The Princess and the Goblin

 The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald is one of the most perfect fairytale stories that exist. From the brisk mountain air to the absurd and terrifying goblins to the transcendent and mysterious Grandmother, with Irene's courage matched with faith and Curdie's courage matched with intelligence and humor, it has everything a fairy tale should have and I will never get tired of it. 

I have to read The Princess and Curdie to go with it, and I could hardly say I dislike it, but it's a very, very different book. Our hero and heroine have only advanced from primary to secondary school, but the tone of the book has advanced from childhood wonder to midlife crisis. The villains are not comical goblins, but ordinary people being selfish and cold in ordinary ways. And for that, there is no permanent cure. The last story's happily ever after dissolves and never comes back. The tone is so very different that I do want to sit Mr. MacDonald down and ask him what *was* going on when he wrote the second book. 

Other Books:

The Brothers Karamazov: I finally finished this. I loved the trial scenes, although I did probably spend an inordinate amount of time wondering whether the rules of evidence really allowed that or whether it was just the novelist's oversimplification. It ends satisfactorily but untidily, but I am left imagining my own ending in which Dmitri and Gruschenka *do* successfully escape to America where, despite Dmitri's current opinion, they settle permanently and Ivan and Katarina follow, along with Ilyosha, and thirty-five years later everyone is trying to have a nice normal American Thanksgiving for the sake of the grandchildren with all this dramatic backstory which keeps coming up awkwardly. 

How to Read Nature  by Tristan Gooley. Yes, I will just be working through all of this author's books I can get from the library. This is a small one and highly accessible, packed with very simple exercises that can be done without fancy equipment right where you are. The theme is the opposite of snooty, as Gooley focuses on the conflict, sex and death that always arrest human attention and that are going on all around us all the time. 

Monkey King: Journey to the West, by WuCheng'En, translated by Julia Lovell. I actually started this when Dame chose it for school last year but I've taken it slowly and just now finished up. This is a classic Chinese fantasy tale, and it is a wild ride. It reminds me of nothing so much as Looney Tunes with the wisdom of fools and so much slapstick. I presume it's been serialized many times. Monkey King is a subversive, obnoxious, and hilarious trickster hero and I remain a little in doubt that he's actually achieved enlightenment by the end. The translation is pretty accessible but as with most old stories modern parents might want to edit a few parts for the younger readers. 

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I *was* listening to this on Spotify and then they put in a 10-hours max per month audiobook rule so now I'm listening on Librivox. Anyway, the dry Yankee wit is a welcome change from all the Russian drama. (My favorite scene is when Ishmael tells the captain that he wants to sign onto a whaling ship to "see the world." The captain gestures to the water over the starboard side as a fair sample of what he will actually be seeing.)  

It's certainly long-winded but I find myself enjoying the diversions and rambles and there's a lot of interesting insight into early natural history and classifications. Think of it as a podcast. It goes well with farming or grinding in video games. Every era has its way of wasting colossal amounts of time and everyone wrings their hands over the current ones and praises the prior ones as superior or abuses them as tedious but the reality is, we're large mammals. While movement is essential, we aren't meant to spend all day every day tearing around like insects or hummingbirds. We're meant to "waste" a good bit of our time, it's how we operate. 

Also, I'm making great progress towards my 100-hour reader t-shirt for the first time ever. 

Echo North by Joanna Ruth Meyer. There are a lot of retellings of East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon, or as I think of it, the Heroine's Journey (aka Cupid and Psyche or Beauty and the Beast), but that doesn't mean there's no need for more. This one felt a bit cliche to me at first but it drew me in. 

Stories in the Stars by Susanna Hislop. Dame has been on an astronomy kick lately wanting to learn to identify some more constellations, so I reserved a bunch of books. (This time of the year is the only time we really have a shot at observing the stars on any regular basis; unfortunately it takes a very long time to get dark.) This one was not particularly helpful for identifying but is more a highly varied sampler of the stories behind them. I did enjoy learning about some of the more modern creations or the myths from different cultures. 

