George Eliot and her latter-day successors.

[Keebleman]

I avoided reading George Eliot for decades.  The reason was a ridiculous one: when I was very small my Mum showed me a drawing of her at the front of a dusty old copy of The Mill on the Floss, and the picture was so ugly it actually frightened me.  In the 90s I watched the BBC's much-hyped adaptation of Middlemarch, but that was as close as I dared go.

I'm a big boy now though, and 18 months ago I steeled myself and read Middlemarch (Oxford Classics edition: no author pic).  I loved it: the characters, the drama, the subtle humour and above all the tremendous sympathy for and understanding of human beings in all their flawed and muddled splendour.

Since then I have read Adam Bede, her first novel, and a couple of days ago started on Daniel Deronda, her last.  Both are superb, and like Middlemarch have themes and settings that Dickens, say, would people with sinister or comic or angelic grotesques, but in Eliot's hands are instead filled with relatable people in relatable settings, even though the narratives are set 150 to 200 years ago.

I know novelists routinely cite Eliot as an inspiration, but which recent writers - and I suppose by 'recent' I mean anything post-war - do work at something like the same seam?  I'm thinking broad canvas, many characters, a non-judgmental authorial view, possibly an historical setting.  Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy is an example I suppose, although it's far more loosely constructed than Eliot's work.

[Gusty OWindflap]

I have never found any author as capable as Eliot in humanising characters in such mundane settings. I regularly reread Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe because it's one of the nicest books I own and is very comfroting. But Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss are the only books I've ever read that made me cry (apart from American Psycho but for very different reasons).

What she's so amazing at I think is taking two characters who are at odds (like a husband and wife) and presenting both sides' positions as so reasonable as to make you understand and feel empathy for both. She has such an enormous understanding of people and can convey that through stories. She herself seems so non-judgemental in her writing I think.

I'm not even interested in period writing or anything like that, it's just that she's a phenomenal writer!

[Mister Six]

Fuckinell, I actually want to read her stuff now.

[Gusty OWindflap]

It takes a commitment in a similar way that reading Cormac McCarthy or Charles Bukowski does I think. But their writing is all such high quality it's worth the time if you have it.

But I'm always wary of making recommendations. A fellow I worked with once used to work in a video rental shop years ago and one day a customer asked him to recommend a movie so he says Schindler's List as it was big at the time. Customer says he likes war films so he heads off with the dvd. 30 minutes later he walks back in and fucks the box over the counter in disgust and says 'it's in black and white.'

I do recommend people read Eliot though :)

[buttgammon]

Middlemarch is a massive commitment but such a pleasurable and rewarding reading experience too. I would say anyone wanting to get into Eliot would do well to read one of her shorter novels, perhaps Silas Marner, first, but the problem is that this wouldn't really prepare a reader for the sheer scope of Middlemarch, so there is a lot to be said for diving in.

[Smeraldina Rima]

When we read Middlemarch together on CaB it left me with an impression of reactive personality formation and seeking out of reassuring opposites to dress wounds. At the time I also read Silas Marner but don't remember anything about it now. Last year I read mostly 19th century novels which I'd always neglected and The Mill on the Floss stood out among them. Maggie Tulliver's difficulties with confident severity and unconfident indulgence helped me to think about my own similarly anxious and martyrish personality development. Mainly because of this sense of connection to Maggie Tulliver but also because of finding the scenes more easily visible than the scenes in Middlemarch, and for its connections to two other novels I liked around the same time, The Mill on the Floss is my favourite of those three.

I think The Mill on the Floss works well in a group of three with Jude The Obscure and The Rainbow and would like to find some more novels with their strong and depressed feelings and their effective use of symbolism to suggest the more obscure ideas. They're also all set in a recent past and all of them have scenes of or references to drowning that draw them together; the latter two are also connected as a studied model and adaptation. I'd like to read Adam Bede next if I return to Eliot's novels, imagining it to be the closest one to The Mill on the Floss.

The narrator's intrusions asking the reader not to judge in The Mill on the Floss seemed quite strange. I assumed it was not exactly Eliot's own voice as a mysterious storyteller stopping the reader's precipitous judgements. The vices shown across the characters with obsessions or defining catchphrases are in some ways similar to Dickens's moral caricatures as effective scarecrows to me. I prefer reading Eliot to Dickens, whose manipulation of the reader with dramatic irony can be annoying.

I just started reading The Golden Notebook and thought that Doris Lessing might have some of the qualities looked for in a post-war novelist.