Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Eliot, George

Eliot, George

Adam Bede, [7] 46; Middlemarch, [68] 20; Silas Marner, [70] 75

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Life is the Thing

Adam Sisman on George Eliot, Middlemarch

Recently I decided to reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2).  Half a lifetime had passed since my first reading. I remembered how satisfying I had found the book then; now I wondered how I would find it thirty-five years later. Rereading a favourite book can be perilous. Whatever the poet says, one can never quite recapture that ‘first fine, careless rapture’. And of course I am not the same person today as I was then.
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A Kind of Redemption

Victoria Neumark on George Eliot, Adam Bede

I’ve been a passionate reader all my life, be it of labels on jam jars or the small print on the back of tax forms, aged copies of free newspapers left on seats on the London Underground, Peter Rabbit or Plato. Reading is more than pleasure, it’s like breathing. Generally, though, I read for aesthetic reasons (literature, to enjoy the writer’s skill), to keep up (newspapers and periodicals) or for escape (thrillers, the blacker the better). Or that was true before my mother died.

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