Of the long list of books that one generally finds numbered among the "classics" in the English-speaking world, a huge amount falls into the British Victorian period - perhaps inevitably, considering how long this period was, and how more recent books have not yet had enough time to consistently be ranked as classics. I readily confess that I - and I doubt I'm the only one - have long had a tendency of amalgamating most of these novels, and an impression of them as being fairly dull and uninteresting.

Over the past year or two, I've read a fair amount of Victorian novels (and a few books of the same period in other countries, notably Fathers and Sons and Madame Bovary), and liked all of them to at least some degree, which has brought me to the point where I haven't merely stopped shying away from them, but even started actively seeking them out. Thanks to an Edinburgh bookstore that sells any three "classics" for five pounds, I've now added Middlemarch to the growing list - and I'm inclined to say it's the best book on there so far, beating out Vanity Fair.

Middlemarch is a dense, complex novel that mostly avoids the typical (in my experience so far) Victorian disease of dragging out the plot too long, and is difficult to pin down on any single theme or overarching idea. The plot focuses on a small, self-centered town in a sleepy part of England around 1830, where the arrival of a few high-profile strangers causes a fair bit of excitement and change, for better or for worse - be it in political, religious, professional or romantic terms.

The characters in Middlemarch can be divided rather obviously into three classes, I felt - the heroes and heroines, the good yet weakwilled who need to rely on their heroic friends or lovers to see them through life, and the bad. That may seem a bit simplistic, but the characters in all three groups are still for the most part well fleshed-out and interesting - the heroes and (mostly) heroines still have their flaws or quirks, and the villains are still treated with nuance and, at times, sympathy. Dorothea Brooke is a particularly fine protagonist, easily one of the best characters I've read recently - sort of halfway between Antigone and Austen's Emma.

The novel has some passages that make it perhaps a tad less easily accessible than Vanity Fair, Trollope's and Dickens' books, with Eliot taking philosophical or intellectual turns, generally for a paragraph or two at the beginning of chapters. And, I might add, a handful of sentences that required me to reread not once, but three or four times before I'd figured out where the missing punctuation belonged that made them intelligible. For all Eliot's poking fun at her ultra-pedantic character Mr. Casaubon (his letters in particular are real gems, though his speech is nearly as impossible), she seems a little over-eager to show off her considerable erudition herself, at times. At times the narrator's interruptions contain insightful observations or comments that enhance the story; at times, not so much. I really don't think this would be sufficient to put off any reader who enjoyed the book in general, though.

The point on which Eliot lets her views shine through the most clearly is probably her views of the relations between men and women - using the term "feminist" would probably be misleading as well as anachronistic. The most unapologetically heroic characters of the novel are women, few male characters seem capable of very much without the support of a strong woman behind them, and there is the occasional critical comment, such as:



Which becomes even more cutting when reread after the reader finds out what Lydgate's marriage ends up being like. That said, the only really "feminist" character in the novel is a minor character, a girl of perhaps ten years old, as Eliot's heroines are ultimately content to remain in the submissive positions society expects of them, at least on the surface.

Middlemarch is a novel that mostly conforms to the Victorian mould of long novels made up of a number of relatively straightforward and not particularly surprising plot lines, ending in a happy ending where the virtuous are mostly rewarded and the bad mostly punished, but the characters, the writing and the ideas expressed in it make it the best book of that kind that I've come across so far. I've already started to think about making a top 5 of books I've read this year in late December, and although there's stiff competition, I think Middlemarch will probably be in it.