My Life in Middlemarch (3 page)

I left Dickens’s desk, walked through the library’s marble corridors, and emerged on Forty-Second Street. I turned into Bryant Park and claimed a chair on a gravel path under one of the
towering London plane trees, a species named for the city of my birth growing in the city I had chosen. I thought about Eliot’s notebook, and of what it suggested about the germination and the growth of
Middlemarch.
I considered, too, how aptly Dickens had identified the strange potency of a great book—the way a book can insert itself into a reader’s own history, into a reader’s own life story, until it’s hard to know what one would be without it.

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.

This kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance. It might lead us back to the library in midlife, looking for something that eluded us before.

O
n December 2, 1870, not long after her fifty-first birthday, George Eliot made an entry in her journal. “I am experimenting in a story, which I began without any very serious intention of carrying it out lengthily,” she wrote. “It is a subject which has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write fiction.”

She had been working on this story in the mornings for the previous month and so far she’d written forty-four pages—four chapters. Most days, Eliot retreated upstairs immediately after finishing breakfast, at 8:00 a.m., and worked steadily for five hours. Affairs were arranged so that she was as free from domestic concerns as possible. Two servants—sisters named Grace and Amelia—kept the household running along well-established lines. “She never knew what was to be for dinner until she came down to it,” one of her servants later told a visitor.

She and Lewes, her partner of the last decade and a half, often lunched alone, but on that day a friend joined them. Maria Congreve was a bright young woman almost twenty years Eliot’s junior: “one of those women of whom there are few—rich in intelligence without pretension, and quivering with sensibility, yet calm and quiet in her manners,” Eliot once reported with approval to another friend. Over lunch, Eliot mentioned that she was feeling more cheerful than she had been of late, and that the sense of anxiety by which she often felt crippled had abated.

Later that evening, by the fire in the study, Eliot read aloud to Lewes an article about the ongoing Franco-Prussian War: Paris was enduring its second month under siege. The article made her cry, and she was troubled that she had spoken at lunch of her own relative contentment when there was so much suffering elsewhere. Before she retired to bed she wrote a note to Mrs. Congreve. “It rang in my ears that I had spoken of my greater cheerfulness as due to a reduced anxiety about myself and my doings, and had not seemed to recognize that the deficit or evil in other lives could be a cause of depression,” she wrote. “I was not really so ludicrously selfish while dressing myself up in the costume of unselfishness. But my strong egoism has caused me so much melancholy, which is traceable simply to a fastidious yet hungry ambition, that I am relieved by the comparative quietude of personal cravings which age is bringing.”

The manuscript upstairs was also concerned with egoism, melancholy, and ambition—and with the question of what an individual might do to alleviate the suffering of others. The story she had begun “without any very serious intention of carrying
it out lengthily” would become “Miss Brooke,” Book One of
Middlemarch.

In describing the subject of the story as being among the possible themes she had long been considering for fictional treatment, Eliot was probably referring to her ingenious revision of the marriage plot. What might happen if, instead of ending with a wedding, a novel were to begin with one—that of a young woman and a much older man to whom she is eminently ill-suited? The marriage plot was a well-established form in nineteenth-century literature, exquisitely mastered by Jane Austen, whose novels George Eliot had reread immediately before she made her own first effort at fiction. And the first four chapters of “Miss Brooke” present a decidedly Austenian scenario. There are two well-born sisters, both unmarried, one filled with sense and the other—like Mrs. Congreve—quivering with sensibility. (Dorothea “was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.”) The clever older sister is under a willful romantic misapprehension. Failing to recognize that her amiable, titled neighbor is courting her, she instead imagines that he is enchanted by her younger sister.

The older sister has entirely other ideals. She hopes to find a husband of exalted intellectual and moral stature. She imagines she would have been happily wed to “John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure.” Before too long, she meets a clergyman and scholar who appears to her—if to no one else around her—to be endowed with greatness, “a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint.” Naturally, she
constructs mentally a future in which she unites the glories of wife and helpmeet in her relation to this paragon of learning. “There would be nothing trivial about our lives,” she thinks. “Everyday-things with us would mean the greatest things.”

It’s fun to speculate about what Jane Austen might have done with this premise: would Casaubon have dwindled into Mr. Collins–like irrelevance, Will Ladislaw turned out to be a Wickham-like scoundrel, and Lydgate emerged as a Darcy-like black horse? One thing is beyond doubt: if this were Jane Austen’s story, the courtship of the blossoming Dorothea by the dry-as-dust Casaubon would have been a comedy. And, in fact, when John Blackwood, George Eliot’s publisher, read Casaubon’s excruciatingly stilted letter of proposal to Dorothea he wondered whether it was too comical to be plausible. (The letter reads, in part: “I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated.”) Blackwood queried the tone. “It is exceedingly funny,” he wrote. “But I mean is it not too transparently so not to strike even a girl so devoted to wisdom as poor dear Dodo.”

There is an Austenian irony in Eliot’s presentation of Dorothea’s ardent nature. Celia, the small, steady voice of sense, recognizes her sister’s fondness for self-denial—“she likes giving up,” Celia tells Sir James. The author knowingly editorializes upon Dorothea’s misplaced infatuation. “Dorothea’s inferences may seem large,” Eliot writes. “But really life could never have gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusion, which
has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization.” The reader is invited to recognize the absurdity of Dorothea’s instant devotion to Casaubon, and also to recognize the absurdity of social proprieties—the “difficulties of civilization,” in a marvelously restrained phrase—that require a man and a woman to marry before they have more than a passing acquaintance with each other.

