#MiddleMarch
LightNews LightNews
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
I have a lot of regrets from this past year. Specifically, it appears that ‘Middlemarch’ was *not* one of my top 5 words on here 😩😩😩
December 6, 2025 at 4:51 PM
bluejo.bsky.social
It's time to remind everyone that books make great holiday gifts, because they're rectangular, and easy to wrap.
Among Others, bookcover, girl lying reading Tooth and Claw book cover, red with a gold dragon Illuminated frontispiece for Ficino's Enneads of Plotinus, with a portrait of Ficino in the capital M of "Magnus Cosmus" and Medici balls at the bottom. Probably you can't afford to give a book like this, but what better to spend your money on if you could? Old green cover of George Eliot's wonderful wonderful Middlemarch
December 7, 2025 at 6:59 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Middlemarch Middlemarch!
December 6, 2025 at 6:16 PM
notquitehydepark.bsky.social
This is correct. It's also very George Eliot. The longer I live in this media environment the more I want everybody to take a break and come back when they've finished Middlemarch. @drbibliomane.bsky.social @rohanmaitzen.bsky.social can you assist
aselrod.bsky.social Alan Elrod @aselrod.bsky.social · 4d
I wrote about the Olivia Nuzzi saga and how it reflects the voyeurism and indignity that drives so much of our media—social and otherwise.

This is an essay about elite excess, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and the crisis of our democracy.

www.liberalcurrents.com/american-fre...
American Freakshow: Our Reality TV-Driven Media Is Killing Our Democracy
The lurid details of Olivia Nuzzi's transgressions and the popularity of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives derive from the same culture of voyeurism.
www.liberalcurrents.com
December 6, 2025 at 5:32 PM
ejpryor.bsky.social
Last reskeet: I feel like my reading life is much richer now that I’ve given myself the freedom to read Middlemarch half a dozen times and counting than it was when I was always chasing the pot of gold at the end of the TBR pile
December 9, 2025 at 6:09 PM
hthomson.bsky.social
What I read in 2025 (5):
George Eliot's Middlemarch
If you're going to read one book. Memorize the opening paragraph of Chapter 27 about a 'pregnant little fact'. 'The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.' Beyond compare.
December 9, 2025 at 2:47 AM
keefstuart.bsky.social
Hi, for this week’s Pushing Buttons newsletter I talked to Dan Houser about the influence of Victorian literature on his games writing - especially Middlemarch on Red Dead Redemption 2 - it was a really interesting chat!

www.theguardian.com/games/2025/d...
Dan Houser on Victorian novels, Red Dead Redemption and redefining open-world games
As the Grand Theft Auto co-writer launches a new project, he reflects on his hugely successful open-world adventures and where game design might go next
www.theguardian.com
December 3, 2025 at 3:09 PM
mara-hell-no.bsky.social
I don't have a magic solution for these trying times, but I do find myself enjoying the old British dramas that I grew up with.

It's equally comforting revisiting classic novels, like "Middlemarch" - like comfort food for the brain.

We need to take care of ourselves now.
December 5, 2025 at 10:27 PM
libraryephemera.bsky.social
College course on the English Novel from 1970.

