‘How was it,’ asks George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observ-ed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?’
I cannot reread that passage without thinking of a more modern marriage: the Church of England’s with her latest Archbishop.
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