Snowed in again! Andy is snowblowing after a scare when the machine didn't work for a while, I've been out shovelling steps for two porches, will go out later for the car. The sun just came out so it is extraordinarily beautiful, a little blue sky peeping, and this means we'll get a lot of melting and evaporating, but this wa at lot of snow.

The picture above, from my office window was from before it snowed again.

I've now got all (I think) of George Eliot's fiction on the Kindle. This probably says a lot about my prehistoric taste in literature. I just read "Brother Jacob" and "The Lifted Veil," probably the only fiction of hers I’d never read before. Often grouped together because of length (short) althought the lifted veil was written between Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss .

"The Lifted Veil" is a kind of Henry James-in-his-supernatural mode story with a touch of Poe, very overwrought and with a totally bizarre medical experiment in the end that causes a corpse to Tell All– still, there were parts that completely gripped me, the strnage passive narrator who sees too much and is involved in a truly rotten marriage-- which I'm beginning to think is the great Victorian subject-- being caught in a relationship with the wrong person and being unable to get out of it.

I’m reading a little in Haight’s bio of her, too, the parts I didn’t pay much attention to like her first time alone, in Geneva, in pensiones, a thirty year old mademoiselle, not beautiful (even the drawings of her barely manage to flatter– the big hooter, the half-blind eyes, the pendulous lower lip). Thank God for George Lewes making her happy and thus Middlemarch and The Mill and Adam and Daniel and Gwendolyn and all the rest.

"Brother Jacob" is a parable, unpleasant family thief found out by his enormous pitchfork toting retarded brother.

I LOVE getting these free and reading them in the calm gray linear environment of the Kindle.