My Life in
Middlemarch
Rebecca
Mead (2014, Crown Publishers)
Rebecca
Mead's book about Middlemarch is also about the life of Mary
Ann Evans, and how she became George Eliot. Delving deeply into
(Evans's) life and (Eliot's) work, Mead stands on the shoulders of
many scholars, while adding cogent observations of her own. She
weaves deftly between the action and characters of the novel, and the
life and times of the author. There's also just enough of Mead's own
history as a student of English literature, as a journalist, and as a
sleuth poring over letters and diaries, and visiting places Eliot
knew. It's all skillfully put together, without a wasted word.
The plot
of Middlemarch is instigated by Dorothea Brooke's high-minded but
foolish decision to marry a much older man, a clergyman and scholar
named Casaubon. Eliot stretches the conventions of the
nineteenth-century novel by making marriage the beginning of the
story rather than the conclusion, as in the works of Jane Austen.
"One thing is beyond any doubt: if this were Jane Austen's
story, the courtship of the blossoming Dorothea by the dry-as-dust
Casaubon would have been a comedy." But something more serious
is going on: "The pages vibrate with Dorothea's yearning for a
meaningful life. Her soul is too large for the comedy of manners into
which she at first appears to have been dropped. She is bigger –
her longings are grander–than the conventional story that others
would write around her."
For a
century and a half, young women readers have vibrated in sympathy
with that yearning, including Mead, who experienced it as a drive to
leave her home in an English seaside resort for Oxford University,
and the unknown adventures beyond. Looking into the letters Mary Ann
Evans wrote in her school days, Mead discovers another such young
woman: "She, too, was waiting for her life to start–not
complacently, or resignedly, but anxiously and urgently....She knew
she wanted something. She knew she wanted to do something. She
didn't know what it was. She just knew she wanted, and wanted, and
wanted."
After her
father's death in 1849, Evans made her way in London as a translator
and writer of critical essays. In 1851, she met George Henry Lewes;
she moved in with him in 1854, though he was married to someone else,
with whom he had three sons. (He also gave his name to two more
children his wife bore by another man. Victorian life could be
complicated.) Lewes encouraged Evans to try her hand at fiction, as a
potentially more profitable line of work, and the world is richer for
it.
Mead
describes how the two supported each other, and how Lewes's sons
became sons to Eliot, who had none of her own. The couple hosted a
regular salon; they knew Thackeray and Dickens, Florence Nightingale,
and the philosopher Herbert Spencer. "Their life together took
its own course, free of the necessity to observe propriety. They read
widely, wrote copiously, talked endlessly." For twenty-five
years, this unconventional menage was, by some accounts, one of the
happiest marriages of the age.
Mead
says, "There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much
as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with
the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree." As a
look into this process, My Life in Middlemarch is a marvel.
Any Good
Books – December 2015
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