Summary:

The unrequited love of the narrator is compared to a devastating fever. Reason, "the physician," is ignored and cannot abate the disease. Without reason, madness (fever) reigns; and the poet renounces his beloved as "black as hell, as dark as night."

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Summary:

Middlemarch is a middle-sized country town typical of rural British life in the early nineteenth century. George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans) was part of the realist school that dominated Victorian literature. She tried to create a true representation of the real, historical lives of ordinary people.

The novel has a vast number of characters and events but most of the plot centers on two couples: Dorothea and Casaubon (later Will Ladislaw) and Rosamond and Lydgate. Dorothea is an intelligent, vigorous woman, eager to improve the lives of her friends and the poor. She is determined not to marry any of the local, mindless squires but to devote herself to godly work.

Soon, however, she is introduced to Casaubon. Casaubon is an aging, ugly scholar, but Dorothea is attracted by his learning and agrees to marry him in hopes of helping him in his work. Their marriage is unhappy and cold. It is contrasted to Dorothea’s growing relationship with Will Ladislaw, a distant relative of Casaubon. Where Casaubon is cold, Will is passionate. Casaubon senses the kinship between his wife and Will and adds a codicil to his will insisting that if Dorothea and Will marry after his death than Dorothea must give up Casaubon’s house and money.

Shortly thereafter, Casaubon does die, and Dorothea is outraged upon hearing of the codicil. She does not recognize her feelings towards Will as feelings of love. By the end of the novel, however, the two confess their feelings and Dorothea gives up her earthly possesssions to live happily.

The plot developed around Lydgate and Rosamond is of particular medical interest. Lydgate is a new kind of medical practitioner. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the traditional medical order, consisting of physicians (like modern consultants), surgeons, and apothecaries, was being replaced. New well-schooled general practitioners could perform all these functions.

When Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch with his modern techniques and visions of building a modern hospital for the poor, the medical establishment greet him with jealousy and suspicion. Lydgate’s practice therefore develops very slowly. His marriage to Rosamond, a woman used to a rich lifestyle, quickly depletes his savings.

Facing bankruptcy and the loss of his disappointed wife, Lydgate receives an unexpected loan from Bulstrode, a wealthy landowner. Soon after, Bulstrode is charged with murder and Lydgate is accused of having a hand in it; Middlemarch sees the loan as a payoff. Disgraced, Lydgate cannot fight back. He becomes a doctor who toadies to the wealthy and abandons his revolutionary dreams. He dies at 50.

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Summary:

This strange little tale, set in western Europe, revolves around the shifting relationships among an Irish doctor, a would-be Austrian baron, a circus performer, and the American woman, Robin, who is to become the nemesis of them all. The plot is unfolded in a long series of conversations, many convoluted by their stream-of-consciousness style, rather than in observed action.

The physician (it is never clearly stated that he is a fully trained physician but the point is probably moot, since he assumes the role), the most consistently present and verbal character, is a study in contradictions. He is essentially never portrayed in a classic physician role, but much is made of his profession. This may be explained by the fact that it is his profession that justifies his central position--he knows and is in the confidence of all other characters. The reader follows, by means of the long and complex dialogues, Robin’s systematic destruction of a chain of male and female lovers in what appears to be an obsessive desire for self-destruction.

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Summary:

This tale is subtitled, "A Provincial’s Story." The narrator is Misail Poloznev, who lives in a provincial town with his father, an uninspired architect, and his sister, Cleopatra. Misail has no interest in the standard, clerical-type employment of gentlemen, but wishes to earn his living by manual labor. This is outrageous! It is totally immoral for a gentleman to cross the line and act like a common workman. When Misail goes to work for Radish the painter and contractor, his father first has the local governor warn the young man that he had better shape up or the genteel community will make him an outcast; when Misail persists, his father disowns him.

Misail’s friend, Dr. Blagovo, is a physician who articulates the beliefs of many of Russian intellectuals: "In this land of ours cultural life hasn’t even begun. There’s that same savagery that existed five hundred years ago." Through Dr. Blagovo, Misail meets Masha Dolzhikov, the engineer’s daughter. By falling in love with the idea of working the land and helping the peasants, she falls in love with and marries Misail, who embodies her ideal. They move to the country and try to farm, but the peasants cheat them. Masha tries to start a school for peasant children, but the peasants sabotage her plan. Finally, she gives up and moves to Petersburg, eventually asking Misail for a divorce.

Meanwhile, Cleopatra has fallen in love with Dr. Blagovo, who gets her pregnant and leaves. The outcast brother and sister then live together, until Cleopatra dies of tuberculosis after having the baby. Years later, Misail continues his principled career as a workman and cares for his orphaned niece.

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Summary:

Miss Armistead is a nurse in the surgical division of a hospital. She is being courted by two men, Dr. Joe Trask, the chief resident, and Dr. Mort Baker, an established and very successful surgeon. Everyone in the division is taking bets on her choice. Most assume she will choose Baker, the wealthier, more powerful doctor.

