George Eliot’s epic novel MIDDLEMARCH, often considered her masterwork, portrays life in an English Midlands community from the point of view of several main characters and the people with whom they interact. While developing characters and plots, however, she also illustrates a variety of themes related to the social milieu of the early 1830s. Dorothea Brooke, the main character, is a bit rebellious, in the sense that she wants to do something with her life, not just be the typical upper-class wife of her period. For this reason, she rejects an early suitor in favor of Edward Casaubon, a man more that twenty years her senior, who has devoted his life to arcane scholarship. Numerous peripheral characters add to the portrait Eliot creates of several levels of provincial society and their lives. All are consumed with money (or imprisoned by it), since the society is based on class and the ability to live up to class standards. The poor are just trying to earn enough to stay alive. Eliot creates fascinating characters, especially Dorothea, the talented and intelligent woman who wanted more intellectual stimulation than she was able to find as an upperclass woman in the 1830s. Eliot herself often challenged the status quo, shocking her society by living openly for many years with a married man, George Henry Lewes.
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The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860, traces the turmoil in the life of Maggie Tulliver, a young woman who has a streak of independence but who also feels close to her father and her brother and believes that she must always honor their feelings and wishes. Maggie’s father is the owner of the Dorlcote Mill on the Floss River, a failing business drawing him into increasing debt to his relatives and creditors. Her brother Tom, with no interest in the mill, is encouraged to learn other skills which may suit him for a higher level of society. When the mill fails and is sold at auction to Lawyer Wakem, the Tullivers become social outcasts, at the mercy of creditors and dependent on their extended family. Often melodramatic in plot, the novel remains realistic, even autobiographical, in its attention to character. Though it is not as fully developed as her later novel Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss is still a well developed, thoughtful novel which goes far beyond the pulp fiction being serialized in newspapers and magazines during that time.
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The bloody Siege of Krishnapur in 1857 is the pivot around which the action revolves in this Booker Prize-winning novel by J. G. Farrell, but Farrell’s focus is less on Krishnapur and the siege than it is on the attitudes and beliefs of the English colonizers who made that siege an inevitability. He puts these empire-builders under the microscope, then skewers their arrogant and superior attitudes with the rapier of his wit, subjecting them to satire and juxtaposing them and their narrowly focused lives against the realities of the world around them. Remarkably, he does this with enough subtlety that we can recognize his characters as individuals, rather than total stereotypes, at the same time that we see their absurdity and recognize the damage they have done in their zeal to spread their “superior” culture. From the opening pages, Farrell builds suspense as the English colony ignores reports of unrest in Barrackpur, Berhampur, and Meerut. The flirtations of the single women, the amorous attentions of the young men, the boorish and insensitive behavior of the officials, the gossipy whispering of their wives, and the unrelenting efforts to maintain the same society they enjoyed at home–with tea parties, poetry readings, and dances–all attest to their degree of isolation from the world around them.
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Originally published in 1970 and newly reprinted by The New York Review of Books, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles, the story of Ireland’s fight for its independence from England, from the close of World War I through 1922, illuminates the attitudes and insensitivities that made revolution a necessity for the Irish people. Farrell also, however, focuses on the personal costs to the residential Anglo-Irish aristocracy as they find themselves being driven out of their “homes.” Major Brendan Archer, newly released from hospital where he has been recovering from the long-term emotional effects of his wartime experience, arrives at the ironically named Majestic Hotel on a bleak and rainy day to reintroduce himself to his fiancée Angela, daughter of the proprietor, and, if they agree to marry, to return with her to a home in England. The Major, however, is greeted by no one upon his arrival at the hotel desk, and he must find his own way to the Palm Court, “a vast, shadowy cavern in which…beds of oozing mould supported banana and rubber plants, hairy ferns, elephant grass and creepers that dangled from above like emerald intestines.”
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The liberation of Rome during World War II was not a “liberation” to many of its inhabitants after the occupying American and British armies took up residence. The initial joy at the Germans’ departure had faded, six months later, as many Italians began to resent what they regarded as the occupiers’ sense of entitlement and superiority. Perfectly capturing the atmosphere and changing moods of the times, author Alfred Hayes creates a microcosm of Roman life in the home of the Pulcini family on the Via Flaminia. Adele, the mother, needing funds and food, uses her dining room as a small café for a handful of American and British soldiers in the evening, and, if they need “company,” she arranges for them to meet Italian women. Written in 1949 by Alfred Hayes, one of the premier writers of the period, The Girl on the Via Flaminia (recently reprinted by Europa Editions) shows Hayes’s experience as an honored and respected screenwriter. This sensitive and gorgeously wrought study of connections and misconnections contains dialogue that one can only hope will one day be transformed for the stage or screen.
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