On this day in 1871, volume 1 of MIDDLEMARCH by George Eliot was published.
"What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?" --from MIDDLEMARCH*
*中國有漢譯本
2004.9.25 多少Middlemarch與英鎊
「《真該早些惹怒你：關於科學、科學家和人性的隨筆. 關於科學、科學家和人性的隨筆.》一出版就落伍」提到該書不一致處：「……. G. Eliot的名著Middlemarch一處用《密德爾馬契》（p.405），另一處用《中途》（p.147）」 想起去年的SIMON University (2003/12/15)：「hc看ylib的"聊齋"談笑: george eliot (女人的男化名)的小說 middlemarch 中文譯名應該是什麼?
有人說是: 三月中/有人說是: 遊行中 我擔心, 難道是: 米豆麻奇 (音譯) 米德瑪赤：梁實秋，英國文學史 * 米德鎮的春天：公視BBC劇集 米德爾馬契：英國文學通史，上海外語教育出版社」 ------ Viginia Woolf once called George Eliot's Middlemarch the only Victorian novel written for grown-ups.
CHAPTER XXVII. Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of man.
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. -----
George Eliot’s sprawling tale of provincial life has triumphed in BBC Culture’s poll of the greatest British novels as voted by the rest of the world. Michael Gorra explains why.
邁克爾·戈拉著有Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece（《一部小說的肖像：亨利·詹姆士和美國經典之作的誕生》）一書。他是史密斯學院（Smith College）的瑪麗·奧古斯塔·喬丹英語教授（Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English）。
One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces resistance from the society she inhabits. In this epic in a small landscape, Eliot's large cast of precisely delineated characters and the rich tapestry of their stories result in a wise, compassionate, and astute vision of human nature. As Virginia Woolf declared, George Eliot "was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment." Introduction by E. S. Shaffer. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/45823/middlemarch/
“How can a writer make goodness interesting? George Eliot tried to do so by examining redemption in Silas Marner … But where are the unheroic, sane, consistent, quiet goodnesses? As literature thrives on conflict, the idea of a sequestered, sanguine goodness might seem impossible.”
Romola walked to the farther end of the room, with the queenly step which ..... Yours is a higher lot, never to have lied and truckled, than to have shared ...
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