My Life in Middlemarch

by Rebecca Mead

  I can’t be sure what I would have made of Mary Garth when I was twelve or fourteen, the age for which it seems to have been intended. Perhaps I would have welcomed it; those years were tricky ones in which to find the right books, with the satisfactions of Frances Hodgson Burnett outgrown but the subtleties of Jane Austen still inaccessible. As a Radipole schoolgirl I might have been enchanted by the warmth of the worthy Miss Garth and amused by her good-hearted suitor. But by the time that I did first read Middlemarch, several years later, the characters that were of absolutely the least interest to me in the whole novel were Fred and Mary.

  They were utterly lacking in glamour. Feckless, harmless Fred was just the sort of raw, fair English boy who left me cold: so un-intellectual, so outdoorsy, so buoyantly optimistic, so resiliently uncomplicated. Mary, that clever brown patch, I should have had a greater interest in, but I was too busy identifying with the passionate, aspiring Miss Brooke to recognize my kinship with the shrewd, satirical Miss Garth. I found her brand of goodness boring. I did not share her sense of duty, or feel as she did the intense importance of family ties. “I consider my mother and father the best part of myself,” Mary says. Like many children of my generation, I suspect, I rather fancied that I was the best part of them.

  Most of all, I could not conceive of falling in love with a boy I’d grown up alongside and had known all my life. I had only vague notions of what I wanted from romantic love, but I felt sure that it involved passionate struggle on exotic frontiers. There was nothing I could imagine wanting less than the predictable domesticity of marrying a childhood sweetheart.

  That was what my parents had done. They met in 1944, the year my mother turned thirteen and my father fourteen. My mother, a slender, pragmatic girl with fine brown hair and a broad smile, attended the girls’ grammar school, to which she was permitted to ride her bike so long as she rode with an older cousin, who attended the boys’ grammar school nearby. My father, a quiet, cricket-obsessed boy with black curly hair and olive skin, rode with them every morning, too. That was their beginning, and they married in the summer that he turned twenty-two and she twenty-one.

  In their wedding picture, taken at the gate of the local church, my mother isn’t wearing a bridal gown, but a belted dress—it was heavy, pale blue silk—with three-quarter-length sleeves and a knee-length skirt. Slim and elegant, she wears a pillbox hat with a chic fringe of veil. The dress comes from Harrods department store, in the advertising department of which she works, having left school at fifteen to become a messenger girl. From her work she has learned how to stand for the photographer, with one foot in front of the other, her firm chin slightly cocked.

  My father stands square, hair gleaming, his new, imposingly formal gray suit hanging off his slender frame, smiling, looking vulnerable. He is already a civil servant, having left school at sixteen. His exam results were good enough that he could have continued his education into the sixth form, and then into college, but in his family that wasn’t even a consideration: no one ever had. In his teens he had ambitions to become a sportswriter—he went to evening classes to learn shorthand and typing—but his own father had died, and a relative advised him to enter a more secure line of work. He did, and stayed a civil servant for more than forty years, never letting my brother or me suspect that any sacrifice had been involved in our family’s foundation.

  The wedding photograph was tucked away in an old album, which was rarely brought out. My parents were not the type to have their wedding pictures on display, or to make a display of their marriage. They were undemonstrative in their affections to each other, but I never saw them arguing. They lived together in what looked like functional, contented complicity. If as a teenager I had stopped to think about it I would have said they were happy together, but I rarely stopped to think about it. They provided the steadying, untroubled background to my own inward drama of growing up—giving me, in their understated English way, the opportunity to aspire to a life very different from theirs. It did not occur to me to think much about what their own dramas were, or might have been.

  “MARRIAGE, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning,” Eliot writes in the conclusion to Middlemarch. The novel that ends with a wedding was conventional in Eliot’s time, and has become only more conventional since. Middlemarch, though, is punctuated with weddings: it begins with one, features one in its middle, and ends with two more. None of them functions as an ending. Each suggests, instead, the start of a story, not its conclusion. With her quiet, majestic turn of phrase, Eliot writes that marriage is “the beginning of the home epic.” It is “the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of the complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.” Every marriage—which we can take from Eliot’s example to include every committed relationship, not only those sanctioned by church or state—amounts to an epic journey, an adventure of discovery.

  From this perspective, the course upon which Fred and Mary are about to embark in the last chapter of Middlemarch is no less grand, in its way, than Dorothea’s early aspirations for a life of significance, or than Lydgate’s ambitions to make scientific discoveries. Throughout Middlemarch, Eliot has shown from different angles the demands that marriage makes. She has argued, in effect, that a good marriage is the expression of sympathy in its smallest unit. “Marriage is so unlike everything else,” Dorothea says toward the end of the novel. “There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” The chosen adjective is deliberately ambiguous, connoting at once a sublime state and also one conducive to dread.