A Walk through the Heavens by Milton D. Heifetz and Wil Tirion. This one, on the other hand, is perfect for actually finding new constellations, it starts you off at the Big Dipper and gives step by step instructions to each one. We also discovered that some old red tissue paper over a flashlight works fine for preserving night vision. And I have discovered that my eyes are starting to decline, and I cannot see all the stars that Dame can. I should have spent more time learning constellations when I was younger, I suppose.  But I can spot Cygnus now, and Vega of the Lyre. 

Trial by Jury

Progressing through *The Brothers Karamazov* I was startled to hear a jury being selected. Tsarist Russia has trial by jury? Turns out it did, for some crimes, for a little while, as part of Tsar Alexander II's reforms in the 1860s, shortly after freeing the serfs and ending with the 1917 revolution. This law review article answered a lot of my questions, though being over twenty years old it still leaves me wondering how the revival of trial by jury is going these days. 

Anyway, you can hear the skepticism of the upper classes as the jury is seated--what can these muzhiks know about the passions and motives of a (sort of) aristocratic Karamazov? Well, everything, of course, because crimes are committed by humans for human reasons, and what we need of the jury is to simply be human beings. Which brings in Chesterton's great defense of exactly why the right to jury is so important: 

Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round.

Interestingly, while jury nullification (i.e. the unavoidable ability of the jury to refuse to convict a person even though the case against them is proven, because they disapprove of the law) is a hush-hush or lunatic fringe concept in American law, it was explicitly authorized and stated in Russian trials. Yet despite that, and despite a presumably higher historic degree of antagonism between the government and the people, acquittal rates in Russia were always similar to those in the US, which suggests that perhaps we will not unloose anarchy if we talk about it.  

My practice does not involve many jury trials, none criminal, but I have conducted or assisted with a few. From what I have seen, it is quite true that it is impossible to impress the nuances of legal concepts upon a jury. No matter how carefully explained, they will have no comprehension of burden of proof or causation. But they will very seriously try to understand who is in the wrong and to be fair, and in the end that comes out as close as we could ask for. 

On a lighter note, the miniseries Jury Duty provided a goofy but surprisingly heartwarming look at our judicial system. The premise is that a single person gets what they believe to be a legitimate jury duty summons and is seated on what appears to be a real jury. Only everyone--judge, attorneys, litigants, and all the other jurors--are actors. (The judge is also a retiring judge, so the legal process itself is fairly accurate.) The actors then provide increasingly absurd hijinks yet, through it all, our random juror remains committed to trying to give the litigants a fair trial and make a just ruling. 

The Phantom Tollbooth

 Last winter someone was asking in a Facebook group on reading for more books like *The Phantom Tollbooth* and neither Bookworm nor I could come up with any. There's really nothing like *The Phantom Tollbooth*. However, on further reflection, although it would completely skew anyone's expectations of either book, what *The Phantom Tollbooth* is most like is *Pilgrim's Progress.* It is a *Pilgrim's Progress* of the mind. The zany characters and situations are not merely a series of puns, they are the embodiment of ideas, turns of phrase, paradoxes. And it is, of course, a moral journey: from ignorance and indifference to wisdom and curiosity. 

I am afraid that will convince no one to read it, or the people who do read it will find it not at all what they were expecting. It is also a hilarious, delightful, relatively easy read. It has been one of my favorite books since I first read it at an age so young I no longer remember. It was definitely the most formative book of my first decade of life. As a child for whom abstract knowledge came more readily than the often overwhelming world of the senses, it convinced me that the real world was full of wonder as well. 

Other Books:

*Atlas of a Lost World* by Craig Childs. G. K. Chesterton writes in several places with great humor of the folly of archaeologists and anthropologists imagining "primitive man" (as the term used at the time) as some utterly alien being full of incomprehensible behaviors instead of (whether separated by time or geography) people very much like us with customs no stranger, when you stop to think about it, than our own. Fortunately I think this is one area where the prevailing mindset has improved, and this book was a terrific example. The author writes of various archaeological discoveries related to the arrival of humans to the Americas in the Ice Age, and intersperses those with his personal camping and travel experiences (on foot or by boat) among landscapes that might resemble those of the Ice Age. It's a wonderful exercise of the imagination, vividly portraying the courage, curiosity, and skill must have taken to survive in a world of megafauna.  

