by Rebecca Mead
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.
Mary Ann was good at things other than needlework. Her essays in English were “reserved for the private perusal and enjoyment of the teacher, who rarely found anything to correct,” a classmate said. She was the best pianist in the school, came at the top of all her classes, and cried when school closed for the holidays—“to the astonishment and perhaps disgust of her schoolfellows,” one of them reported. Another former classmate said that Mary Ann always seemed a different order of creature, and added, “Her schoolfellows loved her as much as they could venture to love one whom they felt to be so immeasurably superior to themselves”—an observation with enough of a sting in the tail to be worthy of George Eliot herself.
After leaving school she continued to write to a favorite teacher, Maria Lewis, who was only a few years her senior. From these letters and others to an aunt and uncle, scholars and biographers have gleaned much of what has been established about Eliot’s early life, and many critics have found this correspondence extremely unpalatable. By her teens, Mary Ann had become enthusiastically evangelical, and priggishly judgmental. She liked giving up. She disapproved of singing, other than hymns; she dismissed novels as dangerous and frivolous. “I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing even a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life,” she wrote. “Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?” It would be satisfying to discover that the young George Eliot resembled Elizabeth Bennet, the clever if initially misguided heroine of Pride and Prejudice. Instead, she brings to mind Lizzy’s prim younger sister, Mary, who, charged with playing the piano at a dance, wants to supply concertos instead of reels.
She was equally quick to deliver her opinions about the choices of others, however unearned her authority to judge. “When I hear of the marrying and giving in marriage that is constantly being transacted I can only sigh for those who are multiplying earthly ties which though powerful enough to detach their heart and thoughts from heaven, are so brittle as to be liable to be snapped asunder at every breeze,” she wrote, at the wise old age of seventeen. She seems determined to be joyless. After a sightseeing trip to London with her brother Isaac, who was three years older—the first time she has been to the capital—she declares herself “not at all delighted with ‘the stir of the great Babel.’ ” (The highlight of her week was seeing the Greenwich Hospital, Christopher Wren’s masterpiece on the Thames, which housed veteran sailors.) Gordon S. Haight, a professor of English at Yale who in 1968 published the first scholarly biography of George Eliot, noted with considerable understatement in his nine-volume edition of her collected correspondence, “It must be conceded that the letters before 1842 are generally lacking in charm.”
And yet to me what is most excruciating about these letters is not exactly their dedicated priggishness, or their unsympathetic religiosity, or their writer’s perverse insistence on remaining unimpressed by one of the world’s great cities. Rather what I find almost too painful to bear is their nakedness and their earnestness—their embarrassing pretentiousness, their mannered affect of maturity. (“You will think I need nothing but a tub for my habitation to make me a perfect female Diogenes, and I plead guilty to occasional misanthropic thoughts,” she writes in one.) Lacking in charm they may be, but they were not written to charm, and certainly they were not written to charm professors of English literature at Yale. They were written out of passion and exuberance and boredom and ostentation, and her desire to discover what she was thinking by putting it on the page—which is to say they are letters written by a young woman who is trying to work out who she is, and where she is going.
That raw season in which I sat on my narrow childhood bed, propped up on pillows and reading Middlemarch for the first time, I also spent many hours writing letters to a cousin of more or less my own age. And if my teenage correspondence was much less learned than George Eliot’s, the letters I wrote were no less painfully self-exposing, filled with the enthusiasm and obliviousness and unearned wo
rld-weariness of youth. There were rudimentary discussions of leftist politics that I understood in a cursory way and believed in with the fervor of ignorance; a nascent feminism into which I channeled my confusions about the dawning of sexual maturity; fascinated but affectedly blasé accounts of the discovery of sex itself, and its attendant complications; long catalogs of the pop music I was listening to; even longer lists of the books I was reading. In one letter that began with the languid declaration, “Any wit I ever possessed has left me, any eloquence I ever enjoyed has been used up,” I reported that I had just read Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and the Damned, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, The Paper Men, by William Golding—and Middlemarch, “which is a brilliant novel and should be read,” I offered airily.
I can hardly bear to read these letters, which my cousin saved and gave back to me a few years ago. The combination of egotism and insecurity they convey embarrasses the part of me that still feels represented in them, as well as paining the part of me that feels an adult pity for the emotional trials of my younger self. But the sheer weight of the packet in my hands reminds me how crucial the epistolary habit was in those days before e-mail and cell phones, when the single telephone in my home was used only rarely, and never just for chatting on. Sitting at my desk and writing letters—on childish Snoopy notepaper I’d been given for Christmas, using a heavy, liver-colored fountain pen with a gold cap that had belonged to my mother until I claimed it—was no less significant a part of my growing up than were the mild adventures I excitedly recounted: of underage pub-going at fifteen, at seventeen of spending an entangled weekend in London with a boyfriend, not visiting the Greenwich Hospital. Writing letters was one of the things there was to do while I was waiting for my life to start.
And so the letters that George Eliot wrote when she was Dorothea Brooke’s age move me because of their dreadfulness, not in spite of it. She, too, was waiting for her life to start—not complacently, or resignedly, but anxiously and urgently. She had many more responsibilities than I had as a teenager: since her mother died she’d been running her father’s household, making damson jam and supervising the dairy. But she knew she was not where she would end up. “My soul seems for weeks together completely benumbed, and when I am aroused from this torpid state the intervals of activity are comparatively short,” she wrote at nineteen. She was troubled, she went on to say, that she did not make better use of her time in the service of God. “I feel that my besetting sin is the one of all others most destroying, as it is the fruitful parent of them all, Ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures,” she wrote. “This seems the centre whence all my actions proceed.”
