I had intended today’s newsletter to be about George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss but I’ve had to change my plans. My experience of reading George Eliot hasn’t been particularly happy. Until last year, the only book of hers that I had managed to get all the way through was Silas Marner, which was a set text on the Irish Inter Cert when I sat that exam in the early 1970s. I had heard the end of a radio dramatization of The Mill on the Floss about the same time, and always intended to read the novel, but somehow I never managed to get past the first few chapters. I did a little better with Middlemarch, but not well enough. As far as I can remember, Middlemarch is the only work on the syllabus for my English degree course that I didn’t finish. I had underestimated the amount of time I’d need to read it and was only about 40% of the way through it by the time we discussed it in a seminar. After the seminar, I wasn’t in the mood go back to it.

Finally, last year, I decided it was time to fix this gap in my reading. I read The Mill on the Floss and then, a little while later, Middlemarch, allowing myself 10 to 14 days for each. As I remarked at the time, George Eliot is not a quick read. I intended to reread both novels before long. Last week, I started again on The Mill on the Floss, as preparation for writing about it in this newsletter. I finished the novel on Thursday (having taken many more notes than I usually do when reading a novel) and I have quite a few ideas as to what I want to say about it but they’re still very disorganized. It’s not yet clear to me how these ideas connect or where I should start. I need to give my thoughts time to settle. I feel certain that I’ll get around to writing about The Mill on the Floss before too long but I’m not there yet.

Part of the problem is my attention has been almost completely taken up with Andrew Marvell recently. Since 2012, when I finally submitted my doctoral thesis on the theme of justice in Marvell’s works, I’ve made three or four attempts to turn it into something publishable and more likely to appeal to an idealized, abstract “general reader”. At last I’m getting somewhere with that: I have an almost complete draft that is less than 60% of the length of the thesis I submitted and leaves out practically all of the legal-constitutional historical context that I spent so much time trying to understand, and that sits so uneasily with Marvell’s poetry.

In putting together the draft, I’ve rediscovered some of my early attempts to get started on the thesis before I hit on the idea of writing about the justice theme. I had originally intended to focus on constraint and enclosure in his poetry. I’d still like to write something fairly short about that, and I could use some of my early attempts as a starting point. There’s some material in there that I don’t just want to abandon. This morning, I thought I could cobble together a post from that material but I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that it needs more editing and reworking than I have time to give it at the moment. So, unfortunately, there will be no substantial post today. My apologies for that.

I have been thinking about the future of this newsletter. If I can keep it going until the middle of November, it will be five years old. In principle, I should be able to continue posting for much longer, as I certainly don’t intend to stop reading books. At some point in the next few months I’m going to need cataract surgery and I expect that there will then be a hiatus in both reading and publication. I suspect that my reading speed has declined because of my deteriorating eyesight, and also that reading tires me out more quickly than it used to.

Ideally, I’d like to keep the newsletter going indefinitely but I’ve been finding one aspect of it frustrating recently. The number of subscribers has hardly been growing at all, and the reason seems to be that Google has completely stopped indexing my posts. I’ve tried various things to get my posts indexed again but none of them seems to be having any effect — and I don’t know why.

There’ll be a proper post in two weeks’ time, and there will eventually be one about The Mill on the Floss but probably not till I’ve read it a third time, which won’t happen in the next few weeks.

Again, I’m sorry for the lack of substance. Till next time.