Difference between revisions of "Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)"

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(General)
(General)
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==General==
 
==General==
*set 1829-32, pre [[Important Victorian legislation|Reform Act]]
+
*set 1829-32, pre [[Important Victorian Legislation|Reform Act]]
 
*9 Eliot tweaking lazy physiognomy description in saying that Celia looks more worldly-wise than D
 
*9 Eliot tweaking lazy physiognomy description in saying that Celia looks more worldly-wise than D
 
*26-7 D's wonderful reverie leading to "I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here -- now -- in England"
 
*26-7 D's wonderful reverie leading to "I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here -- now -- in England"

Revision as of 14:33, 21 September 2017

General

  • set 1829-32, pre Reform Act
  • 9 Eliot tweaking lazy physiognomy description in saying that Celia looks more worldly-wise than D
  • 26-7 D's wonderful reverie leading to "I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here -- now -- in England"

Theme tracking

Reading/writing

  • 18 D offering to organize her uncle's papers and indirectly Casaubon's, like a secretary
    • i bet secretarial manuals would be a good source for practical information organization
  • 23 contrast between Casaubon's reading notebooks and "the shallows of ladies'-school literature"

Materiality

  • 8 interesting (and useful for me) that the gendered question of idealism vs materialism is pitched in Dorothea as between books and fabric
She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in guimp [fabric trimmings] and artificial protrusions of drapery.
  • 20 Celia "notions and scruples were like spilt needles"
  • 23 again this pattern of very tangible figures for the world of ideas: "he thinks a whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror"

Shakespeare references

  • 7 epigram to ch 1 from Beaumont and Fletcher, which she almost certainly knew from Dyce's eds