  Of all the marriages that are made in Middlemarch, the one over which Eliot casts the most golden, glowing light is that of Fred and Mary. Eliot—who did not marry her young love, nor stay in her childhood home—gives Fred and Mary what many readers have felt is the one truly romantic love story in Middlemarch, a story that is free of regret or disappointment. (We might have wished for Mr. Farebrother’s sake that Mary had chosen him, but it is hard to begrudge Fred.) They produce three sons, the same number that Eliot helped Lewes raise, and both Fred and Mary, surely not coincidentally, become authors—she of a book of tales for children taken from Plutarch, he of a work called the Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle-Feeding. (The residents of Middlemarch are convinced that each of them wrote the other’s book. “There was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else,” Eliot writes, in a private joke about her own peculiar history of pseudonymous authorship.)

  Fred becomes the picture of uxorious devotion, the kind of man it is easier to see the attractions of at forty-five than it is at twenty. Having failed to inherit Stone Court, the house he hoped Mr. Featherstone, his rich, grumpy uncle, would bequeath him, he has an opportunity to gain the house anyway, through his own hard work and application. He maintains his love of hunting but risks the derision of his companions by refraining from jumping the highest fences, “seeming to see Mary and the boys sitting on the five-barred gate, or showing their curly heads between hedge and ditch.” As a young reader, I skipped past this line without pausing, but now when I read it a lump always comes to my throat, so acute a description is it of familial fidelity.

  Strikingly, Fred and Mary are the only characters in Middlemarch to whom Eliot refers in the present tense in the book’s conclusion—as if, after all, they were real people a reader could go and track down, not characters formed by her imagination. Anyone who seeks to inquire, she writes, might find that Fred and Mary are still living at Stone Court, where “the creeping plants still cast the foam of their blossoms over the fine stone-walls into the field where the walnut-trees stand in stately row.” For the first readers of Middlemarch, which was published some forty years after the period it describes, Fred and Mary, living beyond the pages of the novel, would have been in their midsixties. For the rest of us, Eliot’s belated readers, Fred and Mary are the representatives of our unassuming elders—wat
ching over us, making no explicit imposition upon us, knowing and feeling far more than the young can ever imagine them capable of. They are as solid as those fine stone walls, and as connected to the land as the walnut trees in the fields. Fred and Mary dwell in the landscape of childhood, and they are the landscape of childhood, too.

  “On sunny days the two lovers who were first engaged with the umbrella-ring may be seen in white-haired placidity at the open window from which Mary Garth, in the days of old Peter Featherstone, had often been ordered to look out for Mr. Lydgate,” Eliot writes. This passage had no particular resonance for me when I was young, but now it thrills with depth and suggestion. Now I can see what I could not see as a teenager—the romance, and the epic dimension, of long-lasting marriage. It begins at the church gate, a bold embarkation in formal clothes and self-conscious smiles, and it ends with the fastening of buttons on the shirt of a spouse whose trembling, liver-spotted hands can no longer manage the task. What would it be for love to be rooted in a single place, for a life’s length? This, of all experiences in love, is one I will never have, even if it is mercifully granted that I grow old together with the husband I met on the brink of middle age.

  From where I stand in the middle of my own home epic—my own mundane, grand domestic adventure, in which I attempt to live in sympathy with the family I have made—I now look upon the accomplishment of early-dawning, long-lasting love with something like awe. When I turn the last pages of Middlemarch and read about Fred and Mary, I think of my parents, who met when they were barely past childhood, and who grew white haired together; until in the hours before dawn one winter morning, nearly sixty years after their wedding day, my father died with my mother at his side, holding his hand and speaking softly to him of sweet memories in common. Middlemarch gives my parents back to me. In the pages of my imagination they are still together, watching me and watching over me from the window of their lives, under the pale sunlight of the place I came from and still call home.

  IN the end, more romance is attached in Middlemarch to the accomplishment of enduring love than to the trials of young love, the follies of which are so ably dissected. In Fred and Mary, Eliot gives a glimpse of what a contented old age might be like. The final chapter of Book Eight, by which time their marriage is decided, is prefaced by an epigraph in French, from Victor Hugo. The epigraph is not about the excitement of new love, but the gratifications provided by love in old age. “The heart is saturated with love as with a divine wit which preserves it; hence the undying attachment of those who have loved each other from the dawn of life, and the freshness of old loves which still endure,” it reads. “This, then, is old age: a resemblance of evening with the dawn.”

  By the time Eliot was finishing Middlemarch she thought of herself as incipiently elderly, and within less than a decade she would join Lewes in Highgate Cemetery, where a bed of wild-flowers now covers her tomb. Her diaries from her later years show that she entered what she regarded as old age with less than the complete equanimity that is recommended by the passage from Victor Hugo. In real life, her sunset years were filled with bodily aches and pains, as well as anxieties about work that she feared she would inevitably leave undone.

  “As the years advance there is a new rational ground for the expectation that my life may become less fruitful,” she wrote in her diary, on the last day of 1877. “Many conceptions of works to be carried out present themselves, but confidence in my own fitness to complete them worthily is all the more wanting because it is reasonable to argue that I must already have done my best.” Still, in her old age, she felt the familiar spur of inspiration. “In fact, my mind is embarrassed by the number and wide variety of subjects that attract me, and the enlarging vista that each brings with it,” she wrote.

