on 8/11/01 12:58 PM, david.bircumshaw at [log in to unmask]
wrote:
> Um, bits of Middlemarch do fall into your area of objection, Rob, but old
> Featherstonehaugh's deathbed is worthy of Tolstoy, and that marvellous visit
> to the billiard room in the pub, written by a Victorian woman remember, and
> as for the horse-trading details, no net curtains there at all. My critique
> of it would be along the lines of it succumbing to wish-fulfilment at times,
> fantasy hiding behind the realism.
Spot on, as they say in your land, Dave--and I'd add that the same
weakness undoes _Villette_ (where we know there was a real fantasy operating
to derealize the realism), although I greatly admire the ambition of both
novels and would rank them as brilliant failures in their own aspirational
terms. (By an obscure process of association, it occurs to me to ask what
you make of Willa Cather's _Professor's House_, which I prefer to _My
Antonia_, personally.)
> I really do think Pirrip's transformations, especially with the original
> bleak ending intact, are the best thing the English Vistorian novel ever
> did. Some of CD's other stuff is brilliant, but none so sustained and
> integrated as GE.
Agreed again, but I'm also inclined to protest that _Our Mutual Friend_
was robbed even as I pin the blue ribbon on _Great Expectations_!
Now: _Women in Love_?
Candice
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