Stormy reading
I may have read George Eliot’s Silas Marner in late high school or early college. A certain unpleasant memory prompted by seeing the title in the list of her works inclines me to believe that we did have it assigned to us, and that I didn’t enjoy the experience. (I don’t necessarily blame this on George Eliot. One way to guarantee that adolescents will not enjoy a book is to assign it in view of an exam on it.) But a month or so ago, I bought her Middlemarch and placed it on the bedside table. Hunkered down yesterday as hurricane Irene roared in, dropped tons of rain, and knocked down six trees on our property (none near the house, thank goodness), I picked the book up and began to read. I think the three prefatory paragraphs are wonderful, and if they cause anyone else to read (or re-read) the novel, that can only be a good thing. (If anyone chooses to comment, please don’t give away the plot. I’m only 80 pages into it.)
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.
Sorry about your trees. Hope no damage to the chickens and other livestock.
I was sad to see “Silas Marner” panned in comments on some other recent posts. It is somewhat sentimental, but I have never read a better story about the nature of family.
“Middlemarch” is, I think, Eliot’s best work, a wonderful novel for grownups about marriage. I’m always amazed by how much Eliot manages to convey, within the constraints of her time, volumes about marital incompatibilities and disappointments, and how real people deal with them.
Eliot, as I’m sure everyone knows, was an Anglican with Methodist sympathies (see “Adam Bede,” for instance, which made me later appreciate our local Methodist Ladies and their sense of active Christian service). Many of her works explore the nature of grace and repentenance and/or acceptance.
I too had Silas Marner rammed down my throat when no doubt I was not in a receptive mood. But Middlemarch, which I came too in middle age, is a wonderful, wonderful book, and as Jean Raber says, is about real people. Dorothea Brooke is one of the greatest creations (I can’t think of a greater) of 19th century fiction. And Silas Marner, which I reread later, is a lot better than my first experience suggested.
I have also occasionally used casaubon as a password on the net — not that I regard him as a role model.
***POSSIBLE SPOILER***
I like that “Middlemarch” doesn’t take a flat view of any of the characters (except Rosamund, who I, think, is meant to be pretty shallow). Even Casaubon has his virtues and achieves some self-awareness.
Also, if our Nicholas Clifford is the same Nicholas Clifford who did the audio version of Henry James’s “The Aspern Papers,” well done! I thank you, and my poor eyes and nerves which were shot from reading student papers thank you!
Just finished listening last night. The recording is through LibriVox, which offers free audiobooks in the public domain. Wonderful resource.
A scary bit of kizmit, Joe, though likely more for you than for me: I have always wanted to read “Middlemarch,” and two months ago downloaded it on an iPad, intending both to read the darn thing this summer and hopefully finally finish the kind of great novels I used to read and barely do any longer, and also to see how the “e-reading” experience works.
In any case, both experiments have so far been failures, as I just can’t see adapting to an e-reader (doesn’t work for reading late at night in bed, or outdoors, or for taking copious notes, and its spine is not going to be visible on my bookshelf) and I haven’t finished the book.
But I have loved it, and since the moments of the wonderful opening.
Jean, you can’t assume anything about my knowledge of Eliot and the background of the novel, though I very much wanted to know more. I certainly wondered at her invocation of Saint T(h)eresa.
Jean Raber — I’m past the point in life where I have to read student papers, but I very much enjoy reading out loud, and for the last few years have done a fair number of readings for Librivox, mostly Henry James and Anthony Trollope, but some others as well. I’m glad you enjoyed the Aspern Papes — which should be required reading for academic researchers.
Another note on Eliot: I also greatly enjoyed Daniel Deronda, when I read it a few years ago.
I was so looking forward to reading all 800+ pages of Middlemarch, but Jean Raber had to go and spoil it! I guess I’ll just have to slog my way through the latest Daniel Silva thriller, Portrait of a Spy, instead.
David Gibson: Not scary from my viewpoint either. I used to read one of the great big Dickens novels each summer, but got out of the habit. Does an e-reader permit putting dots in the margin next to memorable phrases or sentences, such as the ones below, from the first chapters. (I love Eliot’s sense of irony.)
(It may strike people as odd, but there is something about Eliot’s style that reminds me of two 20th-century authors, Murray Kempton and (Don’t laugh!) S. J. Perelman.)
“Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister’s [religious] sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation.”
“Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”
Dorothea: “Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.”
