eliot drew on her own anguished childhood when she depicted the stormy relationship between Maggie and Tom Tulliver. Maggie’s often tormented battle to do her duty and belong on the one hand, and to be  herself, wild and natural, on the other, propels her from one crisis to another. As the Tulliver fortunes decline and fall, the rift between Maggie and her family becomes almost irreconcilable. But Maggie’s biggest mistake of all is to fall in love with Stephen Guest who is engaged to another woman.

Both a sharp and observant picture of English rural life and a profoundly convincing analysis of a woman’s psychology, The Mill on the Floss is a novel that tackles the complexities of morality versus desire."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2026.

Pool, Daniel "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew"

Pool, Daniel "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist - the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England" - 1993

Even though this book is a non-fiction one, the first part reads like a novel. If, like me, you love your English classics, especially Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins and similar authors, this is the book for you. It's not just about food but, as the second part of the title already suggests, about every important or not so important fact about life in the 19th century in England. If you always wanted to know how they play whist, what a Rear Admiral of the White is, why the ladies need all sorts of clothing that we are not aware of today and why Mr. Collins in Pride & Prejudice has to inherit the Bennett estate rather than the daughters of the family, this book gives you all the explanations.

The authors of that era wrote, same as most authors of any era, for their contemporaries. After all, they were the ones who would pay for their work. They didn't want to hear explanations about the food they ate or the celebrations they had, they already knew the background. Now you can, too. I have read a lot of that literature and about the background, so I had learnt a lot before I picked up this book but I never found a piece that was as explicit as this one. It has so many details.

Daniel Pool has done a lot of research and came up with a great book about that time of life in England. Even though he wrote this for Americans in the first place (and it does come up quite frequently), it is also interesting for the rest of us. While the first part is divided into chapters where everything from politics and public life up to customs and rituals are explained in a narrative form, the second part is a dictionary, a reference book that you can always go back to and check out the exact job description of a scullery maid or what the difference was between a physician and an apothecary. And is a baron more than a marquis or less (he is lower) and what on earth is the difference between a curate and a perpetual curate? You will find all the answers to those questions you never asked yourself in this book.

Any work about everyday life in Regency or Victorian England couldn't be more fascinating. A great companion to your English classics.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover: 

 

"For every frustrated reader of the great nineteenth-century English novels of Austen, Trollope, Dickens, or the Brontës who has ever wondered whether a duke outranked an earl, when to yell "Tally Ho!" at a fox hunt, or how one landed in "debtor's prison," here is a "delightful reader's companion that lights up the literary dark" (The New York Times). 

This fascinating, lively guide clarifies the sometimes bizarre maze of rules, regulations, and customs that governed everyday life in Victorian England. Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the "plums" in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the Church of England, sex, Parliament, dinner parties, country house visiting, and a host of other aspects of nineteenth-century English life -- both "upstairs" and "downstairs." 

An illuminating glossary gives at a glance the meaning and significance of terms ranging from "ague" to "wainscoting," the specifics of the currency system, and a lively host of other details and curiosities of the day."

Eliot, George "Daniel Deronda"

Eliot, George "Daniel Deronda" - 1876

I like the style of the 19th century. I especially like George Eliot's style. She describes the characters extremely well, the problems between the different people are very interesting and everyone seems so alive. There are people whom you will like and others whom you will dislike. The novel gives a lot of information about life at the time, a lot of history, the problem the Jews had all through the centuries. A very interesting book, a lot to read, about 750 pages.

George Eliot said herself that she expected a stronger resistance to her book because of the Jewish element. She wanted to depict the Jews with sympathy and understanding and felt that her readers would dislike this. Throughout the whole book I was amazed how much George Eliot knew about the Jews and the problems they were facing, she almost predicted WWII.

I loved this book.

We discussed this in our international book club in June 2003.
We also read "Middlemarch" by the same author.

From the back cover: 

"George Eliot's final novel and her most ambitious work, Daniel Deronda contrasts the moral laxity of the British aristocracy with the dedicated fervor of Jewish nationalists. Crushed by a loveless marriage to the cruel and arrogant Grandcourt, Gwendolen Harleth seeks salvation in the deeply spiritual and altruistic Daniel Deronda. But Deronda, profoundly affected by the discovery of his Jewish ancestry, is ultimately too committed to his own cultural awakening to save Gwendolen from despair."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2024.

Eliot, George "Middlemarch"

Eliot, George "Middlemarch" - 1871-72

"One of the classic novels of English literature and was admired by Virginia Woolf as one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. A critical introduction, and historical documents, pertaining to medical reform, religious freedom, and the advent of the railroads."

Next to Jane Austen, George Eliot alias Marian Evans is one of my favourite classic British authors. I love classics. English is not my mother tongue but I just could read English classics all the time. I've been reading classics with my various book clubs, one of them in England. And I was usually the one finding it easy whereas my British friends thought it hard. Someone thought it might be that the sentences are so long and it's not like that any more in contemporary English whereas German is full of them.

I think "Middlemarch" is more difficult than, let's say, a Jane Austen. There are more people, for a start, and more people are important to the whole book. But it's also the language. So, while I really loved "Middlemarch" and would recommend reading it, I wouldn't consider George Eliot to be the easiest of writers.

Maybe that's why I love her novels so much, and "Middlemarch" is probably my favourite. Dorothea Brooke, the main character, has been wonderfully described. There is so much she has to deal with.

She could have been a great woman in our time (as the author) with the possibilities we have today but had to fight all her life to be heard. Almost every subject relevant for the time is touched, medical reform, industrialisation, religious thinking, women's rights, a great description of the change of society from the old times to our modern world. There is everything in this book, good and evil, guilt, affections, love, loneliness, hope, happiness, envy, jealousy, doubt, you name it … A great read!

I thought Dorothea was the best character, not just because she also happened to be the main one. She was so ahead of her time and so strong. And she knew what she wanted. I really admired her and felt sorry for her at the same time. Most of the choices in her life were well tought of, she knew what she was doing, yet, nothing turned out the way she expected it, mainly because the time was not ready for such an incredible woman like Dorothea. Apparently, there's a lot of Marian Evans in Dorothea Brooke.

All in all, a wonderful book, a must for anyone who loves classic novels. Most of our book club members agreed with me, just some found a little too difficult.

The BBC made this into a nice mini-series in 1994.

We discussed this in our international book club in June 2007.

From the back cover:

"'People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are'.

George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories entwine, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2024.

We also read "Daniel Deronda" by the same author.