*The Summer Book* by Tove Jansson. This is a deceptively simple book, about a little girl and grandmother experiencing summer on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland. That sounds rather saccharine, but it is not. Grandmother is not growing old gracefully and the little girl is as contrary and unpredictable as any real child and the simple life close to nature is undertaken with the casual indifference of an earlier era when it was perfectly normal to throw your trash into the sea. There is Father, too, but he is a middle-aged person who spends all his time working or fishing. It's up to the very old and very young to experience being human.

*The Brothers Karamazov* I've almost made it to Dmitri's trial. I really don't think much of Dmitri but I also don't think he did it. Dostoevsky is certainly deft about exploring the labyrinths of the human mind: though everyone is a bit over the top, especially the women, they are over the top in recognizable ways. 

*Songs of Willow Frost* by Jamie Ford. This is the current book club selection, so I am finishing it even though it's not the kind of thing I like (but it is definitely the kind of thing that winds up picked for book clubs so apparently a lot of people do like that kind of thing.) It's a notable local author who provides well-developed stories illuminating local history. I just don't really read to deal with realistic family problems and personal calamities, that's what I deal with all day. But I take it like medicine and then I go read something like:

*Oath of Swords* *The War God's Own* *Wind Rider's Oath* *War Maid's Choice* by David Weber. These are the books you read when you want some big damn heroes with great big swords to stabbity stab some even bigger nasty demons. While the main character, Bahzell, a verrry reluctant paladin, is a joy in any circumstance, I'm also a big fan of his fellow paladin Dame Kareitha, who has a sword divinely blessed to let her know when documents are forged and who settles boundary disputes with some deft legal expertise combined with using the sword in its more traditional fashion. 

*What Feasts at Night* by T. Kingfisher. I never know what to say if people ask if I like horror. I don't find horror particularly horrifying for whatever reason, so reading for pure adrenalin does not work for me. It's a book, nothing's going to eat me. If there's interesting psychological development, though, horror doesn't put me off. This series, by T. Kingfisher, tends to have a rather botanical twist and features frequent appearances by Beatrix Potter's aunt, a noted mycologist. 

Wind in the Willows

 Wind in the Willows, someone once said, is not a book that you judge: it is a book that judges you. But it is a kindly judgment, not the imperious magistrate casting you into the gaol, but the friends dragging you back home for your own good. It is a book I feel sorry for people who never got to read, or who cannot appreciate it. And I can understand why some people struggle with it (beyond those who have no enjoyment for anything fantastical): the pacing is erratic, lurching between pastoral lyricism and the crazy adventures of Toad. But so be it. It is not for us to judge. 

Whereas Winnie the Pooh deals with life's small and ordinary feelings and encounters, Wind in the Willows dives right into some of its hardest tangles: the line between supporting friends and enabling them; the tension between the longing for home and longing for adventure; the overwhelming weight of glory and the mercy of our day to day agnosticism. 

The thing that struck me most of all on this reread was that Grahame succeeds in a way almost unique to bring the modern (to him at least) world into his fantasy without losing any of the sense of wonder. It is extremely easy--nearly every modern YA fantasy book does it--to render magic into mere technology. It is not particularly unusual to write fantasy, like Tolkien did, in which technology is the enemy and hostile to magic. But to make a world where Mr. Toad can steal a motor-car--and a train for good measure--and yet every tree and streamlet is laden with mystery and purpose--that is quite uncommon. 

It had been too long since I read it (not since Dame and Dash were second graders, so eight years at least), and I will do my best not to let so long go by again. 

Other Books:
I finished How to Read a Tree, by Tristan Gooley, but I really think I need to own it because it's a book to read a tiny bit of and then go for a lot of long walks and noticing. Not that I get to spend a lot of time noticing since my walks are usually desperately trying to restrain or hopelessly trying to locate the dogs, but I still am spotting some more. Looking forward to trying out more by this author, the library has a bunch. 

I also got back from the library and finally finished The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery. Last year everyone was reading Incredibly Bright Creatures, including our book group, and while we enjoyed it pretty well (especially for the local setting and for being more cheerful than *most* of the local books we get to read), the best part was definitely the octopus and if you really want to spend some time with octopuses, The Soul of an Octopus might be more what you want.

