Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)

General

• 9 Eliot tweaking lazy physiognomy description in saying that Celia looks more worldly-wise than D

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