My Life in Middlemarch

by Rebecca Mead

  The chapters are also both deeply comic. When Ladislaw declares, “There are certain things which a man can only go through once in his life; and he must know some time or other that the best is over with him,” or when he feels, wildly, that something must hinder their parting—“some miracle, clearly nothing in their own speech”—Eliot strikes a distinct note of humor, distancing her authorial self from the consciousness of her protagonists. But this humor is not necessarily something a young reader appreciates. I know I didn’t. When I read these passages in my early twenties they seemed entirely fraught, and not at all funny. The way that Ladislaw feels is the way I felt during my first serious love affair, with a fellow student toward the end of my time at Oxford, when our impending parting was built into the drama of our days together. (He sent me poems not by Shelley but by Baudelaire, whom I am sure Ladislaw would have approved had their dates lined up.) There is a self-involved intensity to young love that cannot imagine the world without it, and it’s one of the peculiarities of modern life that—unlike Dorothea and Ladislaw—young people go through that experience with a residual consciousness that this love affair will not be their last. Many of us do not end up marrying—or staying married to—the person we loved in school or college. But even with this awareness of young love’s transience, it’s hard at twenty-one or at twenty-three to imagine that love might strike us just as intensely later in life, too—even when we’re middle-aged, and in spite of gray hairs, as Eliot put it.

  In the fall of 1872, Eliot wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, with whom she had developed a rewarding epistolary relationship, to caution her against thinking that the Dorothea-Casaubon marriage was drawn from her own experience. “Impossible to conceive any creature less like Mr. Casaubon than my warm, enthusiastic husband, who cares much more for my doing than for his own, and is a miracle of freedom from all author’s jealousy and all suspicion,” Eliot went on. Sometimes in his own letters Lewes did compare himself comically to Casaubon, referring to his unfinished work, Problems of Life and Mind, as “the Key to All Psychologies.” Eliot he cast as Dorothea, who, Lewes told Blackwood, “is more like her creator than anyone else and more so than any other of her creations.”

  But for all Lewes’s comical affectation of seeing himself represented in the toiling scholar it seems unlikely that he missed the tribute that Eliot made to him in the bright portrait of Ladislaw. Ladislaw is not entirely Lewes; he lacks Lewes’s abundant generosity of spirit, and he does not share Lewes’s miraculous deficit of egoism in the primary relation of his life. But there is enough of Lewes in Ladislaw—who is disparaged for lightness, frivolity, foreignness, and dilettantism—to suggest that Eliot meant him to be her beloved’s vindication. No wonder Eliot loved the character she created. In Ladislaw, she reimagined the aging, unprepossessing Lewes as a young, handsome, passionate lover. Or perhaps in the loving eyes of Eliot Lewes simply was all those things, whatever he might have looked like to others.

  OF course, they never married. Former friends and acquaintances were aghast at Eliot’s departure for Weimar with Lewes, and cold upon her return. George Combe, the phrenologist who had previously examined Eliot’s head and detected only low degrees of “amativeness,” or sexual feeling, demanded to know whether there was any madness in her family. Cara Bray, Eliot’s close friend, was a long time coming round. To Cara, Eliot wrote an eloquent defense, saying, “If there is any one action or relation of my life which is and always has been profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr. Lewes.” The tears shed in the rooms on Cambridge Street show the gravity with which Eliot regarded her choice. “Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically,” she continued, with a touch of proud sarcasm. “Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done—they obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.”

  Being excluded from dinner parties turned out not to be such a bad thing. Their life together took its own course, free of the necessity to observe propriety. They read widely, wrote copiously, talked endlessly. They traveled often, sometimes to the English seaside, sometimes on tours through Italy. “How I worship his good humour, his good sense, his affectionate care for everyone who has claims on him!” Eliot wrote in her journal in 1865. An American visitor to the Priory, the writer Annie Fields, wrote of being taken by Lewes into the room in which he worked, where he drew back a curtain obscuring some shelves, upon which the bound manuscripts of Eliot’s novels were arranged. “She was his chief topic of conversation, the pride and joy of his life, and it was quite evident that she returned his ardent devotion with a true love,” Fields recalled.

