Summary:

This work, originally entitled "Three Women," is a semi-autobiographical story of Willa Cather, her mother and grandmother, four younger children--all boys--the father, and a servant girl, who all lived together in a small midwestern town. The roles of the three women are beautifully described: the gentle grandmother who cared for and taught the children, her daughter, a displaced "southern belle" who was spoiled in many ways but wise and loving with her children, and her granddaughter, a teenager set upon her own needs and ambitions but dutiful toward her family.

Another part of the story is the relationship of this family to a well educated neighbor couple who "kept a tender watch over the comings and goings of the household." It was in their home that the granddaughter found a library she could use and encouragement for her studies. Eventually it was this couple who made it possible for her to attend college.

The gradual, unnoticed deterioration of the grandmother ended with her death. The response of the family to this event is well described. Also the empathic relationship between the grandmother and the servant girl is very poignant. Even the death of a family cat adds to the depth of the story in a metaphorical way.

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Aurelio Escovar is introduced as a poor dentist without a degree. He is busy polishing false teeth early one morning when the mayor arrives to see him. At first he refuses to see this would-be patient, until the mayor, who has been suffering severe toothache for five days and is desperate, threatens to shoot him. Eventually the dentist lets him in, examines him, and then removes the infected wisdom tooth, without anesthesia.

We realize that the dentist has deliberately made the mayor suffer all this time, and he gives the reason as he pulls out the tooth, saying "Now you’ll pay for our twenty dead men." When the mayor has recovered and wiped his tears, he leaves, telling the dentist to send the bill. When Escovar asks whether to send the bill "To you or the town?," the mayor replies, "It’s the same damn thing."

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On the night before Easter, a traveler waits to cross the river to a monastery. Finally, a lay brother named Jerome brings the ferry across. As the ferry moves slowly to the other bank, Jerome reveals his sadness over the death of Nicholas, a fellow monk who wrote beautiful prayers for saints’ days. "Can you tell me, kind master," Jerome asks, "why it is that even in the presence of great happiness a man cannot forget his grief?"

Jerome loved Nicholas who was very quiet, kind and tender, not at all like the other monks, who are loud and harsh. At the monastery the traveler participates in services throughout the night, then returns to the ferry after sunrise on Easter morning. Jerome is still working the ferry. His promised relief has not arrived.

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Gerald has just married into a close knit Kentucky family. So when the kin receive word that Ory, one of his wife’s brothers, was shot by his girlfriend, Gerald gets the job of driving to Nebraska to pick him up. When he arrives in Wahoo, the Indian doctor at the hospital tells him that Ory had a "blood clot" and died.

The sheriff takes Gerald to the jail to meet Ory’s girlfriend, who shot him in an argument about a wig. Later, he decides to take Ory back to Kentucky. Two days later he arrives home with the corpse covered with dirt in the back of his pickup. "The stench was bad and getting worse." (p. 31)

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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:

A small-town doctor’s son is saved by a black man from a burning house. In gratitude, the doctor takes it upon himself to salvage the life of the badly burned and disfigured hero. Others warn him that he is doing no service to the patient, but the physician cannot let go of one whom he owes such a profound debt. The town begins to fear the newly created "monster." The burned man’s life becomes a nightmare of rejection; the physician and his family are progressively rejected by the community.

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Doctor Yashvin sits with his colleagues and admits, "I have killed a man." The story of his resistance activity during the Bolshevik revolution ensues. The young doctor was called to serve as the personal physician of an enemy colonel. In this command the doctor witnesses horrible atrocities against common people as well as resistance fighters, the last straw being the brutal beating of a woman who comes demanding to know why her husband has been shot. Called upon to attend to a knife wound sustained by the colonel and finding the latter in a vulnerable position, Yashvin takes advantage of the moment, shoots the colonel dead, and escapes.

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Summary:

This little novel is the retrospective tale of a childhood event told by the protagonist 40 years later. Family relationships and bonds in conflict with professional and community obligations vie with the shadow of racism and sexual abuse in the doctor/patient relationship for the core tensions in the book. The setting is a small rural community where the pioneer family about which the tale evolves controls the law and the medicine. The boy narrator relates his view of the breakdown of family as its secret--a physician uncle who is suspected of sexually abusing his native-American women patients--becomes a force that demands action from the doctor’s brother who serves as the sheriff.

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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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