Mr. Casaubon: “It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes.”
Dorothea: “…her annoyance at being twitted with her ignorance of political economy, that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights.”
Celia: “…stifled in the depths of her heart was the feeling that her sister was too religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.”
“Sir James had no idea that he should ever like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man’s mind–what there is of it–has always the advantage of being masculine–as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm–and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate, but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.”
Dorothea: “Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path.”
“Mr. Casaubon seemed even unconscious that trivialities existed, and never handed round that small-talk of heavy men which is as acceptable as stale bride-cake brought forth with an odor of cupboard.”
“…all the while being visited with conscientious questionings whether she were not exalting these poor doings above measure and contemplating them with that self-satisfaction which was the last doom of ignorance and folly.’
Sir James: “…the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and
disinclines us to those who are indifferent…”
Dorothea: “As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory?”
David N., well, there’s STILL a whole lot of surprises in 800 pages of “Middlemarch” that I didn’t manage to wreck. But you could go over to the “Good Night Irene” post and just look at the YouTube musical numbers if you’re looking for High Cultural Experience. Hee.
David G., you may be interested in Gordon Haight’s wonderful bio of George Eliot. I read it 20 years ago now. What a wonderful woman she would have been to know. Interested in everything.
Nicholas C., “The Aspern Papers” is a very funny book, almost slapstick in a mordant way–Miss Bordereau rising from her death bed to lunge at the hapless self-deluded narrator as he is about to rifle her desk drawers (no, I realize that doesn’t sound funny, but it is). I think that comes across more in listening to the book. James’s sentences are so dense–part of their charm, of course–that you sometimes have to re-read them to get their full sense. Having a reader navigate all those piled-on clauses and asides for you makes that tone pop a lot more.
Fr. Komonchak, thank you for a chance to recollect my own reading of Middlemarch. It was a few years after college, and one of the most delightful reading experiences of my life. Dorothea Brooke, in fact, is one of my favorite heroines in English fiction. (Only one other could match her, and that is Margaret Schlegel in E. M. Forster’s Howards End.) The book is too long to re-read entirely now, but I may read again passages related to her.
Well, I would never have linked George Eliot with S.J. Perelman. But now it’s been done, there’s probably a scholarly article for a literary journal somewhere. The only trouble is that you’d have to cloak your findings in so much orthodox post-modern language that you’d lose much of the pithiness of both your subjects.
“(It may strike people as odd, but there is something about Eliot’s style that reminds me of two 20th-century authors, Murray Kempton and (Don’t laugh!) S. J. Perelman.)”
But wouldn’t it be interesting to know if Perelman and his confrere Groucho Marx, a voracious reader, read George Eliot? We know Groucho corresponded with the Other Eliot (T.S.). Here’s one of the letters:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/09/confide-in-me-tom.html
I always wanted to write “Groucho: A Literary Companion,” trolling his bios and letters for a reading list and to see if I could trick out any kind of coherent literary critical theory. I guess that’s a good project for my old age. Which’ll be coming along now any minute (as Groucho said to Margaret Dumond).
Anyhow, Fr. Komonchak is correct in that there’s lots of laughs in Eliot. Women can be damn funny. Intentionally so.
Thanks for flagging those passages, Joe. I believe there are note-making functions to allow for some kind of digital marginalia (or Fr. Busa would have invented them) but I can’t trust them. Digital things can go poof, in my view.
I agree that Eliot is hilarious, and the Perelman association doesn’t seem odd. I was lucky to read Henry James years ago thanks to a great friend who is a top James scholar (and wrote the intro to the new Penguin edition of “Monsignor Quixote,” another favorite by another favorite author). So I not only learned to appreciate James, who may have been too daunting for me in this middle passage of life, but I learned that he was pretty funny too. You just had to work a bit harder.
Joseph A. Komonchak 08/29/2011 – 3:29 pm:
Kempton I don’t know. Perelman chooses each word with extreme care and places it delicately or firmly (as the case may be) in the perfect place. It’s also characteristic of him to use words as elegant bludgeons. Here, preceding an example of his prose, is a much better description of his style:
We had to read a novel by Henry James, Daisy Miller, I think, and I found it thin gruel, and haven’t been tempted to pick him up since. Wikipedia makes this apposite remark: “The importance of gruel as a form of sustenance is especially noted for invalids and recently weaned children.”
I will now duck for cover.