Then Miss Armistead develops appendicitis and requires emergency surgery. Joe Trask is on duty and has to begin the operation before Baker arrives, but experiences a terrible crisis of confidence, becoming helpless with fear. Baker arrives and completes the operation.

Everyone assumes that this will clinch Baker’s victory, but when Joe tells her how he was unable to operate on her, Miss Armistead takes this inability to see her as just another patient to be proof of the depth of his love for her, and agrees to marry him.

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Summary:

Anne (Sarah Polley) is 23 years old, is married with two small daughters, lives in a trailer in her mother’s yard, and works as a nightshift cleaner. She is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer and told she has no more than three months to live. She decides to tell no one that she is dying and makes a list of things to do in the time she has left.

She records birthday messages for her daughters, looks for a new wife for her husband (Scott Speedman), explores her troubled relationship with her mother (Deborah Harry), and has an affair with a man she meets in a laundromat (Mark Ruffalo). The last stages of her illness and her death are not shown; the focus is on how she chooses to live a life that has a new shape, both curtailed and illuminated by the knowledge of how soon it will end.

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Summary:

After working with the Parisian physiologist, François Magendie, Dr. John Leggate returns to England to practice in the town of Middlethorpe in the late 1840s. He is obsessed with making a research discovery that will help humanity and establish his name. He falls in love with the intelligent and gifted Marian Brooks who aspires to a career as a concert pianist after study in Leipzig with Felix Mendelsohn. They marry and find happiness at first, but she is troubled by discovery of his past affair in France, and he is troubled by her abandoning music simply to be the type of wife he never wanted.

Leggate has a theory about the origins of cholera, but his painstaking work shows him two things: 1. his original idea is mistaken, and 2. the disease is spread by water. He does not publish, though he announces his intentions to do so. Intimidated by skeptical colleagues, he is unable to write, and the problem is exacerbated by a newspapermen who makes unwarranted accusations because he holds a grudge against Leggate’s wife.

Marian wants to help him, but he rejects her offers and retreats into himself. Their marriage is threatened. Just as cholera returns and the town learns from Leggate’s insights, John Snow publishes his famous observations on cholera. Leggate is scooped. He and Marian migrate to Canada where he is accepted for his skills and desire to be of service and she establishes a conservatory of music. Their marriage is restored.

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Summary:

The spirit of St. Francis of Assisi presides over the garden in spring. Hyacinths bloom, and abandoned bird nests are tucked away in the nooks and crannies. Young couples embrace: "St. Francis forgive them / and all lovers / whoever they may be." The scene then fast forwards to summer, when the lovers find themselves bewildered and "incredulous / of their own cure / and half minded / to escape . . . "

The idyllic garden has turned menacing, yet St. Francis continues to have compassion for the lovers who "resemble children / roused from a long sleep." One lover stands up unafraid in the sunlight "as her heart / beats wildly / and her mind / drinks up / the full meaning / of it." [139 lines]

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Summary:

Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) is a reckless playboy who is injured in a speedboat accident. Life-saving equipment is brought to his aid although it is needed for the brilliant but seriously ill Dr. Phillips, who dies. Merrick’s selfish clumsiness leads to yet another accident, in which the doctor’s widow, Helen (Jane Wyman), is blinded.

Overcome with remorse, Merrick studies medicine, visits Helen under a false name and falls in love. He refers her for special eye examinations in Europe. She begins to love him too, but the specialists are unable to help her and when she learns of his deception, she flees. Years later, Merrick is summoned from his busy practice by Helen’s confidante and nurse (Agnes Moorehead); he arrives just in time to perform brain surgery, saving both her eyesight and her life.

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Summary:

When we meet Frankie "Starlight," (Corbin Walker) he has become, suddenly, an acclaimed writer, and the center of Ireland’s literary circle. In frequently interrupted flashbacks viewers become acquainted with the memoirs in his best-selling book. Much of this story, his story, is about Bernadette (Anne Parillaud), Frankie’s remarkable mother, her life prior to his birth, and the life that they would share until her death.

Bernadette’s story begins in France in the days before the D-Day invasion. She and her family live on the Normandy coast of occupied France where they suffer wartime abuses and atrocities imposed by Nazi soldiers. Just prior to D-Day, Bernadette and her teen-age friends discover an unusual metal object on the dunes. When the object explodes, only Bernadette survives. Shortly thereafter, and minutes before the D-Day attack, her father is brutally executed by the soldiers with all villagers, including Bernadette, bearing witness. Not surprisingly, these two traumatic events leave her damaged and scarred.

Bernadette escapes to Ireland on an American troop ship where she becomes pregnant with Frankie. The remainder of the story concerns her loving and supportive relationship with her child, a dwarf. Other characters include two of Bernadette’s lovers sensitively played by Gabriel Byrne and, later, Matt Dillon. Their relationships with her and her young son bring bizarre twists to an already unusual story. Set in France, Ireland, Texas, and back to Ireland.

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