Let’s say you are involved in politics in some way—writer, think tank, on the hill, whatever. Why would you read a novel from 1871 that seems to be about marriage, an English novel at that? Here are a few suggestions:
Middlemarch is a great synthetic book about what it is like to live through a time of political, economic, social, and moral upheaval. The relationship between the public and the personal is under examination. You may feel this is “relevant to your work”.
Eliot is not a partisan about issues of the vote, the effects of YIMBY, the moral good of democracy, to what extent feminism would be a good idea, and so on. She is deeply sympathetic writer, not a political one in the negative sense. (Yes, it is a YIMBY novel.)
It is a study of ambition, and how and why ambition often fails. Not just political ambition, either.
It is also, largely, about what makes a marriage successful, one of the most important questions.
Eliot was trying to work through political and economic ideas because she believed a picture of life that “only a great artist can give” was far more persuasive than data and theories. She was an editor at the Westminster Review and has a much better grasp of the relevant issues than you might expect from a novelist.
Other people here are currently reading it, or have recently read it, so you will have good conversations about interesting and important topics.
There is a humanities revival happening, largely outside the universities, and that is worth paying attention to. If you want to know why “everyone is reading Middlemarch” well… read Middlemarch!
It is also a study of how to be successful—how to do some good in the world.
Obviously, it is a great novel that you will not only enjoy but will be deeply impressed by. Get some quality in your life! Some people don’t end up loving it, but there aren’t many Middlemarch haters. At a discussion event recently, I talked about the ending and someone else read out the final page. Everyone was impressed and moved.
Matt Yglesias says it will make you feel better and helps your work.
I think that I find it to make the world less stressful to actually take some time out of the day and sit with something that is good, but is not making any reference to you know, current events.
I mean, not just current events in the sense of Trump or whatever, but just like our society. She didn't know that there would be a Minecraft movie or a game called Minecraft or a thing called iPads or a dispute with your kids about screen time.
And so you're sitting with things about humanity, some of which seem quite odd and others of which seem quite resonant across a long span of time and you have to pay attention to what's going on and you know to me that has been a sort of a de-stressing experience relative to everything that's happening.
And it also just gives me in my own writing, some stuff to think about that does, it turns out, relate, or at least seems to me to relate to, the problems of today, but that you wouldn't find elsewhere that other people aren't thinking of, that they don't know about.
My thanks to Virginia Postrel, Sally Satel, and the others who attended the AEI Acela Salon on this topic.
I work in DC and I just started reading Middlemarch a week ago.
It is a book that has stayed with me over the years. Tolstoy and Eliot are tied in showing the importance of marrying a moral and intellectual equal. (I so badly wanted to be a Dorothea and realized to my amazement I had become Celia/Natasha some years back. The pull of the nursery is a powerful force, and now that I am not keeping a baby alive minute by minute I feel a zest for the larger world returning.)