Our book club's newest selection is In The Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. I am looking forward to hearing everyone's opinions on it--it's the true story on which Moby Dick was based. I think everyone will enjoy it, except perhaps Barb who has some cannibalism-related trauma due to being a child before movie ratings systems came out. Adventure on the high seas and all that. I really want to give Moby Dick another go now (I last read that as an extremely stubborn but largely uncomprehending 10 year old) but I'm still only about a third of the way through the Brothers Karamazov. I definitely want to check out more by this author. 

In children's books that came out since my time, I've been reading a whole slew of Harriet Hamsterbone and Danny Dragonbreath adventures by Ursula Vernon. They're in the gaining fluency stage, somewhere between a graphic novel and a chapter book, and they're hilarious and inventive and in my opinion a significant cut above the better known series in that range. Harriet and her battle quail solve various fractured fairytale crises, while Danny and his small reptilian buddies cope with various more or less mythical monsters. They manage to have great adventures without dead or absentee parents, potty humor, or any excessive degree of family turmoil. I also highly recommend Castle Hangnail. 

The Brothers Karamzov I have moved to audio book--it's way easier to keep the characters straight with an actor doing different voices than it is to remember who is going by which name in what context. Russian literature, I suspect, is rather like watching reality TV or soap operas: one's own life can hardly escape looking better by contrast. It is great and profound and thought provoking and also sometimes I just want Flora from Cold Comfort Farm to show up and convince everyone to stop being so melodramatic. 

I saw a bunch of recommendations to try Louise Penny as a modern mystery writer and I must say the titles and cover art were very compelling. I read A World of Curiosities and found it pretty well done but in the end I really don't like the grittier kind of mystery very much. (Even though, if you think of it, cozy mysteries are far more disturbing--to think that an ordinary person living their ordinary life could have personal knowledge of dozens of murderers who mostly murdered for rather humdrum and ordinary reasons--is far more troubling than to think that the chief detective for a large metropolitan area would need to deal with the occasional serial killer.) But I will probably read a couple more because the titles are so lovely, but not right before bed.

Due to wanting to inspire Dame to keep up on her Latin I started doing Latin on Duolingo, but the course is not very long and I have already gotten to the part that's only review while still being very far from actually reading anything interesting in Latin. So I'm very excited to have purchased Scribblers, Sculptors and Scribes along with Wheelock's Latin, which promises reading real Latin writers from the very beginning, even if we have to start with graffiti and copybook headings. 

The Great Brain

 So for February my revisitation of children's literature went to The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald. There are more in the series, but we seem to have the first two. (My library consists of a very random amalgamation of books--mostly American history--purchased by DOB in his youth; books of many varieties picked up by me at random library sales, books obtained for school for the kids in various years, and quite a number that were rescued from the farm. Also Bookworm's library is slowly migrating this way. And in the past couple of years I have finally started deliberately purchasing books I actually want to re-read. So I am often in ignorance of what exactly is in our library. Also DOB hired some housecleaners to come install additional bookshelves and bring order to the chaos upstairs a couple of years ago and while they did make everything much neater, they had not the slightest conception of how books should be organized so pretty much everything is just random. After the addition goes on and Bookworm moves in we shall have a grand book reorganizing.) 

*The Great Brain* is in the category of realistic kid adventures with a strong historical and geographical setting--in this case turn of the 20th century (we have to specify which one now) Utah. They are based on his own childhood and I have no idea how fictionalized they are (or what his older brother immortalized as the titular character, a money-loving eleven-year-old con artist, thought of the series.) 

On re-read, these are solid but not immortal books. The prose is a little clunkier than I remembered. There are many things that might grate on modern sensibilities, but on the whole the series is good-hearted and doesn't shy away from tough issues (immigration, disability, suicide, lack of community care for an outsider). Honestly I think most parents would definitely put it in the read-aloud-and-discuss category. It's certainly a very different world, one where a boy's status is entirely measured by physical violence and girls don't even exist, where weeks of the silent treatment is the enlightened parental alternative to the whippings routinely handed out, where dividing along cultural and religious lines is hardly even to be questioned. But I think it's good for kids to visit some different worlds, and even to realize that places not all that distant in time or space still had dramatically different outlooks and unquestioned values. 

