My Life in Middlemarch

by Rebecca Mead

  Copyright © 2014 by Rebecca Mead

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mead, Rebecca.

  My life in Middlemarch / Rebecca Mead.—First edition.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Eliot, George, 1819–1880. Middlemarch. 2. Mead,

  Rebecca—Books and reading. 3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Title.

  PR4662.M43 2014

  823′.8—dc23 2013011477

  ISBN 978-0-307-98476-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-98478-4

  Jacket design by Elena Giavaldi

  Jacket photographs: Marco Scozzaro;

  (landscape) SuperStock/Getty

  v3.1_r1

  For my mother, and in memory of my father

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prelude

  Chapter 1: Miss Brooke

  Chapter 2: Old and Young

  Chapter 3: Waiting for Death

  Chapter 4: Three Love Problems

  Chapter 5: The Dead Hand

  Chapter 6: The Widow and the Wife

  Chapter 7: Two Temptations

  Chapter 8: Sunset and Sunrise

  Finale

  Bibliographical Notes and Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prelude

  “Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies’ school literature.”

  —MIDDLEMARCH, CHAPTER 3

  When I was seventeen years old and still living in the seaside town where I spent my childhood, I would go for a few hours every Sunday morning to the home of a retired teacher of English literature to talk about books. She was the wife of an admiral in the Royal Navy and had been enlisted by my school to tutor me, along with a couple of my classmates, for our university entrance examinations.

  My town is in the southwest of England, in a mostly rural county that is cut through by narrow roads and hedgerowed lanes that discreetly delineate the ancestral holdings of landed families. The admiral and his wife lived in a village just outside town, and their living room overlooked chalky hills. Here we sat, week after week, reading narrowly but closely: analyzing Metaphysical poets and dissecting tragic themes in Shakespeare. The biggest book we read was Middlemarch, by the Victorian novelist George Eliot, who was born Mary Ann Evans near Nuneaton, not far from Coventry, in 1819.

  I had the Penguin English Library edition, a brick of a paperback nine hundred pages long. On the front cover was a detail from a painting of a young woman in a full white skirt and a long black tunic, climbing some stone steps to scale a fence and reach a wooded thicket that abuts a golden hillside. The painting dates from 1839, but the scene looks exactly like a stretch of countryside that lay within five minutes’ walk of my parents’ house.

  I was aching to get away from this landscape. Oxford was the immediate goal, but anywhere would do. My town had no colleges, no theaters, no museums. It seemed to me to offer no opportunity to live a cultured, intellectual life, which was what I avidly aspired to do, even if I had only a very imprecise notion of what that might consist of. I noted the subtitle of Middlemarch—“A Study of Provincial Life”—and as I looked out of my teacher’s window over hills that were frequently sodden with rain, grazed by forlorn sheep, my home seemed to me barely less provincial than the Midlands of the 1830s the book described.

  The novel, which charts the intersecting lives of a number of residents of an English town, was riveting, from the very first sentence of its first chapter. “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress,” it reads, and you know immediately that you are in the company of an unconventional heroine. On that first encounter, I identified completely with Miss Dorothea Brooke, an ardent young gentlewoman who yearns for a more significant existence. This identification was in spite of the difference between our social stations. Dorothea lives at Tipton Grange, a large estate equipped with household staff. My family lived in a modest house with a small garden, built in the 1950s, and I only had to go back a few generations to find ancestors who had belonged to the household staff on properties like the Brookes’.

  Dorothea, who at the novel’s outset is nineteen, disdains the attentions of her neighbor and suitor, Sir James Chettam, an altogether too amiable baronet, “who said ‘Exactly’ to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty.” Instead, she makes a spectacularly unwise marriage to the Reverend Edward Casaubon, a pedantic middle-aged scholar laboring on his notes for an endlessly deferred masterwork with the deadly title The Key to All Mythologies, whom she initially mistakes for a sage in parson’s clothing.

  Parallel with the story of Dorothea, we have that of Dr. Tertius Lydgate, an idealistic young physician newly arrived in town. He aims to establish a practice along modern principles and to make great discoveries, but his ambitions are fatally curtailed by his marriage to Rosamond Vincy, the willful, empty-headed town beauty. We meet Will Ladislaw, a youth of tempestuous passions, full of high-flown aspirations to be an artist or a poet; a cousin of Mr. Casaubon, Ladislaw is drawn—in the most honorable of fashions—to his cousin’s new young wife, who comes also to depend upon him. We meet Rosamond’s brother, Fred Vincy, the feckless but well-intentioned son of the town’s mayor; and we meet the young woman Fred has set his hopes on, clever, practical, sardonic Mary Garth, the daughter of a financially squeezed land agent. We come to know Nicholas Bulstrode, the sanctimonious, overbearing banker, who insists that others conform to religious principles that—it is no surprise ultimately to discover—he has not always observed himself. And we learn about the Reverend Camden Farebrother, the humane, generous clergyman who understands the frailties of his flock because, being an occasional gambler and a habitual smoker, he is well aware of his own.

