My Life in Middlemarch

by Rebecca Mead

  I would be skeptical of any scholar who claims to read Casaubon’s story without feeling uncomfortable twinges, so deadly accurate is Eliot in her characterization of the always-present threat of futility that looms over any scholarly endeavor—what V. S. Pritchett characterized as the scholar’s “befogged and grandiose humiliations.” And I can’t help wondering whether Haight’s own energetic and learned repudiation of the Pattison/Casaubon identification was at least partly motivated by an effort to deny what might be Casaubonish in himself. If I walk the streets Eliot walked, and read the diaries and letters she wrote—if I attempt, in some small measure, to enter sympathetically and imaginatively into her experience—it seems to me impossible to conceive that when, a few months after her visit to Oxford, she began writing a story about the marriage of a passionate young woman and a much older scholar, she did not have the Rector of Lincoln and his wife somewhere in mind.

  One vivid image of George Eliot’s stay in Oxford has endured. Mary Augusta Ward, who in subsequent decades became a popular novelist herself, was at the time a young woman living in Oxford, where she studied with Dr. Pattison. (No Oxford colleges admitted women in 1870; the first, Lady Margaret Hall, was not established until 1878.) In her memoirs Mrs. Ward recalled seeing Eliot in the quadrangle at Lincoln. “Suddenly, at one of the upper windows of the Rector’s lodgings, which occupied the far right-hand corner of the quad, there appeared the head and shoulders of Mrs. Pattison, as she looked out and beckoned, smiling, to Mrs. Lewes,” she wrote. “It was a brilliant apparition, as though a French portrait by Greuze or Perronneau had suddenly slipped into a vacant space in the old college wall. The pale, pretty head, blond-cendrée, the delicate, smiling features and white throat; a touch of black, a touch of blue; a white dress; a general eighteenth-century impression as though of powder and patches—Mrs. Lewes perceived it in a flash, and I saw her run eagerly to Mr. Lewes and draw his attention to the window and its occupant. She took his arm, while she looked and waved. If she had lived longer, some day, and somewhere in her books, that vision at the window and that flower-laden garden would have reappeared.” Mrs. Ward thought she witnessed the novelist’s imagination at work, absorbing material, storing it up for transformation.

  Today, the Pattisons’ drawing room is the study of a don: a young, female one who teaches history, which might have pleased Mrs. Pattison. What would have been the Pattisons’ dining room is used as a reception room, and when I visited, sherry glasses were laid out on a table, ready for awkward students unaccustomed to aperitifs, emulating sophistication with the rector. But the rooms still bear the traces of their earlier incarnation, with gilded carvings of flowers and leaves around the fireplaces and doorways, a Persian rug underfoot, and a view onto quiet gardens and the Radcliffe Camera beyond.

  As I walked around the rooms, I wondered what the rector and his wife must have thought when they read Middlemarch—as they both certainly did, although later, as Lady Dilke, Francis pretended she hadn’t, doubtless to fend off the Dorothea question. I imagined Francis, frustrated in her marriage, recognizing her younger self in Dorothea’s devout earnestness, as A. D. Nuttall suggests; and I pictured the rector comprehending Casaubon’s miseries in the light of his own sense of intellectual underachievement.

  But that simple sense of recognition would not be the only way in which each would have received the book. Mark Pattison relates in his memoir that he was extremely religious in his youth, and was at one point even tempted to convert to Catholicism, under the influence of Cardinal John Henry Newman, the leader of the Oxford Movement. Pattison spent time at Newman’s retreat in Oxford, known as “the Monastery,” where he fasted and prayed. (“Spent nearly two hours this morning in devotion and self-examination,” he wrote in his diary.) As well as being religious, he was an intellectual seeker: he arrived at Oxford longing for wise guidance and like-minded company. “I thought that now at last I should be in the company of an ardent band of fellow-students, only desirous of rivalling each other in the initiation which the tutors were to lead into the mysteries of scholarship, of composition, of rhetoric, logic and all the arts of literature,” he wrote. In the event, he was bitterly disappointed by the dullness of his peers and the uninspiring nature of his teachers.

  Reading this, I wonder whether the gruff Rector of Lincoln might have recognized himself in the ardent, devout, hungry Dorothea, just as much as he saw himself in her scholar-husband.

  Who is to say that a middle-aged man, given the free space for imaginative sympathy that a great work of literature provides, might not identify with a naive young woman within its pages? That for all his apparent gravitas he might not feel that in certain orders of experience he is still young?

  Francis, too, might not simply have seen herself in Dorothea. The former Emily Francis Strong also had ambitions for writing large, authoritative works—ambitions that eventually had to be scaled down to size, or remained unfulfilled. In her middle years, she began to realize that she might not achieve all she aspired to. “Sometimes I think even that the best use one could make of one’s own life would be to devote oneself to knowing everything, to become a master—at least in the general meaning of the word—of all that the human mind has conquered in all fields,” she once wrote. “But I am forty, and it is too late.”

