I've been in reading heaven since yesterday. I have discovered George Eliot. Victorian novelists are an arena I've only explored in patches: lots of Thomas Hardy, two of the three Brönte sisters, a little Charles Dickens, no Anthonny Trollope. Does a TV adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters count? And George Eliot, shallow though it seems, somehow those volumes always looked so doorstop-like…
The happy coincidence of a friend's recommendation (I was devastated to realise that I'll never have the chance to read Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda again for the first time,' she mused wistfully) and the lucky find of a secondhand bookstall in Greenwich market selling Deronda, plus the capacious minutes on the Bristol-London train, means that the last few hours I've been immersed in the so-deftly observed world of Gwendolen Harleth as conjured by Eliot. Those 700 odd pages have been transformed from doorstop to doorway…
2 comments:
I know that feeling of envying someone discovering something for the first time. Middlemarch is beyond praise, but you are in for such a treat if you haven't read Trollope before. I've been gradually working my way through the Barsetshire books at the rate of about one a year, and he really is the most delightful and companionable of writers. Sublime.
Hi Gareth,
Well, that's good news! Thank you for the recommendation. You really can't beat a good book, as they say, and – although I knew Eliot and Trollope were out there – suddenly to have discovered their books is pretty exciting. What have I been doing for the last 20 years?!
I'll put the Barsetshire books on my to-read list.
R
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