'Middlemarch,' opening of ch XXVII

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for example. Rosamond had a Providence of her own who had kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who seemed to have arranged Fred's illness and Mr. Wrench's mistake in order to bring her and Lydgate within effective proximity.

Edward Casaubon as self-portrait

I am happy to accept Casaubon as a compound of George Eliot’s self-knowledge, self-criticism, elements from other difficult temperaments with which she was acquainted, and material fresh from her own mint. The choice of the name Casaubon for her character is not commented on in her extant writings. Like her Mr Casaubon, the Elizabethan Isaac Casaubon was a theological and classical scholar; unlike his fictional namesake, Isaac published many scholarly works of exegesis and was what Middlemarch’s Mr Casaubon aspired in vain to be, namely an internationally acclaimed scholar (his contemporary Joseph Scaliger described him as “the most learned man alive”). A subtle and not completely unsympathetic irony is observable in George Eliot’s gift of the name to her troubled character.

- Rosemary Ashton

I will never badmouth Wikipedia again in my whole entire life no matter how irresistibly strong the temptation

Other

• Digital facsimile of manuscript "Quarry for Middlemarch", MS Lowell 13, Houghton Library, Harvard University

....HOLY FUCKING CRAP

(The Jane Austen manuscript site! The new EED site! The Bronte online! OH INTERNET JE T'ADORE.)

A Most Dangerous Woman

HOMINAH

(altho she looks more like she's supposed to be George Sand, not George Eliot. But still, great photo!)

George Eliot on happiness*

One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young’s theory that “as soon as we have found the key of life it opes the gates of death.” Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one! Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown. Witness colic and whooping-cough and dread of ghosts, to say nothing of hell and Satan, and an offended Deity in the sky, who was angry when I wanted too much plumcake. Then the sorrows of older persons, which children see but cannot understand, are worse than all. All this to prove that we are happier than when we were seven years old, and that we shall be happier when we are forty than we are now, which I call a comfortable doctrine, and one worth trying to believe!

- letter to Sara Hennell, 1844


*unlike my girl Charlotte, or at least her creation Lucy, she does seem to think it something of a potato

spotted in the wild

While we were buying a new toilet plunger at the big QFC down on Broadway (the things you tell the internet) I scoped out the book table, because I scope out book displays everywhere I go -- QFC, airport, drugstore, it doesn't matter. Walked out with a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed (I KNOW, MISTAKE, I KNOW) but more to the point, saw a stack of Middlemarch in among the "books" by Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck and Leslie Rule and crap like The Time Traveller's Wife and Revolutionary Road. I was so tickled I got T to take a picture for me.