On rereading Middlemarch

The book did not change in fifteen years. I did, and it noticed.

The first time I read Middlemarch I was nineteen and firmly on Dorothea’s side about everything. I wanted her to be rewarded for her idealism, and I was impatient with every character who stood in her way.

Reading it again, I found myself spending most of my sympathy on the people I had dismissed. Lydgate, with his talent and his quiet money troubles. Fred Vincy, who is not a bad person so much as a person nobody ever asked anything of. Even Casaubon, whose great unfinished work is a much sadder thing to read about once you have a few unfinished projects of your own.

That is the real gift of the novel: it refuses to let any life be small. The narrator keeps stepping back to remind us that every character believes themselves to be the centre of the story, and that this belief is both ridiculous and completely justified.

I read it slowly, about forty pages an evening, across most of January and February. There is a particular pleasure in a book that long: it stops being something you are reading and becomes a place you go back to. When I finished, I missed the town more than any single character in it.

I suspect I will read it again in another fifteen years and be on yet another side. That seems like the point.