by Rebecca Mead
Still, there the smell was. And maybe—just maybe—the book had absorbed molecules of smoke from a fireplace at the Priory, the house in St. John’s Wood, London, that George Eliot bought in 1863 and in which she lived with George Henry Lewes, the exuberant critic and writer whom she spoke of as her husband despite the fact that he remained legally married to someone else. Perhaps the notebook—inscribed by George Eliot’s hand and containing a record of her thought and mind—had also been imbued with a trace of her material world, and could lead me back there.
The Priory was a substantial house a few steps from Regent’s Park and close to Regent’s Canal, on a street called Northbank. Eliot lived and worked there until Lewes’s death, in 1878. On Sunday afternoons they opened the house to friends and to some lucky admirers, whom they received in a drawing room decorated with Persian rugs, casts of antique statues, paintings and engravings, and books. She might have kept the volume in her study upstairs, on the first floor, where her desk stood before a tall window overlooking the garden. The room was boldly decorated with green wallpaper, a dado of dull red, and yellow skirting boards and doors. “Herein were the many wonderful books written,” said Elizabeth M. Bruce, an American writer who visited the house when it was put up for sale after George Eliot’s death, in 1880. “We felt within it as pilgrims at a shrine may feel. We were moved by an impulse to enter with unsandalled feet.”
Or perhaps the notebook had been used in the library downstairs—“a cheerful room like the others, lined with well filled bookshelves,” observed Charles Eliot Norton, an American professor of art at Harvard, who visited the Priory in January 1869. (He noted, irritably, that the house was “surrounded with one of those high brick walls of which one grows so impatient in England.”) Over the fireplace was a portrait of George Eliot by Sir Frederic Burton. The portrait was made in 1865, when George Eliot was in her midforties. Her face is framed by abundant, shiny, light-brown hair, and there is a soft expression in her gray, heavy-lidded eyes.
Norton considered the portrait “odious” and “vulgarizing,” and it is certainly sentimental. Eliot looks wise and beneficent, like the headmistress at a good girls’ boarding school. The portrait seems too respectable—which is how William Hale White, a writer who had known Eliot in her thirties, characterized the first, overly reverent biography of her, George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals. That book was published in 1885 and written by John Walter Cross—who was George Eliot’s widower, a man twenty years her junior whom she had married a year and a half after George Henry Lewes’s death and only seven months before her own. White remembered Eliot quite differently, and he gave a suggestive characterization of her. “She was really one of the most sceptical, unusual creatures I ever knew, and it was this side of her character which to me was the most attractive,” he said. White hoped that in some future literary portrait, “the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot’s entirely unconventional life.”
The Burton portrait, executed in pastel-colored chalk, is lacking in salt or spice, but many who knew her thought it a good likeness. Her mouth is closed and she has a sober expression, although the faintest trace of a smile line can be seen on her cheek. She smiled rarely—“like a fitful gleam of pale sunshine,” wrote Sophia Lucy Clifford, another guest at the weekly gatherings at the Priory, who later became a novelist herself. The thrill of witnessing that smile and hearing George Eliot’s low, measured voice—a voice that many remarked was very beautiful—“was beyond all description, and had the effect of making you feel that there was nothing in this world you would not do for her; and that to be with her, even on one of those rather terrible Sunday afternoons, for a single hour, was a great achievement in your life.”
I paged through the notebook carefully, looking at the hand-numbered pages, their contents carefully indexed in the back. (Why had I never thought to index a notebook? My own organization of research tends to be haphazard and disorderly, like that of Mr. Brooke, Dorothea’s scatterbrained uncle and guardian, who demands of Casaubon to know his method of arranging documents. “In pigeon-holes, partly,” replies a startled Casaubon. “Ah, pigeon-holes will not do,” says Mr. Brooke. “I have tried pigeon-holes, but everything gets mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is in A or Z.”) Eliot had listed the episodes of The Canterbury Tales, made notes on Hindu literature, named the colleges of Oxford University. She had transcribed lines from Wordsworth, Blake, and Spenser, and made notes in Italian on Machiavelli. There were quotations from sacred Jewish literature, the Hebrew letters carefully if inexpertly copied, and I remembered a line from the first chapter of Middlemarch, about Dorothea’s unusual hopes for marital life even before she has met Casaubon: “The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.” This wonderful sentence shows Eliot’s dexterity with comedy and with pathos: Dorothea is so wrong, and so earnest, and so completely recognizable in her well-intentioned misprision.
After a while I closed the notebook, but before I left I took one more look around the reading room. In a corner stood a small desk that had once belonged to Charles Dickens, Eliot’s near contemporary. I thought about his wildly popular American tours—draining but profitable excursions into celebrity that were the sort of thing Eliot avoided completely. She never traveled to America, as a literary celebrity or otherwise, though in 1872, when she was in the midst of Middlemarch, an acquaintance from New England urged her to visit. She declined, writing, “Boston I always imagine to be a delightful place to go straight to and come straight back from. But the Atlantic is too wide for that.”
I’ve crossed the wide Atlantic many times, and it never gets any easier. In my early twenties, I went home to visit my parents once a year or so, and they would come to see me; in my thirties I would stop off for a day or two in England en route to or from an assignment somewhere more extraordinary—Paris, Mumbai, Tokyo—feeling jet-lagged and glamorous. And then, as my parents became elderly and their lives constricted, I went back more often, for walks with my mother that would be filled with accounts of doctors’ visits, and dinners at which my father would pour Rioja with an increasingly shaky hand. Five days here, a week or two there: I did not want to stop and count the meager total. When I first left England as a young woman, I didn’t consider that there would be a finite, and unknowable, number of times I would return. Eventually, though, each good-bye came to be freighted with the possibility that it might be the last.
Upon Dickens’s desk was a flower in a vase and a calendar set to the date of his death: June 9, 1870. In the years Eliot lived with Lewes she came to know Dickens socially, and he had been to lunch at the Priory not long before his death. “I thought him looking dreadfully shattered then,” she wrote in a letter afterward. Dickens was a famous writer before she even became a novelist, and he had been an early admirer of the mysterious new author who went by the pseudonym of George Eliot. When Scenes of Clerical Life, her first work of fiction, was published in 1858, Dickens astutely wrote to the author via the book’s publisher, John Blackwood, with the sly observation, “If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began.” Eliot’s identity was revealed after the publication of her first novel, Adam Bede, in 1859. This time, Dickens wrote to her in person and offered praise in terms that would thrill any writer: “ ‘Adam Bede’ has taken its place among the actual experiences and endurances of my life.”
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 g
reat 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.
Chapter 1
•
Miss Brooke
“Something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent.”
—MIDDLEMARCH, CHAPTER 10
On 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 Mr
s. 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.
ALTHOUGH 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.