  My favorite image of Eliot and Lewes is provided by a neighbor who used to see them out walking Pug, and reported, Mrs. Cadwallader-like, “They were both very unattractive people to look upon, and they used to wander about the neighbourhood, the biggest pair of frights that ever was, followed by a shaggy little dog who could do tricks.” The censorious glimpse from behind the net curtain is a peculiarly English phenomenon, and I derive delicious pleasure from the two Georges’ carelessness about the judgment delivered by smaller minds and smaller hearts than their own.

  To later generations untroubled by the notion of cohabitation, Eliot and Lewes provide a model of coupled contentment. The critic Phyllis Rose has written that “the Leweses managed to be as happy together for the twenty-four years they lived together as any two people I have heard of outside fantasy literature.” Robert Lowell, in an unrhymed sonnet about George Eliot, called their union “Victorian England’s one true marriage.”

  I’m inclined to join in this celebration of Eliot and Lewes’s life together, and I cherish their late love all the more because it was not until I was thirty-five that I met the man who was to become my husband—a kind, optimistic man whose strengths include the gentle power of making me feel beloved. He is a writer, too, and on those days when we are working in different corners of our house, or traveling together for research, or reading one another’s work before any other editor has seen it, I think I have a glimpse of what Eliot and Lewes’s writerly companionability must have been like: “working, reading, correcting proofs, traveling, entertaining, receiving and writing letters, planning literary projects, worrying, doubting their powers, experiencing a delicious hypochondria,” as Elizabeth Hardwick described it, with almost concupiscent precision. Hardwick was married to Robert Lowell when she wrote her essay on Eliot, and in her description of Victorian literary couples—“Before the bright fire at tea-time, we can see these high-strung men and women clinging together, their inky fingers touching”—there seems to be a touch of admiring identification, too. It would be hard to find a happier model for a writers’ marriage than that of Eliot and Lewes.

  They were unconventional, and unashamed to be so, but Eliot didn’t remain unmarried as a feminist act, or as deliberate social defiance. It is difficult to appreciate today the boldness that it took to make her choice, which met with such widespread censure from close friends as well as from titillated onlookers. She became notorious in an age when notoriety could not be transformed by the alchemy of public relations into a tarnished badge of honor, and in later years she would write of herself ruefully as “the criminal usually known under the name of George Eliot.”

  Eliot was not at all opposed to the institution of marriage. She took very seriously its commitment—“its demand for self-suppression and tolerance,” as she characterized it in Middlemarch. But she believed that there was a limit to the degree of self-suppression and tolerance that even marriage could demand. In Middlemarch, Eliot dramatizes the question of how much a woman should submit in marriage by showing Dorothea wrestling with a dilemma: should she agree to continue her husband’s work on his behalf after his death? “She pictured to herself the days, and months, and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins—sorting them as food for a t
heory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child,” Eliot writes. Dorothea is spared the necessity of promising Casaubon that she will submit: he dies before she is able to. Appalled by the discovery of his jealous codicil, she declines to look anymore at his documents. “The living, suffering man was no longer before her to awaken her pity: there remained only the retrospect of painful subjection to a husband whose thoughts had been lower than she had believed.”

