My Life in Middlemarch

by Rebecca Mead

  I, too, was wearing latex gloves, and I gently ran my finger along the desk’s lacquered surface. Nisbet said, “You’d feel you had to write something really good with this.” I thought of a letter George Eliot wrote to Harriet Melusina Fay Peirce, an American activist on behalf of women’s welfare, in 1866, just after the publication of her fifth novel, Felix Holt, the Radical. In the letter, she gave a surprisingly unguarded explanation of why she made a late start in fiction. “I was too proud and ambitious to write: I did not believe that I could do anything fine, and I did not choose to do anything of that mediocre sort which I despised when it was done by others,” she wrote. I imagined her as a stiff, self-conscious, inhibited girl, warily examining herself for signs of greatness, too proud and too fearful to lay paper to desktop and try.

  GEORGE Eliot’s childhood home, Griff House, is on the outskirts of Nuneaton, and seen from the front appears much as it did when Mary Ann Evans lived there, from the age of a few months until she was twenty-two. It has a handsome Georgian facade of red brick, a steep slate roof, and well-proportioned windows that overlook a wide lawn edged with trees. In an engraving that appears in Cross’s Life, the house is half obscured by an exuberant growth of ivy, picturesquely if inconveniently creeping into the rain gutters.

  These days the ivy has been removed, and that is the least of the changes that have been made to the home that George Eliot loved. A few years ago Griff House was bought by Whitbread, the hospitality company, which appended a sprawling pseudo-Georgian hotel and surf-and-turf restaurant to the rear of the old farmhouse. In the Evanses’ day Griff was in the countryside, on the edge of the Arbury estate, but now there is an incessant roar of traffic from the highway passing only a few hundred feet away. It could not be further from the sleepier atmosphere of the 1820s, when, as Eliot wrote in the opening pages of Felix Holt, “the morning silvered the meadows with their long lines of bushy willows marking the watercourses, or burnished the golden corn-ricks clustered near the long roofs of some midland homestead.”

  Taken out of context, such beautifully rendered passages can appear sentimental: Eliot’s meadows were surely sodden with rain and dampened with mist far more often than they were silvered or burnished by sunshine. But the purpose to which Eliot puts her passages of natural description is anything but sentimental. They convey an authentic nostalgia—a melancholy homesickness of the sort that might be experienced by a journeying epic hero, if on a more modest scale. Eliot describes a landscape that was already vanishing when she was writing. During her childhood, Griff House looked out over fields, but within a few years a colliery was visible from its upper windows.

  I’d gone to Griff with my notebook in hand, hoping, as a reporter does at the outset of a new assignment, to understand something about my subject by surveying the place in which she’d spent so many years. Visiting the former homes of famous writers tends to be a compromised and often unsatisfying endeavor; by contrast with a painter’s studio, the nature of literary creativity is not easily suggested by the site of creation. While shuffling through such places I start thinking about how much has changed, rather than how much has stayed the same—wondering about how drafty the windows would have been, and whether indoor plumbing had yet been installed. Preservation tends to mean sanitization. “Stupidity of people tricking out and altering such a place instead of letting one see it as he saw it and lived in it,” Eliot once wrote when she visited Friedrich Schiller’s home, in Weimar.

  But George Eliot’s childhood home hasn’t been preserved as a monument to her. It’s been almost erased by the present. The ground-floor parlor has been converted into a bar, with an enormous flat-screen television tuned to a satellite sports channel over the fireplace. In what was once the dining room, there’s a pool table instead of a dining table. Lurid slot machines have been installed on the flagstones of the entrance hall, where a wood-paneled nook that once served as Robert Evans’s office is now a snug little retreat with upholstered armchairs and beer mats on the tabletop.

  It felt ridiculous to be wandering these rooms, trying to ignore the glowing fire-escape signs and the soft rock on the sound system, and attempting to imagine the house as it was. But I tried anyhow, and saw glimmers of what Griff must have been. My first evening there, I sat with a beer at a trestle table on what would have been the lawn in front of the house. The sound of traffic carried over hedges, and someone’s phone kept jangling with “The Entertainer,” but there were bluebells flowering under the trees and daisies growing in the grass, as there must have been nearly two hundred years ago.

  The upper floors of the house are now private, occupied by the hotel manager and his family, but I arranged to see the attic, to which the young Mary Ann Evans sometimes absconded in search of privacy. Later, she transferred her fondness for that elevated retreat to Maggie Tulliver, the heroine of The Mill on the Floss: “Here she fretted out all her ill-humours, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves.”

  The attic had been converted into a bedroom since Mary Ann’s day, with steeply sloping walls and uneven floors that were covered with carpet the color and consistency of porridge. Sturdy wooden rafters were coated with chocolate-brown paint. A cob-webbed window overlooked parked cars and the highway and a light-industrial estate beyond. The room’s most recent occupant had been the manager’s daughter, who was now in her twenties and living elsewhere. A narrow bed was still covered with her pink bedspread, and on top of a laminated dresser stood a ceramic statuette of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Left behind along with the figurine and the bedding was a slightly melancholy atmosphere of half-formed hopes and enthusiasms. It was a room to look out from, and from which to hope for something more.

