Registration has concluded. A Newberry Library Adult Education Class. Choose between two online sections, Wednesdays or Thursdays 2:00-4:00pm (CT), March 5/6 – April 23/24. Registration information here.
Spend some quality time with a timeless classic.
This class explores George Eliot’s multi-layered story of love, loss, ambition, and achievement in manageable weekly reading installments. Our progressive, serial discussions—with no spoilers—will produce a wide-ranging and in-depth look at Eliot’s literary craft, as well as the novelist’s challenging insights into character, social roles, culture, science, and art. Weekly discussions will be supplemented with images and film clips. Eight sessions.
Materials List
Middlemarch, by George Eliot. Oxford World’s Classics Edition. ISBN: 978-0198815518.
Other materials will be made available by email and brought to the seminar sessions.
For the first session, please read only the novel’s Prelude and Book One: Miss Brooke (to page 112). Please do not read the introduction.
Class Description
George Eliot’s Middlemarch has been a popular and critical success ever since its publication in 1872. In fact, it was a success even before its full publication in 1872, since it was serialized in eight bimonthly installments beginning the year before. Victorian readers of this 800-page work enjoyed and absorbed the story for over a year, discussing its gradual unfolding with friends and family and anticipating the turns each new installment would take. Eliot herself advocated for the serial reading format as a way of enhancing a reader’s experience, once writing her publisher to remark, “You may imagine how little satisfaction I get from people who mean to please me by saying that they shall wait till Middlemarch is finished and then sit up to read it ‘at one go-off.’”
Eliot divided Middlemarch into eight “books” of approximately 110 pages each, and these installments naturally form the framework of our course readings. In addition, the first session will focus carefully on the novel’s initial pages as an opportunity to introduce some background to the Victorian era, take stock of themes that readers see emerging, and, importantly, become acquainted with the novel’s sensitive, complex, and influential prose style. Thereafter, each weekly will primarily discuss the features, plot developments, and specific themes of the installment at hand, and will also refer to shorter works of Victorian literature.
Middlemarch interweaves the events and fates of several characters living in provincial England in the early nineteenth century, but the novel’s themes—and their effect on generations of readers—range from matters of individual and social identity to scientific and philosophical investigation. This novel, as Eliot saw it, was painted on a “big canvas,” and our class sessions will allow for both close-up analysis of its parts and broader views of its remarkable landscape.
In this way, participants will be invited to develop an ongoing dialogue with a tremendous amount of material regarding Eliot’s novel and Victorian culture. I feel that serial reading and discussion is a unique process that, step-by-step, prompts lively and thoughtful consideration and commentary on specific issues, recurring images, and opinions that evolve over the course of reading. Moreover, since all good novels actually teach readers how to read them, installments allow readers to benefit from these reading lessons early and make use of the experience when it counts—while reading.
In advance of each session I will distribute an optional “study guide” in which I offer suggestions (while avoiding spoilers) for upcoming plot points and issues that readers should keep an eye on. I also include selected quotations from the novel to consider, as well as selected quotations from critical works, past and present.
The class will also highlight images from the Newberry Library’s complete set of the original installments of Middlemarch.
Schedule
Session One
The novel’s Prelude and Book One
Please do not read the preface or introduction.
Theme: The patterns of Middlemarch
Session Two
Book Two: Old and Young
Theme: Memory, ambition, and art
Session Three
Book Three: Waiting for Death
Theme: Victorian science
Session Four
Book Four: Three Love Problems
Theme: Victorians and gender
Session Five
Book Five: The Dead Hand
Theme: George Eliot bio, part one
Session Six
Book Six: The Widow and the Wife
Theme: George Eliot bio, part two
Session Seven
Book Seven: Two Temptations
Theme: Money and society
Session Eight
Book Eight: Sunrise and Sunset (and Finale)
Theme: The nature of conclusions
Image: Portrait sketch of George Eliot by Samuel Laurence (1860)
