My Life in Middlemarch

by Rebecca Mead

  A note on naming: Biographers have struggled with the question of what to call George Eliot, who went by many names in her life as well as adopting a literary pseudonym. She was, variously, Mary Ann Evans, Marian Evans, Marian Evans Lewes, and Mary Ann Cross, and I have switched between names as seems appropriate to the context. Many scholars do not refer to George Eliot by surname only, since, it is argued, there was not really a person called George Eliot. In the spirit of the naive reader I remain and aspire to represent, I think of George Eliot as a real person—just as I think of Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, and George Orwell as real people—and therefore I do sometimes refer to her by surname only.

  When quoting from the works of George Eliot I have used the following editions: Scenes of Clerical Life (Penguin Classics, 1998), Adam Bede (Penguin Classics, 2008), The Mill on the Floss (Penguin Classics, 2003), Felix Holt, the Radical (Penguin Classics, 1982), Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 1994), and Daniel Deronda (Penguin Classics, 1995). Quotations from essays published anonymously in the Westminster Review and elsewhere are taken from Essays of George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney (Columbia University Press, 1963).

  The most important sources I have used are George Eliot’s own journals and letters, which her widower, John Walter Cross, drew on for the first biography, George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals (Harper and Brothers, 1885). They have subsequently been edited in more scholarly fashion, and these are the editions I have used. All quotations from the journals come from The Journals of George Eliot, edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Quotations from George Eliot’s letters come from Gordon S. Haight’s nine-volume collection, The George Eliot Letters (vols. 1–7, Oxford University Press, 1954; vols. 8–9, Yale University Press, 1978). Haight included relevant letters of George Henry Lewes and John Blackwood, and several of Eliot and Lewes’s other correspondents; when quoting them I have drawn from his edition. Lewes’s letters have also been collected in The Letters of George Henry Lewes, edited by William Baker (English Literary Studies, 1995). Some of George Eliot’s letters I read in manuscript at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, where I also read Thornton Lewes’s letters, several of which are entirely or partially unpublished. I am grateful to staff there, particularly Timothy Young, curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, who helped me decipher Thornie’s handwriting.

  Other institutions granted me generous access to their materials. I am extremely grateful to the British Library for making the manuscript of Middlemarch available to me; I would like to thank in particular Jamie Andrews, head of English and Drama; Helen Melody, curator, Modern Literary Manuscripts; and Rachel Foss, lead curator, Modern Literary Manuscripts. I am indebted to Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, for permission to quote from George Eliot’s notebook, and for showing me Charles Dickens’s desk. At the Morgan Library & Museum, Declan Kiely, the Robert H. Taylor curator and department head, Literary and Historical Manuscripts, was extremely helpful. At the National Library of Scotland, I am grateful to Iain D. Brown, formerly the principal curator of the Manuscripts Division, and to his colleague Yvonne Shand, as well as to David McClay. At the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, which holds George Eliot’s proofs of Middlemarch, thanks go to Jenn Shapland for her assistance. Hannah Westall, archivist at Girton College, Cambridge, also receives my thanks, as does Elizabeth Adams, librarian of University College, Oxford.

  At the National Portrait Gallery in London, I am indebted to Tim Moreton, Clementine Hampshire, Alexandra Ault, Kristina Macdonald, and Eleanor Macnair. Ali Wells, keeper of Collections (Social History and Natural History) at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, gave generously of her time, as did Catherine Nisbet and Janine Fox at the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery. At the Grolier Club, in New York, where I read the Sotheby’s catalog for the 1923 auction of Gertrude Lewes’s estate, I am grateful for the assistance of Meghan Read Constantinou; thanks go to Sarah Funke Butler for pointing me there.

  IN the Prelude, I cite Virginia’s Woolf’s article about George Eliot that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (November 1919); it is reprinted in A Century of George Eliot Criticism, edited by Gordon S. Haight (University Paperbacks, 1966). Accounts of visits to the Priory, and of encounters with George Eliot, by Elizabeth M. Bruce, Charles Eliot Norton, William Hale White, and Sophia Lucy Clifford are taken from K. K. Collins’s George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections. Fascinating images of the Priory, as well as other locations and individuals important to George Eliot’s story, can be found in George Eliot by Marghanita Laski (Thames and Hudson, 1987). After my encounter with George Eliot’s notebook I learned more of its history from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” Notebooks: A Transcription, edited by John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt (University of California Press, 1979).

