I recently finished rereading George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which all students at our college read during their junior year, and it has reminded me of one reason such books are indispensable to liberal education: They help us form our own characters.
Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
Don’t have an account? Sign up now.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
I recently finished rereading George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which all students at our college read during their junior year, and it has reminded me of one reason such books are indispensable to liberal education: They help us form our own characters.
At the novel’s start, Dorothea Brooke is young, enthusiastic, and passionate about improving the world. She is seeking knowledge to help direct her energies toward changing society.
By the end of the book, her experiences have transformed her character. She has become unobtrusive and quiet, Eliot writes, but “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
In Dorothea Brooke, Eliot shows us two ways of being that invite comparison. More than a dozen other characters in the novel invite similar comparisons. Some are selfish or greedy, some upright or sturdy, some jealous or inconstant, some ambitious or proud. They develop over time, affecting one another and the entire community of Middlemarch.
That is what the very best books do: help us to consider, and ultimately to choose, the best way for us to live. And that is why real liberal education cannot do without them. The sooner we start contemplating the best life, the sooner we can start to live it.