(Sorry @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social, no Middlemarch.)
List of readings from a class on the English Novel. Includes Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, Adam Bede, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Heart of Darkness, Sons and Lovers, Portrait of the Artist, To the Lighthouse and Pincher Martin.
December 2, 2025 at 2:42 AM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
When I encounter someone else who has READ MIDDLEMARCH, I don’t just identify w them bc key-to-all-mythologies jokes are hilarious (though they are), but also bc I know they spent hours getting increasingly irritated w Fred Vincy or saddened by Lydgate or exasperated with Dorothea but kept reading.
November 30, 2025 at 3:01 PM
larissakelly.bsky.social
Paragraph from MIDDLEMARCH by George Eliot, which reads: Mrs. Cadwallader said, privately, “You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care of then. But you must not run into that. I dare say you are a little bored here with our good dowager; but think what a bore you might become yourself to your fellow-creatures if you were always playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely. Sitting alone in that library at Lowick you may fancy yourself ruling the weather; you must get a few people round you who wouldn’t believe you if you told them. That is a good lowering medicine."
December 3, 2025 at 9:25 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch is a YIMBY send post
zas.bsky.social Casaubon @zas.bsky.social · 12d
There is basically zero YIMBY literature and sci-fi other than Toni Morrison's Jazz and The Expanse.
November 30, 2025 at 5:13 AM
halotolerant.bsky.social
Just looked up why GMMTV 'Replay' trailer has gone and wow OK, solid choice, but how do my 3 couples hang out with inept sexiness now? Surely not too late to pivot to 'Middlemarch', Gawin would be a superb Tertius Lydgate
November 30, 2025 at 5:36 PM
nathankhensley.bsky.social
Very excited and honored to be doing an online book conversation about *Action without Hope* at @greenhouseuis.net next Monday, December 8th, at 10 am Eastern / 4 pm Central European — Zoom link below. Would be so psyched to see people there, if you can make it 🌿

newnatures.org/greenhouse/e...
Nathan K. Hensley, Professor of English at Georgetown University (USA), will discuss his book Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse (University of Chicago Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 8 December 2025, at 16:00 Central European / 10:00 Eastern. Zoom link: https://stavanger.zoom.us/j/61351916503?pwd=bn4WaobjC5WqEzWl8BnYVnVR8zL6Je.1 A study of how writers from the early phases of our prolonged climate emergency used aesthetic strategies to redefine the category of action. What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that is coming undone? Nathan Hensley turns to Victorian literature to uncover a prehistory of this deeply contemporary sense of powerlessness. For many in nineteenth-century Britain, their world seemed so scarred by human rapacity that restoring it seemed beyond the powers of any one individual. Like George Eliot’s characters in Middlemarch or the doomed lovers of Wuthering Heights, observers of the gathering carbon economy felt themselves ensnared by interlocked and broken systems. In the face of damage so vast and apparently irreversible, what could possibly be done? Book cover, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse, Nathan K Hensley [Detail of Turner watercolor showing wash of gray, blue, orange, yellow, and red]
December 1, 2025 at 4:18 PM
vin2go.bsky.social
Favorite Book: MiddleMarch George Eliot
Movie: Ran Kurosawa
TV Show: Brooklyn Bridge/ Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (tie!)
November 30, 2025 at 10:06 PM
pseudospectre.bsky.social
Mr Brooke losing the petty bourgeoisie
kind of thing. He was a little conscious of defeat, however, with Mr Mawmsey, a chief representative in Middlemarch of that great social power, the retail trader, and naturally one of the most doubtful voters in the borough - willing for his own part to supply an equal quality of teas and sugars to reformer and anti-reformer, as well as to agree impartially with both, and feeling like the burgesses of old that this necessity of electing members was a great burthen to a town; for even if there were no danger in holding out hopes to all parties beforehand, there would be the painful necessity at last of disappointing respectable people whose names were on his books. He was accustomed to receive large orders from Mr Brooke of Tipton; opinions had a great weight of grocery on their side. Mr Mawm- but then, there were many of Pinkerton's committee whose sey thinking that Mr Brooke, as not too 'clever in his intellects', was the more likely to forgive a grocer who gave a hostile vote under pressure, had become confidential in his back parlour. 'As to Reform, sir, put it in a family light,' he said, rattling the small silver in his pocket, and smiling affably. 'Will it sup- port Mrs Mawmsey, and enable her to bring up six children when I am no more? I put the question fictiously, knowing what must be the answer. Very well, sir. I ask you what, as a husband and a father, I am to do when gentlemen come to me and say, "Do as you like, Mawmsey; but if you vote against us, I shall get my groceries elsewhere; when I sugar my liquor I like to feel that I am benefiting the country by maintaining tradesmen of the right colour." Those very words have been spoken to me, sir, in the very chair where you are now sitting. I don't mean by your honourable self, Mr Brooke.' No, no, no - that's narrow, you know. Until my butler com- plains to me of your goods, Mr Mawmsey,' said Mr Brooke, soothingly, 'until I hear that you send bad sugars, spices - that sort of thing - I shall never order him to go elsewhere.' 'Sir, I am your humble servant, and greatly obliged,' said Mr Mawmsey, feeling that politics were clearing up a little. There I would be some pleasure in voting for a gentleman who speaks in that honourable manner.' Mawmsey, you would find it the right eform will touch every- ort of A, 'I beg your pardon, sir, but I can't afford that. When I give a vote I must know what I'm doing; I must look to what will be the effects on my till and ledger, speaking respectfully. Prices, I'll admit, are what nobody can know the merits of; and the sudden falls after you've bought in currants, which are a goods that will not keep - I've never myself seen into the ins and outs there; which is a rebuke to human pride. But as to one family, there's debtor and creditor, I hope; they're not going to reform that away; else I should vote for things staying as they are. Few men have less need to cry for change than I have, personally speaking - that is, for self and family. I am not one of those who have nothing to lose; I mean as to respectability both in parish and private business, and noways in respect of your hon- ourable self and custom, which you was good enough to say you would not withdraw from me, vote or no vote, while the article sent in was satisfactory.'
December 6, 2025 at 3:55 PM
louiselocock.bsky.social
The awful thing is that that the evidence was there, painstakingly collected and understood by both, but no-one listened so women carried on dying.
Re-reading Middlemarch in later life I was struck by Lydgate's badly received efforts to pursue evidence-based medicine www.bmj.com/content/335/...
www.bmj.com
November 29, 2025 at 9:31 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
1. Middlemarch
…
3. Robinson Crusoe
….
10. Moby-Dick
November 27, 2025 at 3:22 AM
rezekjoe.bsky.social
Don’t worry Middlemarch is on there!!!
November 27, 2025 at 2:07 AM
septimusbrown.com
"For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion."