  IN chapter 1, “Miss Brooke,” I am indebted to the scholarship of Jerome Beaty, who in “Middlemarch” from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot’s Creative Method (University of Illinois Press, 1960) described the process by which Eliot constructed Middlemarch. Mathilde Blind’s George Eliot (Roberts Brothers, 1889) proved a fascinating source of firsthand accounts of George Eliot as a child; other recollections of George Eliot’s school days, several of them anonymously published in contemporary periodicals, have been collected by Collins. As of this writing, George Eliot’s desk is no longer on display at the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery; it was stolen in 2012. Nina Auerbach’s suggestive comments about Dorothea are in an essay, “Dorothea’s Lost Dog,” which appears in “Middlemarch” in the 21st Century, edited by Karen Chase (Oxford University Press, 2006). George Eliot’s notebook in which she wrote out her scheme for Middlemarch, known as Quarry for “Middlemarch,” is in the Houghton Library at Harvard.

  IN chapter 2, “Old and Young,” I relied upon Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (Vintage Books, 1999) for my characterization of Woolf’s early years; the quotation from Vanessa Bell’s memoir, Notes on Virginia’s Childhood, is taken from Lee’s book. Leslie Stephen’s essay appeared in the Cornhill Magazine (February 1881) and is reprinted in Haight’s A Century of George Eliot Criticism. My understanding of Coventry’s nineteenth-century history is gleaned from Benjamin Poole’s The History of Coventry (D. Lewin, 1852). I referred to A Dictionary of British Place-Names by A. D. Mills (Oxford University Press, 2011), and am grateful to Paul Cavill, of the University of Nottingham, for his further insight into English place-names. Emily Davies’s letters are excerpted by Collins.

  IN chapter 3, I draw upon George Henry Lewes’s diary, excerpted in Haight’s The George Eliot Letters. In Rosemary Ashton’s G. H. Lewes: A Life (Clarendon Press, 1991) I read about Lewes’s first marriage; I also referred to David Williams’s Mr. George Eliot: A Biography of George Henry Lewes (Franklin Watts, 1983). Nancy Henry’s The Life of George Eliot (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) provides a fascinating reexamination of the circumstances surrounding Lewes’s separation from Agnes. Ruby V. Redinger’s George Eliot: The Emergent Self (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975) offers interesting analysis of the family dynamics between the Evans children. In The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Cornell, 1994), Rosemarie Bodenheimer devotes a chapter to George Eliot’s stepsons; her insights have helped me develop my own. Thornie’s portrait is reprinted in Arthur Paterson’s George Eliot’s Family Life and Letters (Houghton Mifflin, 1928). Natal: A History and Description of the Colony by Henry Brooks (L. Reeve, 1876) was illuminating. Marie Sanderson’s letter to George Eliot is in Haight’s edition. Collins cites Charles Lewes’s defense of George Eliot in a letter to the Times, December 27, 1902.