  Too-lateness of this sort is Casaubon’s condition, and if Francis revisited Middlemarch in middle age, surely she would have recognized aspects of herself in the sad, unproductive scholar. Like all readers of the novel after them, both the rector and his wife would have had their own internal version of Middlemarch, slightly different from anyone else’s, informed by their own history and experience, shaped by the moods of their memories.

  IN the months after Middlemarch was published, Eliot received several letters from young women. Each wrote that she recognized herself in Dorothea—so much so that she believed Eliot must have modeled Dorothea upon her. Eliot was amused and, a friend reported, “asked each of these interesting ladies to send me her photograph. Alas, how little they resembled, at least in appearance, the heroine as I imagined her myself.”

  Such an approach to fiction—where do I see myself in here?—is not how a scholar reads, and it can be limiting in its solipsism. It’s hardly an enlarging experience to read a novel as if it were a mirror of oneself. One of the useful functions of literary criticism and scholarship is to suggest alternative lenses through which a book might be read. (Or even, in the case of J. Hillis Miller, to tease out the uses to which the metaphors of mirror and lens are put in the text: “Seeing, then, is for Eliot not a neutral, objective, dispassionate or passive act. It is the creative projection of light from an egotistic center motivated by desire and need.”)

  Eliot was scornful of idle women readers who imagined themselves the heroines of French novels, and of self-regarding folk who saw themselves in the most admirable character in a novel, and she hoped for a more nuanced engagement from her own readers. Even so, all readers make books over in their own image, and according to their own experience. My Middlemarch is not the same as anyone else’s Middlemarch; it is not even the same as my Middlemarch of twenty-five years ago. Sometimes, we find that a book we love has moved another person in the same ways as it has moved ourselves, and one definition of compatibility might be when two people have highlighted the same passages in their editions of a favorite novel. But we each have our own internal version of the book, with lines remembered and resonances felt.

  “The secret of our emotions never lives in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past,” Eliot wrote in Adam Bede. The bare object of a book—of a story—might also have a subtle relation to our own past. Identification with character is one way in which most ordinary readers do engage with a book, even if it is not where a reader’s engagement ends. It is where part of the pleasure, and the urgency, of reading lies. It is one of the ways that a novel speaks to a reader, and becomes integrated into the reader’s own imaginative life. Even the most
sophisticated readers read novels in the light of their own experience, and in such recognition, sympathy may begin.

  Chapter 6

  •

  The Widow and the Wife

  “If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind.”

  —MIDDLEMARCH, CHAPTER 55

  After her slow start, George Eliot wrote Middlemarch in a dauntingly short space of time. Books One and Two were completed by early summer 1871, and she wrote the rest of it—the total is more than twelve hundred manuscript pages—by September of the following year. This achievement is all the more impressive because she was suffering from various ailments throughout. She had inflammation of the gums, gastric complaints, attacks of migraine—the encroachment of age on the body. “Did you ever, in your young life, have a whole week of headache?” the fifty-two-year-old author wrote to one correspondent in the spring of 1872, when she was in the midst of writing Book Six.

  She was working under professional as well as physiological pressure. Blackwood published the beginning of Middlemarch before she’d completed even half the novel, so there was no room for failure, or major revision. She tormented herself by rereading parts of Felix Holt, her most recent novel, and feeling sure she could never write as well again. As they often did at times of stress, she and Lewes moved to the countryside, this time to a rented house in Redhill, Surrey, better to concentrate on the three volumes of Middlemarch that remained to be written. There they were “shut out from the world amid fields,” Lewes wrote to his son Charles. “Not a sound except hens cackling and dogs barking reaches us.” Eliot was scrupulously disciplined. She didn’t permit herself much letter writing, though sometimes late in the evening she would correspond with a few close friends. One was Barbara Bodichon, to whom she confessed, “I of course am still anxious, as I always am when any work is not safely finished.”

  Lewes wrote in her stead to less intimate correspondents, giving an account of her progress. “She improves visibly, almost day by day,” he told one friend. “The color has come back to her cheek and the oval also. I tell her she will ‘put on flesh.’ And she is writing—writing—writing!” Lewes went on to parody a line from a poem by Oliver Goldsmith, in which the author characterized the energies of David Garrick, the eighteenth-century man of the theater. Lewes wrote, “I will say—‘Why, Sir, away from the desk she is a perfect woman, but at the desk—oh!—my!!—God!!!’ ”

  Lewes’s conjuring of Eliot’s animated creativity is appealing, not least because it provides a useful counterpoint to her own frequent characterization of herself as working slowly and laboriously, depressed by a sense of underachievement and hampered by infirmities. Her letters and diaries are filled with references to feeling unwell: upon reading Cross’s biography Alice James, the sister of Henry James, remarked waspishly, “What an abject coward she seems to have been about physical pain, as if it weren’t degrading enough to have head-aches, without jotting them down in a row to stare at one for all time.” Eliot’s headaches, like Proust’s neurasthenia, seem an integral part of her creative identity, as if her extraordinarily intelligent brain could not work without overloading. Still, one wonders how different her life might have been if she’d had aspirin. She was, as the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, “melancholy, head-achy, with a slow, disciplined, hard-won, aching genius that bore down upon her with a wondrous and exhausting force, like a great love affair in middle age.”