  She had come so far from her girlhood and youth, in geographical distance and in mental and moral capacity, with her mind surveying an ever-widening horizon. But thirty years earlier—still in the Midlands, still uncertain as to what would become of her—Eliot had characterized herself by an image precisely opposite to this one, in a letter to a friend. “It seems to me as if I were shrinking into that mathematical abstraction, a point—so entirely am I destitute of contact that I am unconscious of length or breadth,” she wrote then.

  At the time of that letter her father was weeks away from death, and her mood was somber. She wrote of herself as a moon, a “cold dark orb,” solitary and demoralized. “Alas for the fate of poor mortals which condemns them to wake up some fine morning and find all the poetry in which their world was bathed only the evening before utterly gone—the hard angular world of chairs and tables and looking-glasses staring at them in all its naked prose,” she wrote. “It is so in all the stages of life—the poetry of girlhood goes—the poetry of love and marriage—the poetry of maternity—and at last the very poetry of duty forsakes us for a season and we see ourselves and all about us as nothing more than miserable agglomerations of atoms—poor tentative efforts of the Natur Princip to mould a personality.”

  This litany of life stages passing away is staggeringly expressed, and wrenchingly sad, but what Eliot did with the years that followed was redemptive. Middlemarch itself might be seen as capturing the poetry of girlhood, the poetry of love and marriage, the poetry of maternity, or motherhood, and the poetry of duty. In the novel she comes to terms with the hard, angular world of tables and chairs and looking glasses, and finds a struggling person’s place within it. By the time Eliot was writing Middlemarch she had found a way to think of herself, and of everyone around her, as something more than a miserable agglomeration of atoms. In 1870 she wrote a letter of condolence to a friend and in it, not for the only time, she drew upon an image of death that recalled the grace-giving sunlight of childhood. “I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more,” she wrote. “And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity,—possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.” Her aspiration was not for literary immortality—though she got that—but for a kind of encompassing empathy that would make the punishing experience of egoism shrink and dwindle. She believed that growth depends upon complex connections and openness to others, and does not derive from a solitary swelling of the self. She became great because she recognized that she was small.

  “We cannot give the young our experience,” a visitor to the Priory once recalled Eliot as saying. “They will not take it. There must be the actual friction of life, the individual contact with sorrow, to discipline the character.” She was right, of course, though as we grow older it can be hard to resist the temptation to tell younger people how to live—to believe that we have acquired some wisdom fit to impart to the benighted young. Only an occasional fictional character, like Mary Garth, is wise enough to know for sure at the beginning of her life what she will want in life’s middle, or at life’s end; and if more fictional characters were as certain as that, fiction wouldn’t be worth reading. For most characters, and for most readers, the course is less clear.

  Middlemarch has not given me George Eliot’s experience, not on my first reading of it, or my latest. But in reading her works and her letters, and learning about her life and the lives of those near to her, it becomes clear to me that she could not have written this novel without her individual contact with sorrow. And as I continue to read and think and reflect, I also realize that she has given me something else: a profound experience with a book, over time, that amounts to one of the frictions of my life. I have grown up with George Eliot. I think Middlemarch has disciplined my character. I know it has become part of my own experience and my own endurance. Middlemarch inspired me when I was young, and chafing to leave home; and now, in middle life, it suggests to me what else home might mean, beyond a place to grow up and grow out of.

  ON this mild May day I sit in my Brooklyn backyard, reading and thinking. Between me and the sky grows a broad-l
imbed elm tree that must have been a sapling when my parents were young. Squirrels skitter through it, while sparrows flit from its branches to those of the copper birch beyond. This is a peaceful city garden, surrounded by high, ivy-covered brick walls that bring to my mind the walls around the very first garden I knew, as a small child under a London sky, before my parents moved to the coast.

  This garden is my young son’s home-scene, weaving itself into his joys now, while his joys are vivid. So is the less restful world in which he is being raised, discernible even from this retreat: the traffic passing on the busy street beyond; the subterranean rumble of the crowded subway train that we ride to his school every morning, after waiting on a platform decked with posters for mayhem-filled movies; the ebullient calls of teenagers peacocking down the block to the hilly park on the corner. During the Revolutionary War this park was the site of a fort that was named for a maternal ancestor of my husband, a general who led American troops against the forces of George III. Later, Walt Whitman, the poet and editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who lived in this neighborhood, championed the construction of a park on the fort’s site. When Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855 George Eliot was among the first reviewers to notice it, in the Westminster Review. She alluded to “the very bold expressions by which the author indicates his contempt for the ‘prejudices’ of decency”—a remark that sounds a little prudish until one remembers that Eliot herself was, by then, thought to have held decency in contempt. Whitman achieved his park, and in the 1860s Frederick Law Olmsted, the great nineteenth-century landscape designer, created a small acreage of imagined countryside, where now my son climbs among clusters of old-growth trees whose placement was conceived when Middlemarch was no more than jottings in a notebook and ideas in George Eliot’s mind.