  This book, which had been published serially in eight volumes almost a hundred years before I was born, wasn’t distant or dusty, but arresting in the acuteness of its psychological penetration and the snap of its sentences. Through it, George Eliot spoke with an authority and a generosity that was wise and essential and profound. I couldn’t believe how good it was.

  And I couldn’t believe how relevant and urgent it felt. At seventeen I was old enough to have fallen in love, and I had intellectual and professional ambitions, just like Eliot’s characters. I was, after all, working hard to get into one of England’s ancient universities, something no one in my family had ever done before. The questions with which George Eliot showed her characters wrestling would all be mine eventually. How is wisdom to be attained? What are the satisfactions of personal ambition, and how might they be weighed against ties and duties to others? What does a good marriage consist of, and what makes a bad one? What do the young owe to the old, and vice versa? What is the proper foundation of morality? I marked passages with a fluorescent pen: from chapter 37, as Dorothea realizes Casaubon’s intellectual inadequacies: “Now when she looked steadily at her husband’s failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness”; from chapter 64, where Lydgate and Rosamond’s marital relations are at their most strained: “In marriage, the certainty, ‘She will never love me much’, is easier to bear than the fear, ‘I shall love her no more.’ ” These seemed like things worth holding on to. The book was reading me, as I was reading i
t.

  My copy’s back cover cited what I later came to realize was the most celebrated characterization of the novel: Virginia Woolf’s observation that Middlemarch is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” I was ready for adult literature. I was eager to become well read. I had not grown up in a house full of books, though I was encouraged to be a reader. My family made weekly trips to the library, and my father belonged to a book-of-the-month club from which he ordered me big, presentation volumes: a compendium of fairy tales, a collection of canonical poetry in which I read the most familiar works of John Keats and Rupert Brooke and Philip Larkin. Because I loved words, the Christmas after I turned eleven my parents gave me a hardback edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. My father inscribed it to me, formally, with a fountain pen, while my mother covered the dust jacket with sticky-backed plastic to protect it from tearing.

  A few months after receiving that gift I passed the examination to get into the local grammar school, and in my teenage years, literature, no less than pop music or fashion, became a common cultural currency. My friend Sarah, who had swinging blonde hair and long tanned legs, came in one day having discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because of her I read and loved Tender Is the Night, and now when I come to Fitzgerald’s description of Nicole Diver, with her brown legs and her “thick, dark, gold hair like a chow’s,” it’s Sarah I see. A quiet, intense girl called Kate whose brown hair fell in a heavy braid down her back, and who seemed weighted with mystery and sadness, urged Virginia Woolf upon me. I read To the Lighthouse and The Waves and admired them while being sure I was missing more than I was understanding, which was exactly how I felt about Kate. Someone else came across D. H. Lawrence, and then we all read The Rainbow and Sons and Lovers, and, of course, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was stimulating and perplexing at the same time.

  Books gave us a way to shape ourselves—to form our thoughts and to signal to each other who we were and who we wanted to be. They were part of our self-fashioning, no less than our clothes. In my case, these were draping layers of black, antiquated lace and silk acquired at thrift shops, fastened with paste jewelry given to me by my grandmother. I was pale and thin, and ringed my eyes with thick black eyeliner so beyond my budget that I slept in it to conserve my supply, touching it up in the mornings. I inwardly hoped that my dress threw my intelligence into relief.

  Though I would not have been able to say so at the time, I sought to identify myself with the kind of intelligence I found in Middlemarch—with its range, its wit, its seriousness, its erudition, its deep feeling. I admired the little I knew of George Eliot’s life: her daunting, self-willed transformation from provincial girlhood to metropolitan preeminence, a good story to hear if one is an anxiously ambitious girl from a backwater town. I was intrigued by her adoption of a masculine pseudonym, by which she continued to be known throughout her life as a novelist, even after her identity was revealed early in her fiction-writing career. I knew that some important critics considered Middlemarch to be the greatest novel in the English language, and I wanted to be among those who understood why. I loved Middlemarch, and I loved being the kind of person who loved it. It gratified my aspirations to maturity and learnedness. To have read it, and to have appreciated it, seemed a step on the road to being one of the grown-ups for whom it was written.

  NEARLY thirty years later, I found myself in a marble corridor at the New York Public Library, pressing a buzzer to get into the rare books collection. I moved to New York when I was twenty-one, just after graduating from college, where I had spent countless hours in libraries. As a student I had installed myself for long days of study at an oak desk piled high with books of poetry, novels, and critical texts, my pages of handwritten notes illuminated by a window set with stained glass. The library had been a place for studying, but it had also been a place for everything else: seeing friends, watching strangers, flirting and falling in love. Life happened in the library.

  I didn’t go to libraries so much anymore. I’d become a journalist, so rather than immersing myself in books I tended to consult them fleetingly, then shelve them. I read much less for pleasure than I liked, and my grasp on literature—the field in which I’d sought to distinguish myself at seventeen—grew a little shakier every year, like a foreign language I didn’t have sufficient opportunity to speak.

