Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have had a copy of this book on my shelf for years without reading it. It was so very thick, the print so small, the pages so thin! It looked dauntingly long and dull. But when I finally picked it up out of a sense of obligation (after all, I majored in English, and it is a highly acclaimed classic) I was amazed to find myself laughing out loud on the very first page! Dorothea, Eliot's heroine, is SO very earnest, SO idealistic and ardent! She would never be so tawdry as to fuss with her hair and dress, or wear (gasp!) jewelry in public! She is interested only in bettering the lives of the poor in their neighborhood (you could visualize her at the fore of a modern anti-war protest). But when her sister draws her into trying on their mother's old jewelry, the pure beauty of an emerald ring inspires her to decisively choose it as her own. And she stubbbornly ignores any inconsistency between that decision and her ideals. But her idealism traps her into marriage with a man who is not at all what she believes. She sees him as a paragon of learning, questing the seas of knowledge with fearless curiousity. In actuality, he turns out to be a cautious and small-minded scholar, drily obsessed with minor points of criticism on others works. Poor Dorothea strives to find ways to hold constant in her love in the face of ugly truth. And when she meets young Will Ladislaw, a man of similar idealism and energy, she fights to stay on her moral high ground. Thank goodness the dry old scholar dies! But even after death, he manages to poison the possibility of Dorothea and Will ever making a life together. Around this couple swarm their relatives and acquaintances, and others quests for their best lives. Each couple and each character is amusing and absorbing in their own way. Eliot's characters are introduced and drawn so very well that each personality is fully believable and real. But beyond that, Eliot looks at all of them, the best and the worst, from a viewpoint of loving and gentle amusement. Her pithy comments are hilarious, but never malicious. She draws the reader into her own frame of mind, and invites us to look at the variety of our fellow humans with compassion and laughter. In spite of its length, and several dizzy plunges into despair, this is a light and lively story, very readable and heartwarming.