Would the librarian who pulled the audio version boxed set of George Elliot’s Middlemarch out of the stacks and displayed it on the end cap please stand up? I’d like to thank you for opening my eyes, or should I say ears, to a delightful two weeks of listening.
My only other encounter with George Eliot, the assigned reading of Silas Marner for a high school English class, was not a rousing success. I was too immature to grasp the subtlety of the classic and consequently avoided Eliot for years. To this day, the only thing I remember about Silas Marner is that George Eliot is the pen name of the woman who wrote it.
But a few weeks ago, I couldn’t resist the cunningly displayed audio version of one of Eliot’s (Mary Anne Evans) later works, Middlemarch. The image of the woman with hair piled impossibly high, with the words “unabridged classic” tucked in one corner, Kate Reading listed as the narrator gave me the gumption to give the book a go, all 25 audio CDs.
You read that right. 25 CDS. And every one of them worth a listen.
At first I wasn’t sure. But it didn’t take long to be drawn into the story of the main character, a young woman named Dorothea Brooke and her train wreck of a marriage to the sickly, pompous Reverend Edward Casaubon. He dies mere months later, but not before trying to derail any future happiness between his young wife and his young, distant relative, Will Ladislaw. Weave into that two more subplots concerning two other pairs of young lovers – Fred Vincy and Mary Garth as well as Dr. Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy – and I was hooked. (To get a complete look at the characters and themes of the novel, check out Wikipedia. Or do an internet search of “Middlemarch” to turn up 25 CDs worth of analysis of the book and author.)
Thanks to the subtle, yet distinctive voices Kate Reading created for each character, keeping them straight was easy. She handled the narrative passages with masterful, lively pacing that never bored or disappointed. The book held me captive to the last, powerful paragraph. It described the remainder of Dorothea Brooke’s days by defending the importance of what society might consider an unremarkable, common life as follows:
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
I would not have appreciated that paragraph in high school English, back when my vision of a worthy life required novelty and acclaim. But now, having observed the world made better by the unhistoric, selfless acts of many quiet people, its wisdom moves me to tears.
Thank you, unknown librarian, for making my world a better place through the unhistoric act of displaying Middlemarch to catch this patron’s eye.
Maybe it’s time to read Silas Marner again.
