And I am very sad that it is over because I have become so involved with George Eliot's living, breathing characters and her engrossing tale of life, all of it, including love, anger, money, death and deceit.
Oh, how I will miss the earnest, outspoken and sometimes impulsive Dorothea and her lovely sister Celia. And Mary Garth, the opinionated and sometimes sharply critical one. And Dr. Lydgate and Mr. Ladislaw. Oh and the underachieving Fred Vincy and the revolting Mr. Casoubon.
I truly recommend this book to everyone despite it's 888 page length.
Alas, now I am alone without my Middlemarch, my companion for so many weeks. I will miss the weight of it on my chest as I fell asleep reading it late into the night. I will miss its almost constant psychological insight and power.
And here are Ms. Eliot's final lines about our heroine Dorothea:
Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, its half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisted tombs.