Other books I have been reading:

I finished Byzantium and it held up well through the end. The Vikings remained a hilarious RPG party throughout; even being sent to the silver mines could not squelch them and they horded as much silver as they could until rescued. And yet it also felt real when the one Viking convert, despite his entire instruction being at the hands of his captive/slave/friend, a disillusioned and apostate Irish monk, spoke movingly of the day he nearly died of torture in the mines that he knew that Jesu would be there at the harbor to welcome him home, and would understand, as he had suffered in the same way.

This also got me interested in Eastern European medieval trade routes, which is being further whetted by a podcast on The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors, about a journey from Germany through Russia and Persia in the 1600s, but I cannot find anything on it at all at the local library.  

On the monastery theme, I convinced my book club to read A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters, and I am always happy to spend some time with Brother Cadfael. We'll see how people like it. 

On a bit of a mystery kick, then, I also reread Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers. It is wild to think that this book is nearly a century old; I wonder if it is one of the first examples of the modern workplace comedy with its banter that still feels familiar territory but surely did not exist much earlier, before, well, workplaces were co-ed. (One cannot imagine such a place in Dickens.) Granted it's still early days and there are no women in management but there is one actual female copywriter and a couple of typists whom Sayers, holding true to her principles, treats as humans. And though the language of the actual advertisements have all the absurdities of vintage advertisements, the general motive of advertising and its very mixed blessings have not changed all that much even if the media have changed dramatically. 

I've decided my next tough classic to tackle is The Brothers Karamzov. There's nothing like a little Russian literature to remind one that one's troubles are not really so bad. 

Pooh and Alice

 I started off the year with A. A. Milne. I'm sure the idea is not original with me that children's literature can have a much broader scope than adult literature because, with the attention-hogging topics of sex and death off the table, the writer must delve into the more nuanced joys and sorrows that actually make up the bulk of life. Probably no books exemplify this as well as the Winnie-the-Pooh books, which celebrate life's small joys like sitting in the sun with a friend and its small sorrows like discovering one already ate the snack one was saving for later. Although I think it is the poems that I find even more enlightening, as there are few days in which I do not feel like The Old Sailor My Grandfather Knew, not to mention those days of discovering another knight whose squeak has gone, or needing to enlist a suitable third party to suggest an answer I am not entirely sure of. We will never forget Pooh, even when we are 100. 

Then I went on to Lewis Carroll, which are an entirely different kind of fantasy, the kind where even the ordinary becomes strange. This puts some people off, but for those of us who are always finding ourselves at odds with the world, it is strangely comforting. (Pooh and Alice view from different angles the joy of reciting one's own poetry and the horror of having to listen to other people's. Such is human existence.) There is also a special place in my heart for *The Hunting of the Snark*, though it is much less well known:

He had bought a large map representing the sea,

   Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

   A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,

   Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply

   "They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

   But we've got our brave Captain to thank

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—

   A perfect and absolute blank!"

Anyway, they were both a good way to spend January, including one particularly exciting Friday when the temperature dropped to 12 Fahrenheit, the pipes froze, the heaters stopped working, the dogs got out, and CPS dropped by (due to an offender in the neighborhood).  

Other things I am reading:

Byzantium by Stephen Lawhead. This is the first time I've actually read Lawhead, as far as I know, though I've tried several times but always been stymied by not having the right books in the right order. As far as I know, this one stands alone. So far it's been quite enjoyable (and a nice medieval follow-up to Doomsday Book, which I read over New Year's). It does feel a bit like a role-playing game somehow in the sequence of adventures, but I do not consider that a demerit. 

The Planets by Dava Sobel. I wanted a reliable science writer after starting on a book off the library new books rack that had a glorious title and promised to be about deep sea creatures but instead spent an awful lot of time on the author's Tinder dates, which were of no interest to me. This was not about deep sea creatures, but it was, as advertised, about the planets, both their attributes, exploration, and the history of human views and legends about them. The only thing I wished it had was an update for the most recent fly-bys. 

How to Read a Tree by Tristan Gooley. I haven't finished this yet, because it's best read in small doses so I can then look for things on my next walk, or as much as I can do while disentangling the dogs from the huckleberry bushes. This book focuses on general species that have common traits throughout the Northern Hemisphere and then on specific things to notice about the trees in front of you and how their growth and patterns have been influenced by their surroundings. 

