I had to be forty-six to like Dorothea, and I'm not proud of it.

Second attempt. I gave up at twenty-two somewhere inside the Casaubon marriage because I couldn't forgive her for making the mistake, and I finished it this spring over about six weeks, mostly in bed, with the swifts back and screaming over the roof by the end of it.

How did I not see her before? At twenty-two I thought Dorothea a fool who married a dry old man for the wrong reasons. She is. That isn't the same as being a fool. Eliot lets you feel exactly how much intelligence goes into a bad decision when there is nowhere else at all for that intelligence to go, and I could not have understood that at twenty-two because I had not yet watched anybody do it.

Lydgate is the one that hurt. A clever man ruined by furniture. I know three of him and two of them are related to me.

What I hadn't remembered at all is how funny it is. Mrs Cadwallader is funny. The auction is funny. The whole business of the will is funny in a mean and accurate way that I don't associate with her reputation.

The Ladislaw problem is real and I shan't pretend otherwise; he is a hole in the middle of the book shaped roughly like a man. I stopped minding somewhere around the third time it happened.

Nine because the Finale is a slightly worse ending than the book deserves and reads as though somebody asked for it. Everything before it I'd not change a comma of.