I read Silas Marner voluntarily when I was in my early 20s and felt, and still feel, that it represents some kind of unasked for challenge to widen the circle of interest in and the literary importance of the “lesser classes” who are largely invisible in the work of Jane Austen.
Middlemarch is a great book on so many levels — Eliot herself seems to be recognized more and more, so I hope more people are spurred to pick it up and read it.
As for e-reader: I bought the Nook, which I like a lot, but I have decided that my “Nook” books are going to be the ones I would take on vacation or pick up for a few minutes on the subway or in the car, and then set down again — that is, those that I am unlikely to want to read again or share among friends, or mark up. This way, my house won’t be quite so inundated with books of the moment, but I will still be earmarking and making notes the old fashioned way when I really have time to concentrate and read. Not sure how much longer I will have the ability to make that choice . . .
We had to read a novel by Henry James . . . and haven’t been tempted to pick him up since.
Fr. Komonchak,
Are you alluding to the hilarious Mark Twain quote? He is alleged to have said of a Henry James novel, “Once you put it down, you simply can’t pick it up.”
My all-time favorite Mark Twain quote is, “”Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”
I can heartily recommend What Maisie Knew. It made me laugh out loud, a response I never expected to have reading Henry James.
The world is divided into two types of people: Those who can understand the veriest subtleties of linguistic nuance that convey the deepest horrors, pathos, and absurdities of the human condition.
And those who don’t like Henry James.
I think that comparison between Perelman and Eliot is getting a little strained. Eliot is certainly witty, but “Middlemarch” is hardly a laugh-riot. She has serious things to say about people, and has a great understanding and affection for them. She writes from the heart, not the spleen.
I never had to read those books for school but have read all of Eliot for pleasure. I usually read books by Eliot or James straight through. They (particularly Eliot) are page-turners for me, thrillers from which I can’t tear myself away, like windows into another world. Unfortunately afterwards I quickly forget them, like a dream. It’s always a big disappointment when I am done reading all novels by a favorite author such as Eliot, and I realize that since she’s dead, there are no more delightful stories coming to me.
(Luckily I still have a ways to go before I’m done with James).
Regarding Henry James: I recommend Portrait of a Lady or The Heiress as something between Daisy Miller and The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl.
Henry James and Edith Wharton mined a lot of the same territory, but James is more penetrating with more psychological depth. The House of Mirth and Age of Innocence are Wharton’s best works, and neither is as good as Portrait of a Lady, arguably one of James’s slighter (or at least less dense) works, with one caveat: Wharton is more sympathetic and more understanding when it comes to her female characters. James is more critical of individual choices where Wharton is more likely to convey the reality of how constrained those choices really were.
Just now I am at a colloquium on Stanislas Breton: Philosophy and Mysticism in Cerisy-la-Salle which is cohabiting with a colloquium on Dickens. I heard 2 inspiring lectures on Teresa of Avila and many admiring comments about George Eliot and Henry James. The latter are authors all theologians should read. In our culture the great classics of modern literature have acquuired the status almost of sacred texts and we cannot read the signs of the times unless we grasp human experience in the depth that they grasped it at. (By the way, The Portrait of a Lady is James’s rewriting of Middlemarch.)
James is no Dickens, and I can’t recommend him with the zeal of a convert. But I would recommend “Italian Hours,” for anyone who has been to Italy and who enjoys the musings of that era of somewhat sympathetic non-papists for the Catholic world of the time. I’ve no doubt James would be aghast at the vernacular, but he had some wonderful appreciations of the moveable feast in the side chapels of Neapolitan churches during mass.
“Just now I am at a colloquium on Stanislas Breton: Philosophy and Mysticism in Cerisy-la-Salle which is cohabiting with a colloquium on Dickens.”
Dude, I’d switch colloquia.
“James is no Dickens.”
I like reading ABOUT Dickens more than I actually like reading his books. No denying he can conjure up some memorable characters with funny names (J.K. Rowling has been compared to C.D.). But its the lugubrious bent that puts me off.
In a college seminar on Middlemarch, this guy in my class said, “What if there are people who think they should have an epos, but really shouldn’t?” It’s a fair question. Perhaps more harm is done by people who need to be important than by any others. (Godwin alert): Hitler was not, I think, ultimately motivated by hatred but by self-importance.
