Masterclass: Middlemarch with Jane Davis

Middlemarch by George Eliot
with Jane Davis

10.30am – 3.00pm, Tuesday 16th February
19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool, L69 7ZG
£30 (lunch & refreshments included)
Concessions available

In this Masterclass, Jane Davis, Director of The Reader Organisation, will bring a thirty year reading relationship with this great novel to bear on the question of why Middlemarch stands as a key text behind the development of Get Into Reading.

George Eliot writes of Dr Lydgate, one of her key characters:

He for his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exact relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness [ch. 16].

Don’t come to Middlemarch looking for the usual stuff of novels. This book is an experiment which tests what a novel might do in accounting for human being, turning people and moments under a remorselessly investigatory lens. You don’t need to have read the book in advance, as we will work from selected passages (but if you can read it, do).

To book your place on this Masterclass - and we expect high demand - contact Mark Till on marktill@thereader.org.uk or download a booking form here.