  IN chapter 4, the anecdote about the archbishop of Dublin concealing Middlemarch in his hat is from a letter written by Lewes that appears in Haight’s The George Eliot Letters. The Spectator review published J
une 1, 1872, is reprinted in George Eliot and Her Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews, edited by Laurence Lerner and John Holmstrom (Bodley Head, 1966). Rosemary Ashton’s 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (Jonathan Cape, 2007) gave me insight into George Eliot’s London milieu. George Eliot’s review of Thomas Carlyle’s Life of Sterling appears in Pinney’s edition of her essays; one of her biographers, Frederick R. Karl, notes the consonance between Eliot’s theory of biography and the practice of fiction in his George Eliot: Voice of a Century (Norton, 1995). Bessie Rayner Parkes’s comment about George Eliot’s angelic wings appears in Haight, and I am grateful to Girton College, Cambridge, for permission to reprint it. Letters from Alphonse D’Albert Durade’s haggling over the price of his father’s portrait of George Eliot are preserved in the archive at the National Portrait Gallery. Anne Fremantle’s George Eliot (Duckworth, 1933) provides a perspective upon Eliot’s reputation eighty years ago; Brenda Maddox’s George Eliot: Novelist, Lover, Wife (HarperPress, 2009) does the same thing for our own time. Henry James’s letter to his father is excerpted in Collins, as are the observations of Sara Jane Lippincott, who wrote under the pseudonym Grace Greenwood, of Ivan Turgenev, as reported by Sofia Kovalevskaya, and of Elizabeth Malleson. For a fascinating account of an attempt to identify George Eliot’s painter suitor, see Those of Us Who Loved Her: The Men in George Eliot’s Life by Kathleen Adams (George Eliot Fellowship, 1993). Bessie Rayner Parkes’s essay, “Dorothea Casaubon and George Eliot,” first appeared in the Contemporary Review in 1894. I draw upon Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics (D. Appleton, 1865) and An Autobiography (D. Appleton, 1904). Spencer’s letter to Youmans is excerpted by Haight. Barbara Hardy offers a particularly sensitive and sympathetic reading of Spencer’s motives and actions in George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography. Henry James’s review of Middlemarch was published in the Galaxy, March 1873, and is reprinted in The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, edited by William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (University of Chicago Press, 1986). I have drawn upon Home Life with Herbert Spencer; By Two (J. W. Arrowsmith, 1910).

  IN chapter 5, I cite J. Hillis Miller’s essay from George Eliot, edited by Harold Bloom (Chelsea House Publishers, 1985). I have quoted from an essay “The Building of Oxford Covered Market,” by Malcolm Graham, published in Oxoniensia, vol. 44, 1979. William Wordsworth’s recollection is in Collins. For the life of Francis Pattison I have drawn upon Betty Askwith’s biography, Lady Dilke (Chatto and Windus, 1969). Lady Dilke’s published stories, The Shrine of Death and Other Stories (George Routledge and Sons, 1886), make for fascinating reading. Lord Dilke’s memoir of his wife appears in The Book of the Spiritual Life by Lady Dilke (E. P. Dutton, 1905). For my understanding of Mark Pattison I read his Memoirs (Macmillan, 1885) and drew upon H. S. Jones’s biography, Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Dilke’s unpublished memoirs are cited by Askwith, among others. Haight’s 1974 essay, “Poor Mr. Casaubon,” appears in his volume George Eliot’s Originals and Contemporaries (University of Michigan Press, 1992). Sparrow’s lectures were published as Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University (Cambridge University Press, 1967). A. D. Nuttall’s Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination was published in 2003 by Yale University Press. V. S. Pritchett’s essay on George Eliot appears in A Man of Letters: Selected Essays (Random House, 1985). Mary Augusta Ward’s recollection appears in Collins.

  IN chapter 6, I cite The Diary of Alice James, edited by Leon Edel (Northeastern University Press, 1999). Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay is in A View of My Own: Essays on Literature and Society (Ecco Press, 1982). “How I came to write Fiction” was not published in Eliot’s lifetime; Cross excerpted it, and it appears in full in The Journals of George Eliot. Blanche Colton Williams’s biography is George Eliot (Macmillan, 1936). Remarks by Eliza Lynn Linton and Margaret Fuller appear in Collins. I cite Joel Harvey Linsley’s 1828 publication, Lectures on the Relations and Duties of the Middle Aged. Lord David Cecil’s characterization of Ladislaw is quoted in Haight’s George Eliot’s Originals and Contemporaries; Leslie Stephen’s appears in George Eliot (Macmillan, 1902), a volume in the ill-named English Men of Letters series. James’s comments appear in his Galaxy review. David Trotter’s essay appears in “Middlemarch” in the 21st Century. Several of Eliot’s biographers have noted the parallels between Ladislaw and Lewes, including Ina Taylor in A Woman of Contradictions: The Life of George Eliot (William Morrow, 1989) and Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson, who in their Marian Evans & George Eliot (Oxford University Press, 1952) call Ladislaw “that unfortunate blend of Shelley and Lewes.” Annie Fields is quoted in Collins, as is the anonymous curtain-twitcher. Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (Vintage Books, 1984) remains an exemplary work of sympathetic scholarship and has informed all my thinking about Victorian marriage and not-quite marriage. Robert Lowell’s poem is reprinted in Essays in Appreciation by Christopher Ricks (Oxford University Press, 1996). George Eliot’s translation of Feuerbach is quoted in George Eliot: A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings, and Philosophy by George Willis Cooke (Houghton Mifflin, 1895). Eliza Lynn Linton’s My Literary Life was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1899. John G. Lord’s essay on Eliot appeared in his Beacon Lights of History: Great Women (Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1886). Barbara Bodichon’s letter is in Haight’s The George Eliot Letters, as is Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s. Research into George Eliot’s foreign travels has been done by Kathleen McCormack in George Eliot in Society: Travels Abroad and Sundays at the Priory (Ohio State University Press, 2013).

