Volume 41, Number 9 · May 12, 1994
Eliot Without Tears
By Louis Menand
George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'
directed by Anthony Page. produced by BBC Television
Mobil Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, April 10–May 15, 1994
The six-part television adaptation of George Eliot's Middlemarch now on Masterpiece Theatre is introduced by Russell Baker, who recently replaced Alistair Cooke as the program's host. Mr. Cooke had a manner of speaking of books and their characters as one might speak of colorful family members long deceased. He was almost a literary character himself, a sort of roguish cleric, and he had a trick of blurring the distinction between fact and fiction in a way that made the stories seem a little more real at the expense of making himself seem a little less so. We would not have been entirely surprised to hear Mr. Cooke tell us that his mother's nanny was actually once married to a cousin of Mr. Casaubon's butler.
Review, 3993 words
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