  Dorothea is saved by Casaubon’s death, but Eliot also believed that a marriage could be dead while both partners were still living. In a critique of Jane Eyre she made when she was in her late twenties, she wrote, “All self-sacrifice is good—but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcase.” We might wish that the young Eliot had extended a little more sympathy to poor Bertha Mason, the unfortunate Mrs. Rochester, but her perspective upon matrimony—viewing it not as an eternal sacrament, but as a construct of sometimes erring law—anticipated the way she would later regard Lewes’s obsolete union with Agnes. In 1855, a year after she and Lewes took off together to Weimar, Eliot wrote a review for the Leader of a biography of John Milton, by Thomas Keightley. In it, she addressed Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, approvingly quoting Milton’s wish “not that licence and levity and unconsented breach of faith should herein be countenanced, but that some conscionable and tender pity might be had of those who have unwarily, in a thing they never practised before, made themselves the bondmen of a luckless and helpless matrimony.”

  She regarded Lewes’s union with Agnes as luckless and helpless, and thought of her own relation to him as a true marriage—as characterized by Feuerbach, whose words she had translated in 1854: “A marriage which is not spontaneously concluded, spontaneously willed, self-sufficing, is not a true marriage, and therefore not a truly moral marriage.” The evident contentment with and commitment to each other of Eliot and Lewes struck some observers as unbearably smug, including Eliza Lynn Linton, who in her memoir of literary London wrote nastily of “the pretence of a sanctioned union” between them. Other early commentators did not quite know how to square Eliot’s pseudomarriage with her clearly deserved reputation for moral seriousness. Some sought to argue, implausibly, that Lewes has been the ruin of her creativity, rather than the making of it. Writing a few years after her death, John G. Lord disapproved of Lewes’s living “in open defiance of the seventh Commandment and the social customs of England,” and called the union an “unfortunate connection, which saddened the whole subsequent life of Miss Evans, and tinged all her writings with the gall of her soul.”

  In Lord’s view, the gall-tinged Middlemarch was more faulty than any of her earlier novels—“It has a miserable plot; it has many tedious chapters, and too many figures, and too much theorizing on social science,” he complained. A reader need not agree with this questionable assessment to believe that the moral quandary Eliot faced in deciding to live with Lewes did inform her fictional preoccupations. The heroines of The Mill on the Floss and Romola and Daniel Deronda are all profoundly concerned with determining the limits of commitment, to a spouse or to one’s own sense of self. In Middlemarch, the question of marital renunciation preoccupies not just Dorothea and Lydgate, but other characters, too. One of the book’s most indelible episodes is that in which Harriet Bulstrode, the banker’s wife, learns from her brother about her husband’s proliferating deceptions and possible crimes. She withdraws to her room, where she removes her jewelry and her fancy, decorated cap and puts on a black gown, all in preparation for descending the stairs and embracing his shame and humiliation as her own—deliberately choosing to embody the fidelity that characterizes a true marriage, in spite of her husband’s transgressions.

  Eliot knew what renunciation was—she essentially gave up her ties to her family in order to be with Lewes. But there is no evidence to suggest that there was a knot of sadness and gall at the heart of her relation with Lewes. She was joyful in Weimar, and while her first pitch of happiness might not have been sustained among the mundane woes of headache and toothache, her joy in Lewes did not abate. “In my private lot I am unspeakably happy, loving and beloved,” she wrote in her diary at the end of 1870, almost twenty years after their first meeting. Beyond youth when they met, Eliot and Lewes seem to have been one of those enviable pairs who appreciate each other only more as they grow older together, for reasons she hinted at in an essay she wrote about Madame de Sablé, the seventeenth-century salonnière. She wrote it while on her unconventional honeymoon in Weimar, discovering her power of learning renewed. “It is undeniable, that unions formed in the maturity of thought and feeling, and grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more intelligent sympathy with men,” she wrote. She makes late love sound irresistibly romantic—different from young love, but no less appealing and considerably more satisfying.

