Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal financial on money. How it

works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host David

Stein. Today is episode 375. It's titled Five Financial Lessons from Middle

March. When we look back on the COVID-19 pandemic, there are certain sounds or

movies or books that will always remind us of what it was like. Particularly the

spring of 2020 when we were locked down in our homes, the level of uncertainty was

incredible. Most of the global economy was shut down. Whenever I hear the

desperate and haunting calls of the white wing dove, I remember the pandemic

being locked down in Phoenix, evening walks with the Pearl, her daughter, her

daughter-in-law, and son, and her aging Sheetsu. I remember the novels I read, and

they remind me of the pandemic, Paulette Giles' book, News of the World, and the

850-page Tom Middle March by George Elliott. George Elliott was a pen name for

Mary Ann Evans, who lived from 1819 to 1880. Middle March is probably the most

financial novel of the 19th century that I can recall. It deals with day-to-day

life, debts, trying to figure out what to do for a profession, giving money away,

having enough money to live on. In 1856, George Elliott, at age 35, produced a

scathing essay about what was wrong with popular fiction of that day. She

titled it Silly Novels by Lady Novelist. She began writing Middle March in 1857.

It was published in serial form in 1871 and 1872. Novelist Virginia Wolf

described it as one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,

because it deals with day-to-day grown-up problems. Other prominent writers

publishing in the early 1870s include Thomas Hardy, Luisa May Alcott,

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