Ten Books Everyone Should Read

Virginia Woolf called the novel one of few written for grown-ups; it's particularly valuable for new grown-ups.

Suggesting an 800-page Victorian novel as compulsory reading for thousands of people is not a passport to popularity. In my case it’s also rank hypocrisy, since when Middlemarch was assigned to me in school, I skipped it.

Only sustained coaxing by a trusted friend caused me to revisit George Eliot's best known work a while after I graduated. Since then, I have flung a copy at anyone who has so much as paused to tie a shoelace near me. And I am about to fling Middlemarch at you.

Middlemarch is expansive and hilarious. Serialized in the early 1870s, it feels amazingly contemporary. It addresses questions that preoccupy most of us, not least as we conclude our formal education. With rare generosity and insight, it reflects on work, love, responsibility, and what a meaningful life asks of us. (Science, electoral politics, progress, religion, debt, and family also feature. Hence the heft.)

Two glimpses:

Fred is a clever but directionless young man who, denied a hoped-for inheritance, realizes that working for a living may be a necessary evil. He flails and waffles and drinks until push comes to shove – and then gradually learns the big secret: avoiding work is more painful than doing it. Henry James complained that Eliot devoted so much attention to Fred, “this common-place young gentleman, with his somewhat meagre tribulations and his rather neutral egotism” – but after Middlemarch was published, many young people wrote to Eliot for life advice and received patient answers. As Zadie Smith notes, Eliot was not glib about whose tribulations matter and whose don’t; she was “that wisest of writers, who has time for Fred, time for everybody.”

Dorothea, by contrast, is a morally serious young woman who wants to make herself useful to the forces of good in the world. Disastrously, she tries to achieve this by hitching her wagon to someone who claims to know what he's doing. She marries Casaubon, a brittle theologian (his mind "weighted with unpublished matter"), and realizes too late that she can't attain intellectual and spiritual fulfilment by proxy: "the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither."

Fred and Dorothea (two among dozens of robust characters) are, despite their coarse treatment here, not potted lessons. “For character, too,” Eliot writes, “is a process and an unfolding.” Virginia Woolf famously called Middlemarch one of the few novels in the English language written for grown-up people. From experience, I believe it can be especially tonic for newly grown-up people.

The best case I can make for Middlemarch borrows from the book’s own narrator, describing a beleaguered young husband who finds himself in the heartening company of a wise friend: "The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character."

At a time of life often marked by aspiration and searching mingled with uncertainty and self-doubt, students could do much worse than spend 800 pages in the presence of Eliot's noble nature. Middlemarch certainly changed the lights for me.