Middlemarch

Is Zadie Smith the sharpest critic writing today? I loved her two-part piece on reading (I mentioned it here and here), and now she's got a piece on one of my favorite novels of all time, George Eliot's Middlemarch. She seems to me just the kind of critic George Eliot was: sympathetic and tough at the same time.

A small taste:

The novel is a riot of subjectivity. To Mary Garth, Fred Vincy is the central character in Middlemarch. To Ladislaw it is Dorothea. To Lydgate, it is Rosamund Vincy. To Rosamund, it is herself.

Read the whole essay. And read the book!

(I saw this first on Educating Alice, who must get to her Guardian feeds before I do!)