But as George Eliot presents it, Dorothea’s inward predicament could not be more serious. When the reader meets her she is troubled, restless, discontented. “For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective,” Eliot writes. “What could she do, what ought she to do?” The pages vibrate with Dorothea’s yearning for a meaningful life. Her soul is too large for the comedy of manners into which she at first appears to have been dropped. She is bigger—her longings are grander—than the conventional story that others would write around her.

This theme—a young woman’s desire for a substantial, rewarding, meaningful life—was certainly one with which Eliot had long been preoccupied. It was a theme that she had been turning over in her mind when she wrote that late-night letter to Mrs. Congreve, confessing the alarmingly unbounded extent of her own ambition and ardor. And it’s a theme that has made many young women, myself included, feel that
Middlemarch
is speaking directly to us. How on earth might one contain one’s intolerable, overpowering, private yearnings? Where is a woman to put her energies? How is she to express her longings? What can she do to exercise her potential and affect the lives of others? What, in the end, is a young woman to do with herself?

These questions had been among George Eliot’s most pressing ones since long before she became George Eliot—back when she was Mary Ann Evans, an anxious, moody, brilliant Warwickshire girl with ambitions almost too large to bear.

A
LTHOUGH
a school friend later remarked to an early biographer that it was impossible to imagine George Eliot as a baby, and “that it seemed as if she must have come into the world fully developed, like a second Minerva,” the evidence suggests that she was, at one point, a squalling infant much like any other. “Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury Farm at five o’clock this morning,” her father, Robert Evans, noted in his diary for November 22, 1819.

She was his fifth child, the third by his second wife, Christiana, and Robert Evans was already in his midforties when she was born. Evans, like his father before him, had started out as a carpenter and builder, but by the time Mary Ann arrived he had become the trusted estate manager of Francis Newdigate, the local landowner, who lived at a grand house named Arbury Hall. Evans was not a large man, at least on the evidence of a handsome purple-and-green plaid velvet waistcoat that survives in a local museum. But he was known for his physical strength and for his strong moral rectitude. A terrifying anecdote, approvingly recounted in John Walter Cross’s
George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals,
tells of an occasion when Evans was riding atop a coach in Kent. The woman next to him complained that the hulking sailor on her other side was being offensive. “Mr. Evans changed places with the woman, and taking the sailor by
the collar, forced him down under the seat, and held him there with an iron hand for the remainder of the stage,” Cross reports.

Mary Ann adored her father, and in her fiction the noble-hearted, practical-handed artisan is a recurring type, one whom her critics have sometimes found too good to be true. One such is Adam Bede, the eponymous hero of her first novel, whom Henry James described as lacking “that supreme quality without which a man can never be interesting to men,—the capacity to be tempted.” In
Middlemarch,
there is Caleb Garth, like Robert Evans an estate manager, whose chief fault is that he is too willing to think the best of people. (This is a virtue disguised as a failing, as when an interview subject tells a prospective boss that his worst flaw is being too concerned with detail.) When, in her early thirties, a few years after her father’s death, Eliot spoke in an essay of “virtue or religion as it really exists—in the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter,” it seems an idealized picture from her own childhood. After her father died she saved his wire-rimmed spectacles in their tortoiseshell case and kept them for the rest of her life—an intimate souvenir, as if his perceptive eyes might still watch over her.

Less information survives about Eliot’s mother, Mrs. Robert Evans, the former Christiana Pearson. In his
Life,
Cross portrays her as the fulcrum of the family, always busy with her knitting, delivering herself of epigrammatic opinions like Mrs. Poyser in
Adam Bede.
But she seems to have been ill for much of Mary Ann’s childhood, her condition doubtless exacerbated by repeated childbearing as well as by grief. George Eliot referred to herself as
the youngest child in her family, but that wasn’t the whole story. Twin brothers, William and Thomas, were born in March 1821, when Mary Ann was barely a toddler; they both died when they were just ten days old. The lost boys are buried in the family tomb at their parish church, in Chilvers Coton, which is where Christiana was also laid after she died, probably of breast cancer, when Mary Ann was sixteen.

Mary Ann was a bright little girl, already reading the romances of Sir Walter Scott when she was seven years old. Scott was her father’s favorite, too, and he encouraged his clever daughter to read, though books were not exactly plentiful in the Evans household. Once a neighbor loaned a copy of Scott’s
Waverley
to Mary Ann’s sister Chrissey, five years her senior; it was returned before Mary Ann could finish reading it, and so she started writing the story out herself from scratch. Like lots of imaginative children, she told herself stories peopled by characters from the fictions she consumed. “I could not be satisfied with the things around me; I was constantly living in a world of my own creation, and was quite contented to have no companions that I might be left to my own musings and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress,” she later wrote. She preferred the company of adults to children and was regarded as something of an odd duck—“a queer, three-cornered, awkward girl,” said a neighbor. Once, when given the assignment of writing an essay about God, she sat down and drew a picture of a large, watchful eye.

At Miss Wallington’s, the school in Nuneaton she attended between the ages of nine and thirteen, and later at the Miss Franklins’ school in Coventry, instructors and students recognized that she had an unusually powerful intellect. Not that a powerful intellect
was strictly necessary, or even preferable, when it came to a girl’s education: her studies included French and English but also dancing and needlework. In
Middlemarch,
she acidly illuminates the deficiencies of what was considered a desirable education for a young lady by characterizing the ignorant and trivial Rosamond Vincy as “the flower of Mrs. Lemon’s school,” where “the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage.” The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry has among its holdings an example of work supposedly executed by Mary Ann Evans and some of her classmates at the Miss Franklins’ school: a little white cloak with a ruffled edge perhaps intended for a doll, though it would also be fit for a baby’s christening, or its funeral.