Book Goals 2024

 My personal reading goal for 2024 is to revisit my favorite childhood classics, which I have not revisited since the kids were small. I am shooting for one a month, but I consider a series one book for this purpose. My rules for this list are: It has to be one I enjoyed as a child (this eliminates ones I only encountered as an adult, such as The Prydain Chronicles); it has to be one my children enjoyed (this eliminates some obscure midcentury fiction or many that were not available on audiobook); it has to be one I haven't reread in a decade. (This eliminates The Hobbit and Anne of Green Gables, for instance.)

The World of Pooh

Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass

The Chronicles of Narnia

Wind in the Willows

The Jungle Book

The Phantom Tollbooth

Little House series

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle

The Great Brain 

Kim 

Misty of Chincoteague or Justin Morgan had a Horse or Brighty of the Grand Canyon, depends on which is easiest to find. 

Arabian Nights adaptation

Redwall (Not going to try the whole series here, one or two should do. Also not entirely sure I read this as a child, I might have been a teenager.)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

Tom Sawyer

OK this list is getting kind of long; it might be a two year challenge. Or I might get through them pretty quickly. As a pre-teen I typically polished off a book or two a day; I don't have that kind of time or focus any more but I don't think most of these will take me very long. 

Middlemarch

 I revisited *Middlemarch* via Spotify this fall. I am not one of those virtuous people who listen to lots of audiobooks while they get chores done, that is too much going on for me. I like to listen to audiobooks and play videogames on the rare occasion when it is quiet enough around here for me to get away with it. (Sadly the Spotify one fell about five chapters short, but luckily I found them on Librivox, I just had to actually click through to the next chapter.)

Anyway, I love *Middlemarch* and was not at all disappointed by a revisit. The characters are vivid and even the more villainous ones are well-rounded. Even the arch-hypocrite Bulstrode has to wrestle with his conscience and we are not entirely unable to distance ourselves from his self-justifications. And the boring ordinary characters are deeply endearing--I honestly came a way with a lot of sympathy for Sir James and Cecy and for Mr. Brooke's colossal but warm-hearted bumbling.  

When reading 19th century literature I always like to envision what the women would do if they *could* do things and how much this would help their frustrations. Dorothea, after a brief stint as Casaubon's graduate student teaching assistant (a relationship that would have suited both of them much better than marriage) would have gone into social work and wound up founding a large non-profit. I may be biased, but I believe Mary Garth would have been a wonderful small-town attorney: she has a strong sense of ethics, an ability to be tactful without being cowed, a very quick wit and tongue, and a deep loyalty to people and place. And she actually knows Latin. Rosalyn, I fear, would be an influencer, the kind that always wants everyone to give them things for free for "exposure." She might at least get some help for her postpartum depression, but fear it is too late to change her fundamental character. 

Mostly 19th century novelists like to expose the follies and false limitations of society, but from the 21st century it is likely to induce a bit of nostalgia for having something resembling society at all--for actually knowing your neighbors and their forefathers and expecting to know their descendants. And of course, having to behave accordingly. Social constraints and the need to pay the bills are not all bad: They might have kept Lydgate and Dorothea from full self-actualization and the noble achievement of which they dreamed, but they also turned Ladislaw and Fred Garth into productive members of society instead of wastrels. 

It seems to be a popular opinion about the book that Dorothea is too good for Ladislaw, or that she and Lydgate should have ended up together or something like that. I think this is quite wrong. She would have been as miserable with Lydgate as with Casaubon, because the primary issue with Casaubon is that he viewed Dorothea as a decorative furnishing for his own life, not as her own person with her own views. And Lydgate, though young and handsome and with a perhaps more useful ambition, views women exactly the same way. The fact that Rosalyn's independent goals and wishes are shallow and pointless does not change this fact. Sooner or later Dorothea would have thought about things differently than he would have, and he would have been as incensed by it as if the table suddenly declined to hold supper, and Dorothea would have been hurt and incomprehending because despite her wholehearted embrasure of model wifely duties, she is incapable of *being* a piece of furniture. Whereas Ladislaw, for all his weaknesses, simply values Dorothea as a person, for herself. Which doesn't mean no conflict, but does mean a chance of resolving it as fellow humans instead of locking themselves away into marital roles. Sure, she will be the dominant personality in their marriage, but then, why shouldn't she be? They are both happy that way.