  George Eliot did not write an autobiography, though she once said she wished she could, telling a friend—with what strikes me as an uncharacteristic overestimation of her abilities—that “she could do it better than anyone else, because she could do it impartially, judging herself, and showing how wrong she was.” Her most straightforwardly autobiographical character is Maggie Tulliver, and as a grown woman Eliot discussed with a friend the ways in which The Mill on the Floss was inspired by her own history. Everything in the novel was softened, she said; her own experience was worse.

  Maggie’s is bad enough. She chafes against the complacency and conservatism of the bourgeois mill-owning family into which she has been born. Her relatives are obsessed with propriety: a great deal of attention is paid in Maggie’s house to having the right linen on one’s table while alive and the right comestibles at one’s funeral when dead.

  The child Maggie, meanwhile, is persistently improper. She chops off her unruly black hair in a fit of passion, and she runs away to join the gypsies—occasions for “that bitter sense of the irrevocable which was almost an everyday experience of her small soul.” There is no book that I know of that better captures the frustration of being a little girl who feels she is not being taken seriously. The single page in which George Eliot recalls the small, penetrating miseries of childhood—when one is left out of a game by classmates, or denied sufficiently grown-up clothing when one’s friends are all permitted it, or when, on a rainy day with nothing to do, one falls “from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness”—is worth a shelf of so-called parenting books on its own, so sharp is its delineation of this forgotten anguish. It concludes with this faultless recommendation: “Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.”

  As a teenager, Maggie is tormented by the same urgent sense of longing that besets the heroine of “Miss Brooke,” though she comes from a different class and has quite different expectations of life. “She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel, that she had to endure this wide hopeles
s yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best upon this earth,” Eliot writes of Maggie. In The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot presents a natural history of yearning. She shows how Maggie’s longing to be elsewhere and otherwise originates. She shows the soil in which it grows; what nurtures it and what blights it.

  When it comes to Dorothea Brooke, however, yearning is a condition for which no originating cause is given. One of the odd things about “Miss Brooke” is how little of the heroine’s personal history is revealed. We learn that Dorothea is of privileged social background, without any “yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers,” and that she has an extremely comfortable if not exorbitant fortune of seven hundred pounds a year—the equivalent of about three quarters of a million dollars today. But of the parents who left her that fortune we know virtually nothing, except that they died when she and Celia were “about twelve years old.”

  I stumble over this sentence every time I read it. How can Dorothea and Celia, who are different ages, both be characterized as “about twelve years old” when their parents die? And why is nothing more said about such a significant loss? Dorothea herself is oddly untroubled by the absence of her parents: she barely thinks of them. In the novel’s first chapter, she consents to divide the jewels that she and Celia have inherited from their mother, and her disdain for what she considers the frivolousness of personal decoration is one of the ways in which George Eliot signals her heroine’s unusual priorities. (“ ‘A cross is the last thing I would wear as a trinket.’ Dorothea shuddered slightly.”) When Dorothea finally is enticed by their beauty into accepting an emerald-and-diamond ring and bracelet, she thinks of the poverty of the miners who dug the gems out of the earth rather than of the presumably once-beloved hand they last adorned. The deaths of the Brooke parents are treated with barely more reverence in the pages of Middlemarch than is the bereavement of Jack Worthing in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest—whose loss of one parent, as Lady Bracknell points out, may be regarded as a misfortune, but whose loss of two looks like carelessness.

  Eliot’s reference to the age at which the sisters lost their parents also looks like carelessness: I suppose they could be eleven and thirteen, but then why be so confoundingly nonspecific? (In fact the manuscript of Middlemarch reveals that the phrase referring to these parental deaths was an afterthought, written in above the text.) But it soon becomes clear that the lack of a fuller biographical sketch is not an oversight. George Eliot doesn’t need to provide Dorothea with a fleshed-out childhood, or a detailed history. She comes into the world of the novel fully developed, like a second Minerva.

  Or rather, she comes into it partly developed. The only growth that matters is that which occurs within the novel’s pages—the growth that turns her from a prematurely opinionated, occasionally priggish, alarmingly passionate, and inchoately ambitious young woman into something else.