Ambition—“fastidious yet hungry,” as she would later write to Mrs. Congreve—was what Mary Ann Evans felt seized by. She regarded it as if it were an external evil pressing upon her, rather than—that which is equally possible—a good rising within her. She admitted to it, and in doing so she gave voice to it. She knew she wanted something. She knew she wanted to do something. She didn’t know what it was. She just knew she wanted, and wanted, and wanted.
ONE morning in late spring I caught the train from London to Nuneaton. I’d only been to the Midlands once before, when I was eighteen, on a weeklong school trip spent on a barge that wended its way through the area’s network of canals. (Most of the time I lay on the roof of the barge, bored by the slow-passing scenery, bathing in the inconsistent sun and doggedly working my way through the Penguin edition of Ulysses.) The journey takes about an hour on the fast train, which further flattens the fields and pastures and turns the canals into leaden streaks alongside its tracks.
The Midlands are lacking in drama, topographically speaking, and George Eliot is the great advocate of the loveliness to be found in their modest plainness. In chapter 12 of Middlemarch, she paints a picture of the land in which she grew up that is as attentive to each facet and flaw of its subject as the portraits by Dutch masters she admired. “Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood,” she writes. “The pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of approach; the grey gate and fences against the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys with wondrous modulations of light and shadow such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful.”
The countryside I saw through the train window wasn’t at all like the coastal English landscape of my youth, where tumbling hills break off into chalk-white cliffs, but the note of nostalgia in Eliot’s description resonated with me. It was more than twenty years since I’d lived in England, and returning always induced a melancholy in me, a reminder of being a restless adolescent struggling with the likes of James Joyce. These days when I took the train from London to my hometown I was always struck by the understated beauty of the countryside. I’d failed to appreciate it when I’d been immersed in it, but now could see that it was no less lovely than any of the many places I had traveled far to see.
I first moved to New York to do a graduate degree in journalism, expecting to return to England after a year. Studying journalism in a classroom turned out to be mostly absurd. One instructor, a weary former city reporter, conducted pretend press conferences in which he would impersonate the whiny, petulant mayor of the city while we, his students, asked pretend questions. Another instructor aired her dispiriting opinion in our first class that most of us would end up in PR. Much of the time I felt like I was wasting time. But I also got a part-time job at a magazine where I did research for writers and answered the phones and even wrote a few short pieces, learning skills and gaining experience that only a real deadline and a real paycheck could provide. When my course was almost over a job in the fact-checking department at the magazine opened up. I was offered it, and a few weeks before I was due to move home to England I decided that I wasn’t going to move home after all.
I didn’t feel at home in New York, exactly—it was too alien and disconcerting for that. But I enjoyed the sense of estrangement my new life offered me. I shared a small apartment that had sloping floorboards, exposed-brick walls, and an occasional rodent problem, four flights above a busy SoHo intersection. On summer nights when it was too hot to sleep I would sit on the fire escape, looking out over the water towers on the buildings opposite and down on the lively streets below, enjoying the exotic sensation of sultry air on my skin. Where I grew up it was always cool at night, even after the warmest of days. I found the abrasiveness of New York exciting, even glamorous. I liked being able to yell at someone who shoved me on the subway, rather than feeling obliged to fume silently.
After more than twenty years New York no longer felt exotic, and the abrasiveness had become less appealing. Now the mild, middle-class manners and gentle landscapes I found when I returned to England had an emollient quality. It was so soothing, this middling Englishness, that I had to be on my guard lest nostalgia slip into sentimentality. I was in danger of being too invested in my melancholic attachment to a half-remembered, half-idealized homeland. Even so, when I came back to England, I missed it more than I did when I was away.
My train arrived at Nuneaton, a market town ten miles north of Coventry. There’s a bronze statue of George Eliot in the center of town, where she sits on a low wall, awash in long skirts, thick hair resting on her shoulders, eyes cast down, a book at her side. Not far away, past slightly dilapidated chain stores, there’s a pub named for her, the George Eliot Hotel, that is said to be the one upon which she modeled the Red Lion in Scenes of Clerical Life, a collection of three stories that marked her fictional debut. In Riversley Park, the town’s spacious public gardens,
there’s an obelisk bearing her name at which members of a local literary society lay a wreath on her birthday.
Also within Riversley Park is the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery, which owns a substantial collection of objects related to George Eliot, many of them acquired from local families. When I visited, the gallery in which the collection was usually displayed was being repainted, and Catherine Nisbet, the museum’s manager, took me into an upstairs room where the objects were being stored. Wearing latex gloves, she drew items out of boxes one by one and carefully unfolded the tissue paper they had been wrapped in, as if they were the most precious and unexpected of Christmas presents.
Many of them probably had been presents once. Out came George Eliot’s reticule, a leather-covered case that contained, embedded in blue velvet, a penknife, buttonhook, and crochet hook, all with delicate handles of mother-of-pearl. Out came a pair of ornamental china dogs, King Charles spaniels with superior looks on their faces, which were formerly owned by one of George Eliot’s aunts, supposedly the models for the Dodson sisters in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot’s second novel, published in 1860. Out came a soup tureen and four matching vegetable dishes in pale, creamy ceramic, which George Eliot and John Walter Cross received as a wedding gift, in 1880. And out came a portable writing desk, decorated on the outside with gilt and mother-of-pearl inlay, and lined inside with purple velvet.