Middlemarch | Thornfield Hall

For several years, I practiced a form of passive resistance while my dad’s so-called estate was settled. If a riding lawn mower was mentioned, I’d say, “Just give away the lawn mower!” Ditto for the shed. “Give away the shed!”

What a tangled web Dad wove! Like the suit of Jarndyce & Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House, there was cunctation and confusion; there were mysterious lost deeds and a shed with a rusting lawn mower. At one point, if I weren’t hallucinating, and I sincerely hope I was, there was talk of turning a “meadow” into an Amish farm. The meadow was hardly bigger than a back yard, but perhaps the Amish could harvest the dandelions.

“Just give away the meadow!”

Despite suspicions that the executors were not entirely honest, that they might have visited Vegas in their leisure hours, I wanted the whole thing settled, period, the end. My favorite mathematical conundrum was: How long does it take to give away a shed? At one point I contemplated giving everything to a party who was suing, but friends pointed out that generosity might spur more lawsuits.

Wills, unsettled estates, and endless lawsuits are a central theme in 19^th-century literature. In Dickens’s Bleak House, the eccentric Mr. Jarndyce refuses involvement in a tangled lawsuit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has troubled his wretched family for generations. Many of the characters in Bleak House are peripherally involved in the suit. Some have grown old waiting for the settlement. Mr. Jarndyce warns his gullible ward, Richard Carstone, to avoid the perils of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has led many to financial and spiritual ruin. Alas, Richard ignores Mr. Jarndyce’s advice, with grim results.

In the beginning of the novel, Dickens describes the fog overhanging Chancery, the glum courts where judges preside over murky cases.

Dickens explains Jarndyce and Jarndyc eloquently.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

In 19^th-century literature, the wills of wealthy men have a major impact. In Middlemarch, Fred Vincy squanders money on horses and frivolous pursuits, in the confidence that he will inherit the estate of his dying uncle, Mr. Featherstone.

But Mr. Featherstone is shrewd. “So, Sir, you’ve been paying ten percent. for money which you’ve promised to pay off for mortgaging my land when I’m dead and gone, eh? You put my life at a twelvemonth, say. But I can alter my will yet.”

Mr. Featherstone alters his will in favor of a distant relation, but repents on his deathbed. He asks Mary Garth, his attendant, to burn it in order to reinstate the will that leaves everything to Fred. But Mary has a strict moral philosophy, and refuses to touch the will while Mr. Featherstone is ill, possibly not in his right mind. It is the morally correct thing to do, but it does affect Fred, Mary’s boyfriend. Eventually the right thing turns out to be right for Fred and for Mary, too, but the reader must think hard about it. Obviously, principles are laxer in the twenty-first century. What does one make of Mary Garth? Are there Mary Garths in the twenty-first century?

In War and Peace, there is more fiddling with wills. Countess Drubetskaya is ambitious for her son, Boris. She realizes that Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of the dying Count Bezukhov, may inherit his father’s estate. And so she does a very odd thing, on the chance that it may help her son someday. She hustles Pierre out of a party and into a carriage, and accompanies him to his father’s house. While the Count is on his deathbed, she wrestles with the eldest princess for a copy of the will that leaves everything to Pierre. How she manages to win this wrestling match is beyond my powers of explication, but it changes Pierre’s life, not necessarily for the better. People pretend to like him, but cheat him and take advantage of him. But, yes, he can and does help Boris. Eventually he finds his way to contentment, but riches have deprived him of joy.

Nineteenth-century writers often wrote about the perils and the power of money. The title of one of Zola’s novels is Money. We might all be better off if we regularly read the 19th-century literature of inheritance, wills, and money. I’m not saying we would be smarter, but we might think more about moral philosophy.

I was wearing pajama shorts, a CAT MOM t-shirt, and tennies as I sat in front of the fan, ready to leap up and turn on the air conditioner if the temp hit 90. When you’ve endured extreme weather – like biking for two hours when it’s 90 degrees, and then being chased on a trail by a horrible boys’ cross-country team who used my bike to pace them – yes, this really happened – you’re ready to spend the day in a comfortable, cool house.

The light looks like autumn: slanting, softer. Some believe fall starts after Labor Day, others that it begins September 22, the official date of the change of season. But even temps in the 80s make me feel it is fall.

Anyway, I have embarked on my fall reading program. I am almost done with Middlemarch, and loving it. Daniel Deronda is my favorite book by Eliot – an elaborate novel partly about the consequences of a pretty, vain young woman’s marriage to a sadist – poor Gwendolyn marries him because he is rich and her family has lost all their money. It is also about attractive Daniel Deronda’s habit of saving women – first Gwendolyn, who confides in him when she is in trouble, and then Miriam, a Jewish singer whom he saves from suicide. It is also about Daniel’s exploration of Judaism after he discovers that he is Jewish. His view of the world and the people he had stereotyped slowly changes.

Middlemarch has never held much interest for me, but this time I am loving it, reading it as a Victorian soap opera. The inhabitants of Middlemarch, a provincial town, are shaped, changed, strengthened, or destroyed by misconceptions, gossip, lack of imagination, and money (or lack thereof). Money is very important – the focus of much of the book.