—from Middlemarch by George Eliot
November 27, 2025 at 7:33 AM
alexpartridge87.bsky.social
Enjoyed this little discussion in Middlemarch between Ladislaw and Lydgate on the importance of having an MP that lives in the constituency
"There's no harm in trying. It's good to have resident members? ‘Why?' said Lydgate, who was much given to use that inconvenient word in a curt tone. ‘They represent the local stupidity better’, said Will, laughing, and shaking his curls; 'and they are kept on their best behaviour in the neighbourhood. Brooke is not a bad fellow, but he has done some good things on his estate that he never would have done but for this Parliamentary bite.'
November 26, 2025 at 8:32 PM
metamorphoseos.bsky.social
wat else do i have here... i've been nosing thru some sufi texts and we're also doing faulkner + my heavy weight trio of ulysses, middlemarch, and les mis rereads (these are the most gradual, i go to them when i need 2 transition from work). maybe next up is some italo svevo per recommendation
November 26, 2025 at 2:01 AM
paullecomtephoto.nz
Fun day out with @otagolad.bsky.social, we were hoping for some frost, didn't expect this.

We crossed over the Maungatua ranges from Outram to Middlemarch, as we approached we could see the whole Strath Taiari shrouded in fog, this is exciting.

1st stop Sutton train station, of course.
The Sutton railway station - a small tan wooden building with the sign Sutton on it. Fog in the background, railway tracks in the front Ferg taking another epic shot, he only takes epic shots Road signs in the hoar frost & fog
November 26, 2025 at 10:21 PM
paullecomtephoto.nz
Behind the calendar shot: July 2026

(final week of pre-sales, remember everyone who buys a calendar goes into draw to win 1 of 3 signed 11x17 matted print).

Hoar frost in Middlemarch, Strath Taieri, Otago.

paullecomtephoto.nz/products/202...
The July page from my calendar for 2026 A bright yellow train crossing road sign sitting against a white out fog & white hoar frost covering all the vegetation. In NZ we have cartoonish steam trains as the symbol for trains crossing.
November 26, 2025 at 10:21 PM