Reading Groups

George Eliot’s Middlemarch with Sheila Kohler

Every Other Week Mondays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT October 2 to November 27, 2023

Online via Zoom

The ‘With Book’ option includes a copy of Middlemarch at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

We will do a close reading of Middlemarch in five sessions, looking at how George Eliot uses both a first-person narrator and a shifting point of view. This permits her to portray her many characters both from within and without, speaking directly to us, allowing us to laugh and cry and revile and sympathize with all of them . Furthermore, she is able to correct herself, asking, in Chapter 29, for example “but why always Dorothea? was her point of view the only one with regard to this marriage?” She comments with humor and sympathy even on poor Mr Casaubon: “He was determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, surprised to find how shallow it was.” By using these many points of view, she confronts us with our own foibles and failures, along with our humble acts of everyday valor.

Meeting Details:
Mondays, 6–7:30pm ET
10/2, 10/16, 10/30, 11/13, 11/27
Online via Zoom

Participants should read the first two books, Miss Brooke and Old and Young, before the first meeting.

Led By

Sheila Kohler

Sheila Kohler

Sheila Kohler is the author of eleven novels: The Perfect Place (Knopf,1989), The House on R Street (Knopf, 1994), Cracks (Zoland, 1999), Children of Pithiviers (Zoland, June 2001), Crossways (The Ontario Review Press, October 2004), Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness (Other Press, 2007), Becoming Jane Eyre (Viking/Penguin, December 2009), Love Child (Viking Penguin, June 2011), Bay of the Foxes (Penguin, 2012), Dreaming for Freud, (Penguin, 2017), Open Secrets (Penguin, 2020), and three collections of short stories: Miracles in America (Knopf, 1990), One Girl (Helicon Nine, 1999), and Stories from Another World (2003, Ontario Review Press). Her recent memoir Once We Were Sisters was published by Penguin in 2017 and Canongate in England.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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