Adventures in Classic Readings Sponsored by the FOL's Ruth D. Bogen Memorial Fund

This reading group, facilitated by Dr. Laury Magnus, Professor of English, will feature great classic works -- ancient to contemporary -- as well as participatory reading out loud of selected passages.

The selection for September and October will be Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life by George Eliot. For the September meeting, we will discuss the novel's first 500 pages.

A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against this backdrop, the quiet drama of ordinary lives is played out by the novel’s complexly portrayed characters—until the arrival of two outsiders further disrupts the town’s equilibrium. Every bit as powerful and perceptive in our time as it was in the Victorian era, Middlemarch displays George Eliot’s clear-eyed, yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge.

Copies of the book will be available at the Information Desk. All registrants will receive a complimentary copy of the book provided by the Friends of the Library’s Ruth D. Bogen Memorial Fund (while supplies last).