Teresa wasn’t like that. Don Quixote was, but not Teresa. I understand her to have gone to the Moors, not to be great, but because martyrs go straight to heaven. (Rather a Moorish thought!)She played “hermit” in the backyard, not “crusades.”
“What if there are people who think they should have an epos, but really shouldn’t?”
Good Lord, did the teacher smack that boy in the head, I hope? What a way to derail Eliot’s point, which, if it not pro-Catholic (but who knows? Eliot was fond of “The Imitation of Christ,” which was found next to her bed when she died), certainly seems to praise the Church, which nurtured a soul like Teresa’s:
“… these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. … Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.”
Of course, she was talking about women she knew. And probably about herself, who chose to write under a false name and gender, in order to be taken seriously.
Teresa’s circumstances were worse for women, and she placed more restrictions on herself. Even if God seemed to tell her directly in a locution that she was to do something, she would not do it except under obedience. I think she acted well. Ambition is such a powerful force. How many marriages have been broken by someone upgrading to the level of beauty or power in a spouse that they were always “meant” to have?
(At my college, we didn’t have teachers, but tutors, and they were expected to make their points by reasoning rather than smacking. It was a sort of montessori college.)
Ah, so it was Eliot who didn’t deserve an epos because times were so much harder for St. Teresa? Or that people often make mistakes in marriage by going after the people they weren’t meant to have (which is exactly Eliot’s point in “Middlemarch”? And so they’re all like Hitler?
Forgive my inability to grasp the point here, but at my college we only had teachers. Smacks were purely figurative of course, but no less stinging when they came.
Anyhow, the conversation has now moved beyond my poor mental powers, so wish Fr. Komochak happy reading.
Every biography should really be a “life and times,” because you really can’t tell the life without situating it in the times. The times don’t necessarily determine the life, but they surely place certain limits on it. Was it Marx who said that we determine our own lives but not the circumstances in which we live them? In that preface Eliot is recognizing this, I think, and I found it interesting that she referred to the absence of a “coherent social faith and order” as one of the circumstances that severely limited her latter-day St. Theresa. That there were other differences who could deny?
Sorry, it’s just that I feel Eliot, in interpreting Teresa, has left out an important factor, the divine Actor. Without seeking out Casaubon, Teresa not only learned from but advised the great intellectuals of her day. One of her confessors pointed to a stack of books and said he had read all of them in order to understand her. But it’s important to note that her life was underwhelming until the point when she regained the will to pray–only with prayer did her life become epic.
I’m not trying to be argumentative, but Teresa’s a mystical doctor, and I think she should be better understood than Eliot does.
There is a moment in Middlemarch when Dorothea and her second husband look out the window, holding hands, like children. It reminded me of Augustine and Monica, looking out the window at Ostia, regarding the kingdom.
(Regarding teachers, the mysteries of any great work of art like Middlemarch seem to me to be beyond anyone’s expertise. No degree could make a Middlemarch fathomable.)
I don’t think the point of the comparison was to interpret the whole life of Teresa. The mood of the preface is elegiac. Do you think she might have remembered Gray’s “Elegy”?
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
I would agree that education is a human need, even a spiritual need. But I really don’t know about the yearning to be great.
Eliot has a feminist angle on Teresa, and anything more religious would probably have spoilt the texture of her great novel — the novel after all is the most secular of genres.
However she does refer to the Supreme Power — and the translator of Feuerbach and Strauss was by surely no means an irreligious woman, even if her religion was calculated to upset the Victorian applecart.
“However she does refer to the Supreme Power — and the translator of Feuerbach and Strauss was by surely no means an irreligious woman, even if her religion was calculated to upset the Victorian applecart.”
A lot has been written about Eliot’s sense of religion. She explored it widely–she apparently attended some lectures by Newman after his conversion and found him witty and charming.
Like many freethinkers who are not sure about God, she had a tendency toward asceticism and demanded strict moral rectitude, albeit unconventional at times, in her own life. While she and Lewes could never marry, she supported his wife and children–including the children the wife had with other men before and after Lewes left.
Good Catholics may feel that Eliot had no right to co-opt their St. Teresa, not even to mourn the loss of Catholic social structure that allowed St. Teresa to flourish. But the lives of the saints call to those both inside and outside the Church, as God must surely mean them to.
Whether Eliot understood the story of St. Teresa with the richness a Catholic might, certainly some part of St. Teresa’s life drew her in.
It’s how many of us get into the Church in the first place.