Eliot’s prose is graceful and witty, and she does a superb job of developing the characters. Indeed, there are so many characters that I intend to introduce you only to a few. On my first reading, I did not find them particularly engaging. I was interested only in Dorothea Brooke, a bright, willful young woman who makes the mistake at 20 of marrying a middle-aged scholar, the first intellectual she has met. Everyone around her knows this is a mistake, but no one can stop her. Mr. Casaubon is an unattractive, absent-minded, neglectful husband and indifferent scholar. Worse, as Dorothea’s sister Celia points out, is the existence of two moles on his face, with hair growing out of them. Celia’s observation exasperates Dorothea. Dorothea works so hard as her husband’s amanuensis that she even begins to study Latin and Greek.

The opposite of Dorothea is lazy, likable Fred Vincy, who failed his exams at Oxford and refuses to fulfill his father’s ambition for him of becoming a clergyman. He goes into debt, unworried because he expects to inherit the estate of his uncle, Mr. Pennyfeather. Fred often visits his uncle, but mainly because he is in love with Mary Garth, Mr. Featherstone’s nurse and housekeeper. Mary has taken this job because she hates teaching. Ironically, Mary is responsible for Fred’s not inheriting the estate: Mr. Pennyfeather made two wills, and when he was dying asked Mary to burn one of them. She refused, because she thought it would be immoral to tamper with his wills. And thus the money does not go to Fred, which of course is good for Fred’s temperament, because now he will have to work. And Mary will not marry a man who does not work.

Mary is my favorite of the three principal women characters in Middlemarch. If only Eliot had spent more time with Mary! I would have loved to know more of her history, of her growing up in a poor family where her strong-minded mother taught them while she baked and did housework.

The other woman character, Rosamund Vincy, Fred’s sister, is very pretty, and very shallow. She sets out to fascinated Lydgate, the handsome new doctor who cures Fred of typhus and studies science by night. And so when the two marry, he is astonished to learn her true, grasping, social-climbing character. She miscarries after an accident on a horse, after he had asked her not to go riding, but she insists that she would have miscarried anyway. And you can imagine what happens to Lydgate’s dreams of scientific discoveries, as he goes into debt to support Rosamund.

Will Ladislaw, who becomes the editor of a newspaper owned by Dorothea’s uncle, is the second cousin of Mr. Casaubon. Will admires pretty, brilliant Dorothea, but Mr. Casaubon refuses to admit him to the house, because he is jealous.

My favorite male character by far is Mr. Farebrother, a charming vicar whose only fault is playing whist in order to supplement his income: he must support his mother, sister, and aunt. He is in love with Mary, and naturally her mother thinks he would be the best match for Mary – as do I – but love is blind.

Yes, I’ve only talked about the characters, not the structure or Eliot’s philosophy, but that’s where I’m living right now – with George Eliot’s characters, as I near the end of Middlemarch.

FOR FANS OF GLADYS TABER. I am a fan of Mildred Walker, the author of The Curlew’s Cry and Winter Wheat, both set in Montana. The author lived for long periods in Montana and Vermont, and all but two of her books are set in Montana.

I recently read her short novel, The Southwest Corner, set in Vermont, which reminds me of Gladys Taber’s books. Both writers describe nature, the seasons, and living in the country. The Southwest Corner is the quiet story of Marcia Elder, a retired teacher who, at 83, realizes that she can no longer live alone in her farmhouse.

Walker’s writing is plain but engaging. She writes,

It had been the longest winter Marcia Elder remembered in all her 83 years. So many days of waking up to frosted windows and unbroken snow across the field, and the front path even with the meadow. Orville Greenstead came by every day or so, but he had tired of keeping the walk shoveled.

Marcia has never considered moving. Then on a spring-like day, she leaves the house to take a long walk and sits down and falls asleep. When she wakes up it is snowing, and she is so cold that she can barely walk back to the house. She is too exhausted to light the fire – it is difficult for her to carry the wood – and she falls asleep under a blanket, in a freezing house.

And so she advertises for a housemate. The arrangement she makes with Bea, a bossy middle-aged woman, is awkward, and Marcia finds herself dominated by her . I loved this book mostly for Marcia’s observations of nature, and though I was anxious, I knew from the preface that all would turn out well in the end.

THE TROUBLE WITH INSTAGRAM. The photos of books are too pretty! Instagram inspired me to begin R. F. Kuang’s Babel, a fantasy set in an alternative Oxford. A group of students, one Chinese, one Indian, and the other two girls, whose identities preclude them from being admitted to most Oxford colleges, attend Oxford’s mysterious Institute of Languages.

I love the charming Author’s Note (really an essay) on Her Representations of Historical England, and of the University of Oxford in Particular.

She writes,

The trouble with writing an Oxford novel is that anyone who has spent time at Oxford will criticize your text to determine if your representation of Oxford aligns with their own memories of the place. Worse if you are an American writing about Oxford, for what do Americans know about anything? I offer my defence here.

Kuang is a brilliant, imaginative writer – far above the standard of most fantasy novelists – but I read this at bedtime, so I may have to skim some parts. There’s a hint of Brideshead Revisited here, crossed with Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House and Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines. It’s great fun, but 544 pages.