Middlemarch in May

Apparently the weather this month is cooperating to help us feel more of an English countryside atmosphere. I apologize for any influence my book choice may have had on the weather, but hopefully by next week, things will be a bit more warm. Just as a reminder, book club will be held this coming Wednesday (25th) at my place at 7 p.m. For any of you who need my address, or don't know how to get here, just email me and I'll send my address to you. (I feel a little funny about posting in on the web.)

In the meantime, I wanted to share some of my latest finds from the book. Some of the writing is just so darned romantic, I love it!

From a conversation between Will Ladislaw and Rosamond:[from Rosamond]:

'I quite envy your acquaintance with Mrs. Casaubon. Is she very clever? She looks as if she were.'

'Really, I never thought about it,' said Will, sulkily.

'That is just the answer Tertius gave me, when I first asked him if she were handsome. What is it that you gentlemeen are thinking of when you are with Mrs. Casaubon?'

'Herself,' said Will, not indisposed to provoke the charming Mrs. Lydgate.

'When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks of her attributes--one is
conscious of her presence.'

'I shall be jealous when Tertius goes to Lowick,' said Rosamond,
dimpling, and speaking with aery lightness. 'He will come back and think nothing
of me.'

'That does not seem to have been the effect on Lydate hitherto. Mrs.
Casaubon is too unlike other women for them to be compared with
her.'

And please bear with me on another:

"Everything seemed dreary . . . even the spring flowers and the grass had a dull shiver in them under the afternoon clouds that hid the sun fitfully: even the sustaining thoughts which had become habits seemed to have in them the weariness of long future days in which she would still live with them for her sole companions. It was another or rather a fuller sort of companionship that
poor Dorothea was hungering for, and the hunger had grown from the perpetual effort demanded by her married life. She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delihgt in what she was. The thing that she liked, that she spontaneously cared to have, seemed to be always excluded from her life; for if it was only granted and not shared by her husband it might as well have been denied. About Will Ladislaw there had been a difference between them from the first, and it had ended . . . This afternoon the helplessness was more wretchedly benumbing than ever: she longed for objects who could be dear to her, and to whom she could be dear. She longed for work which would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and the rain, and now it appeared that she was to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labour producing what would never see the light. To-day she had stood at the door of the tomb and seen Will Ladislaw receing into the distant world of warm activity and fellowship--turning his face towards her
as he went."

What great writing!