  Eliot uses a quotation from the apocryphal Book of Tobit to introduce a late chapter of Middlemarch: “Mercifully grant that we may grow aged together,” she writes, and the line is worth remembering. I like to think of Eliot and Lewes growing together as they aged, remembering their beginnings. Sometimes, Eliot once told a friend, they would talk fondly of their early years together, when they were poor. (In fact, Lewes urged Eliot to write fiction not just as a matter of artistic fulfillment, but because he reckoned it would be a more effective means than journalism to pay the bills—which in those days it was.) Eliot told her friend that they laughed at all their troubles, with Lewes, in his theatrical way, exaggerating for comic effect the extent of the troubles that Eliot had endured. In Middlemarch, Lydgate has a belated inkling of what this kind of married life might be like: “He was beginning now to imagine how two creatures who loved each other, and had a stock of thoughts in common, might laugh over their shabby furniture, and their calculations how far they could afford butter and eggs.”

  The laughter—like Lewes’s kiss for her first effort at fiction—is crucial. A compensation of getting older is an increasing ability to recognize the comedy of human relations, which can be obscured by the tempests of youthful emotion. Even stormy, passionate Ladislaw later comes to see the element of comedy in his desperate noncourtship of Dorothea—something Eliot shows the reader by offering a glimpse of him, mature and middle-aged, telling their love’s origin story.

  It happens during that charged meeting with which Book Six begins, at the moment when Dorothea tells Ladislaw that she expects him to be gone from Middlemarch a long while. “Will never quite knew how it was that he saved himself from falling down at her feet, when the ‘long while’ came forth with its gentle tremor,” Eliot writes. That touch of melodrama is quietly modified by the next sentence, however: “He used to say that the horrible hue and surface of her crape dress was most likely the sufficient controlling force.” Dorothea is wearing elaborate mourning clothes in the prevailing fashion—“her dress was an experiment in the utmost laying on of crape,” Eliot writes—which remind Ladislaw of how inappropriate it would be to woo her. But I hear in that sentence the note of ironical retrospection that can be achieved when one is not yet merely contemplative, but still half-passionate, and still capable of the power of learning.

  UPON her death in 1880, Eliot bequeathed all but one of her manuscripts to the British Library. (The exception is Scenes of Clerical Life, which Blackwood kept for himself, and which ended up at the Morgan Library in New York.) One late summer’s day I went to the manuscripts reading room at the British Library to view Middlemarch, which is kept there under high security.

  A librarian handed me the first volume in its blue storage box, and I took it to a well-lit blond-wood carrel nearby. Opening the box, I gently lifted out the volume, which was bound in oxblood-colored leather with gold lettering on its spine. I carefully settled it into a book rest that was equipped with a gray padded cushion, like something you might optimistically purchase at an airport store
before an overnight flight, and turned the pages of the manuscript, reading the by now familiar words.

  A wide margin had been left on the side of the page for corrections, which were few, but illuminating. I read Dorothea’s letter to Casaubon accepting his marriage proposal. “I am very grateful to you for thinking me worthy to be your wife,” Eliot had written, before amending the line with a poignant shift in register: “I am very grateful to you for loving me, and thinking me worthy to be your wife.” In chapter 9, when Ladislaw makes his first appearance, strolling in the gardens at Lowick with a sketchbook, Eliot had initially described him as having “light curls”; she had afterward inserted the word “brown,” beginning to give color to her creation, whose lightness had been established from the start.

  And at the very beginning of the manuscript was a dedication, written in violet ink. “To my dear Husband George Henry Lewes, in this nineteenth year of our blessed union,” it read, and was dated December 1872, the month in which the final volume of Middlemarch was published. As I read the inscription, I felt as Annie Fields did when Lewes drew back the curtain from the bookshelf at the Priory—privileged to come within the orbit of their endearing intimacy. After finishing her own novel Eliot moved on to other things, principally reading Lewes’s manuscript. “It is a holiday to sit with one’s feet at the fire reading one’s husband’s writing—at least when, like mine, he allows me to differ from him,” she told Francis Pattison in a letter. “I flourish on this pasture very well, and he too is in tolerably good condition,” she wrote. “I hope we are not the happiest people in the world, but we must be among the happiest.”