Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
From Commonplace Book
General
- 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
