Middlemarch 2: The bloom is off the rose

This week we continue to ascend Mt. Middlemarch, with Book Two. Eliot keeps Dorothea, Casaubon and the alluring Will Ladislaw waiting in the wings, and instead takes deep dives into characters who, in a less ambitious novel, would remain minor players. We learn the complicated backstory of Fred Vincy, a man who in most novels would stay a throwaway pleasure-seeker, but here becomes the love-interest for Mary Garth, one of the novel's profound moral centers. We also get involved in the developing story of Tertius Lydgate, the talented but flawed young doctor, who thinks he can flirt with the local beauty Rosamond without consequences. We see the complexity of Rosamond, too, a woman who in other novels is satirical fodder. Lydgate also fancies he can stay a neutral figure in Middlemarch politics, and quickly learns that he's wrong. A brilliant sequence plays out in which he has to choose between two candidates for a hospital chaplain, and we realize that one of Eliot's most fascinating characters, Camden Farebrother, is going to have a tough road ahead of him. At last, we return to Dorothea, on her honeymoon in Rome. This is one of Eliot's most bravura set pieces, jump-cutting between POVs, including, brilliantly, Casaubon himself. We won't spoil the details, but let it be understood that every moment of this sequence, in which the contest between Casaubon and Ladislaw gathers momentum, is as good as a trip to the Eternal City itself. And readers will have a lot more fun than Dorothea on her real honeymoon. The episode ends on a cliffhanger: had Dorothea accompanied Sophie on her own recent trip to Rome, would she (like Sophie) have had two gelatos a day?