Slow March

[san_valentine]

I've been plugging away at reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. It's very slow going and I'm not sure I'm going to make it all the way through. It's celebrated as a great novel for several reasons, including its portrayal of English rural and urban life at a time of change, with the Reform Bill and the arrival of the railways. It interweaves two

Comments

[ceehoss]

Try Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Same story...would be captivating if only there wasn't so much twaddle in between! 'She entered the room and it reminded him of a time when...'(yawn!). Do you think they were paid by the word?

[san_valentine]

I believe some writers of the period, especially those whose work was first published in magazine installments, were paid by the word. I believe Dickens was for some of his work.

I've read Portrait of a Lady three or four times. It is long-winded, but I quite like it. Would be even better at two-thirds the length though. And the characters are more likable than those in Middlemarch. I can't stand Henry James' later works though. We did Turn of the Screw as well as 'Lady' for A level and I didn't like it: didn't find it creepy either. The sheer verbiage of his later books is dreadful. He starts a sentence with half a clause but by the time you get to the end, because he spends the middle of the sentence on a related topic that could be a sentence on its own and doesn't need to be included in this one but he likes to write like that, you've forgotten how it started.

[ceehoss]

I once worked for Oxford Uni reading the theology books and others for the blind students. I swear these authors never actually read what they had written, if they had the books would have been half their length!

[longhairedhippy]

Not read the book, but we watched the television adaptation and I have to admit, it wasn't exactly captivating...