  And in all my years in New York, I’d never had reason to go to the rare books collection, a cooled, darkened room lined with glass-fronted cabinets that now a librarian was buzzing me into. I’d requested to see a volume from its holdings, a notebook that had belonged to George Eliot. She started using it in 1868 and made notes there for a few years, precisely the period in which she wrote what would turn out to be her greatest work. “I have set myself many tasks for the year—I wonder how many will be accomplished?” she wrote in her journal on January 1, 1869. Among those projected tasks: “A Novel called Middlemarch.”

  Scholars have cataloged the notebook’s contents, but my reasons for going to spend time with it were not so much scholarly as they were personal, almost mystical. I wanted to know what was in the notebook—but more than that, I wanted a tactile encounter with something that had been Eliot’s, as if the ink and paper itself might reveal something I didn’t already know about her, and about Middlemarch.

  Middlemarch was one book I had never stopped reading, despite all the distractions of a busy working life. I went back to it as a student: “Discuss George Eliot’s treatment of ‘oppressive narrowness’ and its effect on her characters” was the essay title I selected to answer in my first-year exams at college, where the hard chair and the grand hall amounted to my own escape from oppressive narrowness. I read it again in my twenties, when I was working my way up from an entry-level job, preoccupied by ill-fated romantic entanglements but captivated by city life. In my thirties, trying to establish myself as a writer to be taken seriously, I was struck with new, poignant force by the story of Lydgate—the ambitious would-be reformer who becomes, instead, a society doctor known for a treatise on gout, “a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side,” in Eliot’s pointed observation.

  The novel opened up to me further every time I went back to it; and by my early forties it had come to have yet another resonance. In a far from singular crisis, I had recently become consumed by a sense of doors closing behind me, alternative lives unlived: work I might have done, places I might have moved to, men I might have married, children I might have borne. In this light, a book that had once seemed to be all about the hopes and desires of youth now seemed to offer a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the paths untrodden and the choices unmade.

  So why was I back in the library? It was, I suppose, in a bid to become a little less melancholy, a little less resigned. For the past two decades I’d thrived professionally by delving for a few weeks or months at a time into a wide variety of different subjects, many of which it might never have occurred to me on my own to have an interest in. But I was growing restless, and I felt ready to turn my deep attention to something that mattered to me. I wanted to recover the sense of intellectual and emotional immersion in books that I had known as a younger reader, before my attention was fractured by the exigencies of being a journalist. I wanted to go back to being a reader.

  Still, being a journalist for all these years had taught me a few things: how to ask questions, how to use my eyes, how to investigate a subject, how to look at something familiar from an unfamiliar angle. What would I find, I wondered now, if I used this experience to read Middlemarch differently from the ways I’d read it before? What if I tried to discern the ways in which George Eliot’s life shaped her fiction, and how her fiction shaped her? I wasn’t so naive as to think that novels could be biographically decoded, but novels are places in which authors explore their own subjectivity, and I wanted to think about what George Eliot might have sought, and what she might have discovered, in writing Middlemarch.

  And cloaked in this quasi
-objective spirit of inquiry was another set of questions, these ones more personal, and pressing, and secret. What would happen if I stopped to consider how Middlemarch has shaped my understanding of my own life? Why did the novel still feel so urgent, after all these years? And what could it give me now, as I paused here in the middle of things, and surveyed where I had come from, and thought about where I was, and wondered where I might go next?

  SO here I was, a student of sorts, back in an imposing library after a quarter century’s absence. I took my seat at a carrel opposite a young man who was bending over a work by E. M. Forster, and after a few minutes the librarian returned with a leather-bound volume the size of a slender paperback, which she settled into a book rest.

  I opened to the first page, and as I did so I became vaguely aware of a slight scent in the air that was at once out of place and oddly familiar: the smell of a spent hearth. For a moment, I wondered if there could be a fireplace in the adjoining room—a silly thought, quickly dismissed. But then it dawned on me that the smell was coming from the notebook itself.

  Glancing at the young man reading his Forster, I inclined toward the notebook and surreptitiously inhaled. There was something there beyond the usual mustiness of an old, infrequently opened book, I was sure—something that smelled like the lingering trace of a fire burning in a long-cooled grate. Perhaps, I quickly said to myself, one of the notebook’s previous owners had shelved it near a fireplace. Since George Eliot’s death it had passed through many hands. First were those of Charles Lewes, her stepson, and his wife, Gertrude; their daughter, Elinor Carrington Ouvry, had sold it at auction in 1923, where it had been purchased by Walter T. Spencer, a London bookseller who later sold it to Owen D. Young, the diplomat and founder of RCA, whose collection was acquired by the New York Public Library in 1941. The notebook might have sat on a shelf in an ill-ventilated room on either side of the Atlantic. And maybe the smell wasn’t smoke at all. Perhaps it was just the aging pages decaying, surrendering infinitesimal fragments to the atmosphere every time they were opened.