  Eliot’s great love affair did come in middle age—with Lewes, that sprightly partner who was lively where she was lugubrious and sociable where she was retiring. Lewes’s note about Eliot at her desk, racing to meet her deadline, describes her well, but it also brings Lewes himself vividly to life—in the midst of taking care of Eliot’s epistolary needs while at the same time madly exceeding the rules of punctuation, overstepping the boundaries of what’s proper to convey what’s true. His writing style has the vivacity of the man himself, with an appealing ebullience and enthusiasm.

  Some of Lewes’s contemporaries found him altogether too ebullient. Charles Eliot Norton, who visited the Priory in 1869, wrote with disdain that Lewes “looks and moves like an old-fashioned French barber or dancing-master, very ugly, very vivacious, very entertaining. You expect to see him take up his fiddle and begin to play.” Norton sounds like a snob and a prig, while Lewes strikes me as much more appealing: funny, charming, and above all, cheerful. I think I can understand how refreshing Lewes’s sense of optimism must have been to Eliot, especially after her demoralizing, belittling experience with the complicated Herbert Spencer. At a certain age, what might once have seemed fascinating in a prospective partner—moodiness, indecision, all seeming to indicate emotional depth—becomes altogether less appealing. After an experience like that, to find a partner as accepting and generous as Lewes is a great and unexpected gift.

  Lewes was indispensable to Eliot, and commentators agree that without his encouragement and ministrations she might never have had the confidence to attempt fiction, or enjoyed a working environment conducive to doing so. He acted as her agent, negotiating on her behalf with Blackwood, and he shielded her from reviews and criticism. By her own account, the novelist George Eliot would never have been born from the critic and editor Marian Evans were it not for the germinating spark that Lewes provided. He had encouraged her to try her hand at a novel early on, and then when she did not immediately act upon his urgings he arranged things practically so that she could not avoid the challenge any longer. After she’d written the first few pages of “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” the first of the stories that became Scenes of Clerical Life, Lewes was convinced that she was capable of writing entertaining dialogue, and left her alone one evening to write a death scene, to see if she could produce something persuasively sad. “I read it to G. when he came home,” Eliot later wrote in a memorandum called “How I came to write Fiction.” “We both cried over it, and then he came up to me and kissed me, saying ‘I think your pathos is better than your fun.’ ”

  How delightful that she included the kiss. It’s a crucial detail, but I can imagine other writers skipping over it in an account of their creative origins—dismissing it as irrelevant or embarrassing, or forgetting it altogether. But they did kiss, and their kissing was essential. Lewes adored Eliot, whom he called by the pet name of Polly, with an intuitive kindness and a gratitude in which there was no trace of resentment. “To know her was to love her,” he wrote in his diary in 1859, recalling their first acquaintance. “Since then my life has been a new birth. To her I owe all my prosperity & all my happiness. God bless her!” The sense of grateful, joyful indebtedness was mutual. The name under which she became famous was a tribute to him: she was George because he was George. An early biographer, Blanche Colton Williams, whose book was published in 1936, wrote that “Eliot” is a further, concealed honoring: “To L—I owe it.”

  Middlemarch mostly concerns itself with the problems of young love, the problems of young love being a natural subject of literature. But the book was nurtured by love that was arrived at late, and cherished all the more for its belatedness; and Lewes, George Eliot’s own George, is its bustling, cheering, loving hero. Embedded in this story of young love is another love story, one about the unexpected possibilities presented by middle age.

  THEY were introduced in a bookshop. Eliot had gone to Jeffs, a compact establishment in the Burlington Arcade, after taking a long walk through Hyde Park in the company of John Chapman. The elegant, glassed-in shopping arcade had been opened thirty years earlier by Lord Cavendish to prevent passersby from throwing rubbish into the garden of Burlington House, his imposing residence on Piccadilly. (Oyster shells had been a particular problem.) By the 1850s the arcade was home to leather shops and shirtmakers and tobacconists; and, at number 15, Jeffs, which specialized in foreign-language books imported f
rom the Continent. The shop was tiny: only nine feet deep and not much wider, with a spiral staircase leading to storerooms above. There would barely have been room to turn around, especially while wearing an ample Victorian gown, and Eliot and Lewes were thrown instantly into close proximity. Eliot mentioned meeting him there in a letter to Charles Bray, describing him as “a miniature Mirabeau.”

  Eliot’s biographers agree that this is probably a reference to Thomas Carlyle’s description of the French revolutionary’s “shaggy beetle-brows and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face,” through which nonetheless shone a “burning fire of genius.” Lewes, who was two years Eliot’s senior, was “the ugliest man in London” according to one member of his literary circle. He was slight in stature, with a receding jaw, protruding teeth that were concealed by a bushy mustache, and dark, intense, intelligent eyes. Jane Carlyle unkindly called him “the Ape,” though her husband gave testimony that Lewes was “ingenious, brilliant, entertaining, highly gifted and accomplished.” He had contributed to the Westminster Review, had authored A Biographical History of Philosophy and two novels, and was currently serving as editor and columnist for the Leader, as well as contemplating a biography of Goethe.