Could we PLEASE skip the “good Catholic-bad Catholic” rhetoric, Jean? It’s gotten extremely old, and has been nauseating from the get-go. Every Christian is a bad one, by definition.
Could we PLEASE talk about “Middlemarch” than indulge in thin-skinned complaints about my rhetorical turns of phrase? It was an enjoyable thread.
In the interests of civility, however, I apologize for nauseating any particular individuals who inferred I meant them specifically when I used the term “good Catholics.”
Very civil indeed, Jean. Well done. Speaking of passive aggression, didn’t you march off the scene with your customary dramatic flourish some time ago? It was indeed an enjoyable thread, before that.
All right, let’s cool this. You two should recognize that you’re allergic to each other.
One theme of Middlemarch was how the social demands to get and be married undermine a person’s efforts to pursue and achieve ideals. I expect that this is one of the themes that Eliot has in mind when referring to Theresa of Avila — the binary choices that 16th Century Spain gave to women (probably men too) had the advantage of making the trade offs inherent in one choice over the other very clear.
In the interest of redressing my prejudice against Dorothea Brooke and Middlemarch, I reread it earlier this summer (on my kindle). Still didn’t like it. And now that I think about it Dorothea Brooke reminds me of Jane Eyre, whose adventures I also reread this summer. Aren’t they really both a bit priggish?
JK: Spoiler alert: the last para of Middlemarch is terrific and touching! Best one in the whole book.
Michael Slater’s biogarphy of Dickens is very much in the “life and times” mode and a great read. And I confess, I am an ardent Dickens fan, reread two or three this summer: Great Expectations, Bleak House, Barnaby Rudge (first time–wonderful).
“One theme of Middlemarch was how the social demands to get and be married undermine a person’s efforts to pursue and achieve ideals.”
I think that’s true. There was no sense that one had a vocation to marriage; it was simply assumed that if you were a woman of value, somebody would claim you. Otherwise, you would be a poor figure of fun like Miss Bates in “Emma.” (Interesting how Austen treats spinsters, though she was one.)
If not pro-Catholic, Eliot must have felt that the Church offered the possibilities of other vocations to women that gave them dignity; whether their lives became epic, as St. Teresa’s did, was up to their own drive, grace, and gifts.
“And now that I think about it Dorothea Brooke reminds me of Jane Eyre, whose adventures I also reread this summer. Aren’t they really both a bit priggish?”
I see why you think they’re priggish. I think this is a function of the times and the authors’ own religious struggles. Those who are seekers often get bogged down in moral scrupulosity and self-control.
I don’t like to read autobiographical info into the novels too much, but perhaps the loosening up of the characters is recognition on the authors’ part that their scrupulosity can be as damaging as the social constraints around them.
I apologize for stepping out of bounds earlier. Kathy has pointed out some very ugly aspects of my persona on the blog, which, personal animus aside, I would do well to consider in quiet reflection.
Excellent comments from Jean. The “loosening up” of both Jane Eyre and Dorothea is indeed a striking feature of these two great Bildungsromane. Dorothea’s escape from Casaubon and his posthumous “dead hand” for the charming young sculptor — hardly the love-object of an unredeemedly priggish woman — is an epic of woman’s liberation. James cruelly inverted the story in “The Portrait of a Lady” by having Isabel end in the clutches of Osmond. Middlemarch is simply the greatest Victorian novel. It has all the realism of Trollope, all the subtlety of Meredith, all the imaginative vision of England that Dickens may have striven for, all the stylistic excellence of Thackeray, and much of the tragic depth of Hardy.
The easy moral tale is Lydgate’s. Don’t marry a woman just because she’s pretty and charming. Don’t buy furniture that is more expensive than you can afford.
Margaret may want to try Elizabeth Gaskell’s “North and South,” though if she finds Jane and Dorothea priggish, she may not like heroine Margaret Hale much. (Gaskell was a Unitarian, daughter and wife of U ministers.)
However, it’s an interesting take on tensions between labor and business in a northern mill town from a woman’s perspective, ca. 1855. While Margaret Hale tries to confront injustices at the mill with moral arguments because she has no real power or influence, the book delineates women who DO have power, e.g., Hannah Thornton, the de facto mill owner. Many of the labor problems still resonate. The way the Irish are used to reduce labor costs and the conditions in which they are kept will seem familiar …
It’s not a great book like “Middlemarch,” but it’s a fast and engaging read.