In Our Time on Middlemarch

There was a cracking In Our Time on George Eliot's Middlemarch this morning. (An edited version will be broadcast this evening at 9.30, but I would listen to it via the BBC website.)

I read Middlemarch before starting my Masters in Victorian Studies out of duty, but thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

When the BBC adaptation (filmed in Stamford) was screened in 1994 I had great kudos at work because I knew how things would turn out.

I was interested to hear this morning that many of Eliot's contemporary readers, like my colleagues in 1994, hoped and expected that Dorothea would marry Lydgate.

And I was pleased to hear that I am not alone in finding Ladislaw an unconvincing character.

There was always something unreal about him to me, though this impression may owe something to the fact that he came into the novel as I was reading at twilight beside the Wye in Hay.