Audiobook · read by volunteers
Middlemarch
George Eliot (1819–1880)
Read by Guntar, J. M. Smallheer, Elizabeth Klett, Lars Rolander (1942-2016), redabrus, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), Madame Tusk, hefyd, Andy, Jennie Hughes · 86 chapters · 33 h 02
About the book
In a provincial English town in the years before the first Reform Bill, Dorothea Brooke is young, serious and eager to do something worthwhile with her life. She marries an older scholar, Mr. Casaubon, convinced that she will be helping him with a great work. Meanwhile, the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate arrives with plans to change medicine, and the lively Rosamond Vincy has plans of her own.
George Eliot weaves these lives together with a host of others: bankers and clergymen, landowners and tradespeople, rivals and friends. She is interested in education and ambition, in marriage and money, and in how a person’s hopes meet the realities of a small community.
Often considered one of the great English novels, Middlemarch is wise, funny and deeply humane. Eighty-six chapters, thirty-three hours. A long listen, a very rewarding one.
Introduction
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), who chose a male name so that her fiction would be taken seriously. She had already translated works of German theology and edited a journal before turning to fiction in her late thirties, and her novels include Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, appeared in eight instalments in 1871 and 1872.
The story is set in the early 1830s, a period of political and scientific change in England. Eliot builds a large cast of characters, moving between households and social levels, and shows how their lives are connected. Education is one of its threads: Rosamond Vincy is the product of a fashionable finishing school, while Dorothea’s hunger for learning springs from her serious religious temperament. It is also a novel about marriage, vocation and the way ideals can fail or succeed in practice.
Virginia Woolf famously described it as one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. Its psychological insight and its wide sympathy have made it a favourite of many readers and writers. The narrator often speaks directly, offering reflections on human nature that are among the book’s great pleasures.
This recording has eighty-six chapters and lasts about thirty-three hours, read by LibriVox volunteers. It is a long journey, and a novel that lends itself to patient listening over weeks. Anyone who wants to understand why Middlemarch is so admired will find that the experience is worth the time.
Public domain
George Eliot died in 1880: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text