What Middlemarch can teach us today
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‘She believed the world would be a better place if everyone moved out of their own self-centredness’
New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead was a teenager living in a small English town when she first read George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. The Victorian novel had a profound effect on her thinking, she says, provoking such questions as: How can I become wise? Does personal ambition impinge on one’s duties to others? What makes a good marriage?
As an adult, Middlemarch continued to teach Mead about life, even within the frantic urban confines of New York City. Now she has written a book — My Life in Middlemarch — that explores the life of Mary Ann Evans (Eliot’s non de plume) and the novel’s characters and events. Her conversation with The Star has been edited for length.
Most people who major in English literature at university read Middlemarch but they rarely revisit it — unless they’re watching Masterpiece Theatre. Eliot doesn’t inspire the same devotion as Jane Austen or D.H. Lawrence or J.R.R. Tolkien. But you started reading Middlemarch as a teenager and never stopped. Why?
Middlemarch is one of those books you can read when you’re 17 and make sense of it in a certain way and then you can read it again 10 years later and see it in a whole new light. And 20 years after that it seems to be another book entirely. It has an incredible depth and maturity of vision that grows with you as you age. When I read it at 17, I thought it was all about the trials of young love. When I read it when I was 40, I thought it was about the resignations of middle age.
Is it a woman’s book?
When you first pick it up, it seems to be concerned with the life of a young woman (Dorothea Brooke), in way a Jane Austen novel might be. There is an Austenian touch to that first book (Middlemarch is divided into eight books). But by the time we get to the second book, the parallel character of Tertius Lydgate is given as much importance as Dorothea. Indeed, when George Eliot first thought about writing a story about provincial England, she started with Lydgate. She thought about Dorothea later and knitted the two stories together.
I write about my life in relation to Middlemarch. And of course I identified very strongly with Dorothea when I was young. But I don’t think of it as a woman’s book at all. I hate to think it would be reduced to that.
What parallels in your life do you see with Middlemarch?
The first time I read Middlemarch I identified with Dorothea, partly because she was a young woman of 19 and I was a young woman of 17. We were both hopeful and struggling. By the time I was in my 30s and working as a writer and wondering if I was going to achieve or whether I would end up writing mediocre magazine articles, I definitely saw more of myself in Lydgate. He is the doctor who aspires to make great inroads in medicine and fails and becomes a doctor who specializes in the treatment of gout and rich people’s problems.
People don’t often believe novels have a moral affect on their lives. You say Middlemarch helped you grow up. How?
I don’t mean that it gave me rules to live by. Middlemarch enacts the kind of morality that George Eliot believed in and she tried not to be didactic about it. She believed the world would be a better place if everyone moved out of their own self-centredness into a greater sympathy with those living around them. Dorothea sees only what she wants to see at the beginning, but she moves out of that, she comes through a terrible marriage. Characters in the book learn to see beyond their limited horizon.
What Eliot encourages you to do is to empathize with these various characters in different ways over the course of the book. No one is a bad guy and no one is beyond reproach.
I do believe that fiction has this effect — encouraging us to think beyond ourselves and think about the experience of others.
You travelled to the area where George Eliot lived in England. What did you discover?
She grew up in a little town in a farmhouse outside Nuneaton. The house is still there. It has been turned into a pub with a hideous modern hotel attached to it. It was her childhood home and is now next to a large ring road, so there is traffic noise. And the pub is gruesome. But you can see a trace of what it must have been like when she was there.
And I went to Coventry and her home is still there — it is now a Bangladesh cultural centre. The people there were kind; they let me in and see her study. It was filled with sewing machines that they used to teach tailoring skills to the young Bangladeshi. There was something poignant and interesting about seeing her home repurposed that way. This place is used to teach new immigrants how to support themselves, how to make a life, which is something Dorothea Brooke is trying to figure out in the novel.
At the National Portrait Gallery I visited the portrait of her on the wall, but there were others in the collection that they let me see. There were two other wonderful moments. One was going to the British Library, where they have the manuscript of Middlemarch. That was as close to a spiritual experience as one can get, to touch the manuscript of someone I thought so much about. And I went to a pair of houses that she rented in Surrey around 1870, when she was writing Middlemarch. It was again another wonderful, intense moment of being in the place where she had been.
You mention the oft-quoted phrase of Virginia Woolf, who described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” What do you think Woolf meant?
Woof is not usually quoted in full. The whole quote says “the magnificent book with all its imperfections is one of the few novels for grown-up people.” She writes in a general way about George Eliot’s wordiness, her unwillingness to let one line stand for many. I think what Woolf was trying to say was that the novel doesn’t conclude with a happy ending where everything is tied together and turns out right. It ends ambiguously. Lots of readers are disappointed by Dorothea, the fact she doesn’t do more with her life.
There is this melancholy mood at the end of the book. It feels to me a very true-to-life experience. When I finish reading Middlemarch, I feel uplifted but also I feel melancholy. It holds those two things in balance. I think that is what Virginia Woolf meant.
Mary Anne Evans led an unorthodox life for a woman of the mid-19th century. She lived with a married man whom she didn’t marry. It must have shocked Victorians but she would be very comfortable in our society.
Absolutely it did shock people. She lived a very unconventional life. She probably would have married George Henry Lewes but he couldn’t get a divorce. She did receive a proposal of marriage in her early 20s from someone she quite liked, who quite liked her. But she turned away from that because she didn’t want to give up her intellectual pursuits and felt marriage would end them.
She moved to London and turned herself from a provincial girl into an intellectual. She did elope with George Henry Lewes in defiance of social convention and it cost her greatly in friendships and connection to her family. She made astonishingly bold choices. It’s hard now to understand the boldness it took to do what she did. We can’t even get our heads around how unusual and defiant she was. And I love her for it.
Then she married a man 20 years younger.
There was a lot of gossip about that marriage. She had known him for a long time. His mother had died and some critics say he was marrying his mother. I don’t pretend to understand it, yet when I read the letters she wrote from their honeymoon she sounds joyful and restored.
She had been enormously depressed when Lewes died. It wasn’t that she felt getting married had eliminated that sadness, but she found a sense of renewal in this relationship with John Walter Cross and he seems to have loved her very much and was devoted to her.
How is a book about a Victorian novel going to appeal to readers in North America?
It’s not just a book about Middlemarch, it is a book about the experience of growing up reading and what fiction is. Lots of people have the same sort of relationship with books as I do with Middlemarch. I have a friend who rereads David Copperfield. My husband rereads Proust. My book is for any passionate reader and I don’t feel it’s only for people who have read Middlemarch.
In this era where publishing and book reading are changing so rapidly and ebooks are the latest way to engage readers, how does Middlemarch fit?
The fact the book was set in the 19th century doesn’t mean it can’t feel immediate. I read it when I was a teenager and I didn’t feel it was old or fusty. It is a funny book and an immensely intelligent book. I think, yes, there are fewer book stores and, yes, people have more distractions but I am not discouraged by what I see of people reading. In a way, a book like mine is a testament to the joy of reading a great book.
Eliot’s seriousness as a writer and a woman resonates with you.
She did take herself seriously. And she was earnest. I, too, am earnest in my approach to her. That doesn’t mean that reading books shouldn’t been fun and joyful. Middlemarch is very funny in its observations and its ironies, in pinpointing the foibles and failures of its characters. It is not sanctimonious. Eliot took herself seriously but she wasn’t a prig. I think she had an astute vision of the world and our places in it. Reading her is an illumination for me and other people.
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