Dorothea deserved better.

This took me from January to Easter and I am not sorry about a single day of it.

Everybody warns you about the length and nobody warns you about the kindness. Eliot looks at every single person in that town, including the awful ones, including Casaubon with his key to all mythologies that will never be finished and his cold jealous little heart, and she understands them. She does not let them off. She simply refuses to let you believe that anybody is simple. I don't think I've read another novelist so obviously, actively fond of human beings.

Dorothea marrying Casaubon is one of the most agonising things in fiction, because you can see it coming from miles off and she cannot, and the reason she cannot is that she is good, and being good has made her stupid about him. That is a terrible thing to be true and it is true.

Lydgate is the one who stayed with me, though. A clever man with a great future in front of him, undone not by a villain but by furniture and debts and a wife who wanted a nicer sort of life. That is how it actually happens to people. That is roughly how it happened to a friend of mine.

And then that final paragraph about unhistoric acts, and the people who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs. I read it out to my wife and my voice went.

Nine. Take a proper run at it in winter. Do not read it in bits on a phone on the bus, which is what I did for the first two hundred pages and it nearly cost me the whole book.