  Dorothea has this in common with her creator, though there are important differences between them. Nina Auerbach, of the University of Pennsylvania, has made the persuasive observation that for all Dorothea’s purported longing to be learned she doesn’t make much effort to educate herself, even though she has access to her uncle’s no doubt well-stocked library. Mary Ann Evans, by contrast, was so fervently eager to expand her knowledge as an adolescent that Francis Newdigate, her father’s employer, gave her access to the library at Arbury Hall. (She read up on ecclesiastical history, which she intended to condense into a chart: a Key to All Mythologies of sorts.) At nineteen, she told Maria Lewis that her mind was filled with disjointed specimens—“of history, ancient and modern, scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton, newspaper topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry entomology and chemistry, reviews and metaphysics.” She set herself a fiercely demanding curriculum. A tutor, Signor Joseph Henry Brezzi, was hired to teach her Italian; he then started her on German. In another letter to Maria Lewis she recounted with excitement her discovery of the correct pronunciations of sch and ö, which she and her correspondent had previously been getting wrong. “Goethe, the German way of spelling which is Göthe, is pronounced as though the former vowel were the French eu in peu,” she wrote, with palpable enthusiasm. Mary Ann Evans was so determined to learn German that she set about doing so without, in all possibility, ever having heard it on the lips of a native speaker. Within a few years she would be the first English translator of David Friedrich Strauss, the German theologian.

  I find this diligent effort to become an educated person tremendously moving. In this acquisition of languages it is possible to glimpse the effort that would be required for Mary Ann Evans to turn herself into George Eliot. Years later, a friend from Geneva commented that she spoke French badly, but she knew it well. Once, when she was in her fifties, Eliot urged a German correspondent to write in that language. “I am as quick in reading foreign languages as I am slow to speak them,” she said, wryly. Coming to languages too late for effortless fluency, she set about achieving what she could through resolution and determination. She found an outlet for her hungry ambition by reshaping herself into an intellectual. She turned her yearning into learning.

  DOROTHEA Brooke does not make of herself what George Eliot did. The prologue to Middlemarch, which Eliot called the “prelude,” compares the heroine we are about to meet with Saint Teresa of Ávila, whose “passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life.” Now an epic life is impossible, Eliot writes. Perhaps all that is available for “later-born Theresas” is “a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity.”

  Saint Teresa fades pretty promptly from view once Middlemarch begins, as a contemporary reader in particular may not be sorry to discover. But it seems that George Eliot had at one point intended that Dorothea would more actively seek a vocation, or at least identify a possible one. According to a schema Eliot sketched out for the novel in a notebook known as Quarry for Middlemarch, Dorothea, after being widowed and asserting that she would never remarry, was to declare an intention to “go on some heroic errand of carrying away emigrants etc.”

  That didn’t happen. Dorothea’s heroism, such as it is, turns out to be of a much smaller and more domestic kind. Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls, in a wonderfully suggestive turn of phrase, “the home epic”—the momentous, ordinary journey traveled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood. The home epic has its own nostalgia—not for a country left behind, but for a childhood landscape lost. It’s a journey we may not even realize we are undertaking until we are halfway through its course.

  When I first read Middlemarch as a provincial teenager chafing against the provinces, beginning to discover for myself the difficulties of civilization, I was disposed to concur with the prologue and to believe that Dorothea’s limitations lay outside her—“the meanness of opportunity”—rather than within her. As a young woman coming of age at a moment when legal equality had been won but social equality still seemed some distance off, I was indignant on Dorothea’s behalf about her limited opportunities and appreciated Eliot’s ironical commentary about women’s lack of rights. (The novel can easily be mined for arch, feminist apothegms, such as “A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”)

  But now, when I look at Dorothea again, I don’t find myself regretting her lack of accomplishment, or not exactly. I care less about what she represents as a “later-born Theresa”—bound by her mean opportunities to remain unfulfilled—than I am impressed by the way in which she gives expression to what George Eliot refers to as “the common yearning of womanhood.” This yearning seems to have changed little over the years, even if a girl’s education no longer demands lessons on carriage descent.

  As Miss Brooke, Dorothea remains for me the embodiment of that unnameable, agonizing ache of adolescence, in which burgeoning hopes and ambitions and terrors and longi
ngs are all roiled together. When I spend time in her company, I remember what it was like to be eighteen, and at the beginning of things. I remember going for my entrance interview at Oxford and meeting with the senior English literature tutor at what was to become my college—a forbidding-seeming Scotsman who, I learned much later, was possessed of a magnificently dry sense of humor and was particularly partial to bright, ambitious, state-school students from the provinces. His study was furnished with low-slung easy chairs upholstered in mustard-colored corduroy; one could either perch on a chair’s edge or sink into its depths. During my interview I shifted uncomfortably between one position and the other while talking passionately about Middlemarch. Afterward I walked across the cobblestones of a narrow lane and stepped onto the wide, lovely sweep of the High Street in a state of exhilaration and anxiety. I felt as if my life were an unread book—the thickest and most daunting of novels—that I was holding in my hands. I didn’t know what the story would be, or where it would lead, and I was almost too overawed to crack its spine and begin.

  Chapter 2

  •

  Old and Young

  “We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.”

  —MIDDLEMARCH, CHAPTER 20

  When Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” what did she mean? The observation was made in an essay that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement to mark the centenary of George Eliot’s birth, in November 1919. Before writing it Woolf immersed herself in Cross’s Life and in the novels—“in order to sum her up once and for all,” as she wrote to a friend, with a note of self-mockery.