  IN chapter 7, “The Mill on the Floss”: In Half the Time (Phoenix, 2007) seems mercifully to be out of print. I referred to Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). Benjamin Jowett’s notes on Eliot appear in Collins. The Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone were published by Macmillan in 1905; his review of Cross’s Life of George Eliot appeared in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 17, 1885. Disparaging summations of George Eliot appear in William Ernest Henley’s Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890). George Saintsbury’s observations appear in his Corrected Impressions: Essays on Victorian Writers (Dodd, Mead, 1895). Edmund Gosse’s essay appears in his Aspects and Impressions (Cassell, 1922). Bessie Rayner Parkes’s comments come from “Dorothea Casaubon and George Eliot”; for a fascinating early critique of Eliot’s underachieving heroines, see Abba Goold Woolson’s George Eliot and Her Heroines (Harper and Brothers, 1886). Leah Price writes about the practice of excerpting George Eliot’s wisdom in “George Eliot and the Production of Consumers,” an excellent chapter in The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  IN chapter 8, I am indebted to Stephen Gill’s detailed analysis of George Eliot’s Wordsworthian inheritance in Wordsworth and the Victorians (Clarendon Press, 2001). I referred to The Buildings of Old Weymouth: Part Two by Eric Ricketts (Weymouth Bookshop, 1976). Haight’s essay on Mary Garth appears in George Eliot’s Originals and Contemporaries. The translation of the epigraph from Victor Hugo is taken from the Norton Critical Edition of Middlemarch, edited by Bert G. Hornback (Norton, 2000).

  IN the Finale, I refer to Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One (Harper, 2011). Gillian Beer notes the biblical resonance of the view from Dorothea’s window in Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ark, 1985). I gleaned the history of Shottermill from Shottermill: Its Farms, Families and Mills, Part 2 by Greta A. Turner (John Owen Smith, 2005).

  I am grateful to Daniel Zalewski, my editor at the New Yorker, and David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, for encouraging me to write the essay about George Eliot that led to this book. I am grateful to Sameen Gauhar and Hannah Goldfield at the New Yorker, who were the fa
ct-checkers on that essay, and to Elizabeth Pearson-Griffiths, who was the copy editor. Also at the New Yorker thanks go to Rhonda Sherman, Pam McCarthy, and Bruce Diones.

  I have been extremely fortunate in my editors for this book, Vanessa Mobley at Crown and Bella Lacey at Granta Books, graceful and insightful readers both. Also at Crown I am grateful to my publisher, Molly Stern, as well as to Chris Brand, Miriam Chotiner-Gardner, Maureen Clark, Catherine Cullen, Luisa Francavilla, Elena Giavaldi, Min Lee, Mark McCauslin, Claire Potter, and Elizabeth Rendfleisch. Thanks go to Philip Gwyn Jones, my original publisher at Granta Books, and to Michael Heyward, my publisher at Text Publishing. At Doubleday Canada I am grateful to Lynn Henry, the publishing director, and to Kristin Cochrane. My agent, Kathy Robbins, has been indispensable. I am grateful to her, as well as to Louise Quayle, Rachelle Bergstein, and Micah Hauser at the Robbins Office.

  Rhoda Feng diligently tracked down contemporary reviews of Middlemarch, as well as more recent articles and scholarship. I am very grateful for her assistance. Thanks also to Cathy Tempelsman and to Herman Edelman.