Review of Eliot\u27s Middlemarch: Reader\u27s Guide

This new \u27Reader\u27s Guide\u27 successfully complements two preceding works that were written for the same purpose of providing information and interpretation for readers of Middlemarch in a compact form: those by Karen Chase for Cambridge University Press\u27s \u27Landmarks of World Literature\u27 series, and by T. R. Wright for Harvester Weatsheaf, both published in 1991. The book is closer to Chase\u27s in terms of the order and structure of the argument. After giving a brief biography of George Eliot and introducing the historical contexts of the novel in the first chapter (Contexts\u27), Billington goes on to provide close readings of passages from the novel in the second and third chapters (\u27Language, Style, Genre\u27 and \u27Reading Middlemarch\u27). Critical and other responses to the novel are outlined in the fourth chapter (Critical Reception and Publishing History\u27), the fifth chapter (Adaptation, Interpretation and Influence\u27), which treats visual adaptations and the novel\u27s influence on other authors, and the final section on \u27Further Reading\u27. Altogether, these greatly amplify and update Chase\u27s treatment of critical responses to the novel, which was very brief and focused on earlier criticism. The book might have benefited from a plot outline such as is provided by Chase. The respective chapters are followed by notes and extensive \u27Study Questions\u27, most of which ask the reader to respond to preceding arguments made by critics. These considerably add to the book\u27s value in steering the reader to address the existing arguments about Middlemarch, increasing its usefulness for students and teachers of the novel. As is evident from the fact that Billington divides the close reading into \u27Language, Style, Genre\u27 and \u27Reading Middlemarch\u27, the outstanding characteristic of this book is its focus on stylistic and structural analysis. The \u27symmetries and echoes, antitheses and parallels, which are held in delicately mobile balance and implicit counterpoint\u27 (p. 34) that the novel abounds in are considered in detail, among which the parallels pointed out in regard to the theme of egoism, those between Dorothea and Fred (p. 89) and Bulstrode and Rosamond (pp. 90-1), I find are especially persuasive. The significant point about this focus is that, instead of being a postmodernist celebration of the self-deconstructive complexities of the novel, as was T. R. Wright\u27s study, it is supported by and fully related to its \u27moral\u27 value. This stance is best expressed in the following passage: [ ... ] in situating the narrating and reading mind as if inside and outside those mortal limitations at once, [the narrative voice\u27s] rhetorical strategies seek to open up a negotiable, meditative space on the borderline between writer and reader, novel and ordinary life. The prose evokes a sort of collaborative consciousness that operates like a third dimension, where the recognition of limitation can amount to something other than limitation merely - something more like sensitive moral expansion. (p. 20