My Life in Middlemarch

W
hen I was seventeen years old and still living in the seaside town where I spent my childhood, I would go for a few hours every Sunday morning to the home of a retired teacher of English literature to talk about books. She was the wife of an admiral in the Royal Navy and had been enlisted by my school to tutor me, along with a couple of my classmates, for our university entrance examinations.

My town is in the southwest of England, in a mostly rural county that is cut through by narrow roads and hedgerowed lanes that discreetly delineate the ancestral holdings of landed families. The admiral and his wife lived in a village just outside town, and their living room overlooked chalky hills. Here we sat, week after week, reading narrowly but closely: analyzing Metaphysical poets and dissecting tragic themes in Shakespeare. The biggest book we read was
Middlemarch,
by the Victorian novelist George Eliot,
who was born Mary Ann Evans near Nuneaton, not far from Coventry, in 1819.

I had the Penguin English Library edition, a brick of a paperback nine hundred pages long. On the front cover was a detail from a painting of a young woman in a full white skirt and a long black tunic, climbing some stone steps to scale a fence and reach a wooded thicket that abuts a golden hillside. The painting dates from 1839, but the scene looks exactly like a stretch of countryside that lay within five minutes’ walk of my parents’ house.

I was aching to get away from this landscape. Oxford was the immediate goal, but anywhere would do. My town had no colleges, no theaters, no museums. It seemed to me to offer no opportunity to live a cultured, intellectual life, which was what I avidly aspired to do, even if I had only a very imprecise notion of what that might consist of. I noted the subtitle of
Middlemarch
—“A Study of Provincial Life”—and as I looked out of my teacher’s window over hills that were frequently sodden with rain, grazed by forlorn sheep, my home seemed to me barely less provincial than the Midlands of the 1830s the book described.

The novel, which charts the intersecting lives of a number of residents of an English town, was riveting, from the very first sentence of its first chapter. “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress,” it reads, and you know immediately that you are in the company of an unconventional heroine. On that first encounter, I identified completely with Miss Dorothea Brooke, an ardent young gentlewoman who yearns for a more significant existence. This identification was in spite of the difference between our social stations. Dorothea lives at Tipton Grange, a large estate equipped with household staff.
My family lived in a modest house with a small garden, built in the 1950s, and I only had to go back a few generations to find ancestors who had belonged to the household staff on properties like the Brookes’.

Dorothea, who at the novel’s outset is nineteen, disdains the attentions of her neighbor and suitor, Sir James Chettam, an altogether too amiable baronet, “who said ‘Exactly’ to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty.” Instead, she makes a spectacularly unwise marriage to the Reverend Edward Casaubon, a pedantic middle-aged scholar laboring on his notes for an endlessly deferred masterwork with the deadly title
The Key to All Mythologies,
whom she initially mistakes for a sage in parson’s clothing.

Parallel with the story of Dorothea, we have that of Dr. Tertius Lydgate, an idealistic young physician newly arrived in town. He aims to establish a practice along modern principles and to make great discoveries, but his ambitions are fatally curtailed by his marriage to Rosamond Vincy, the willful, empty-headed town beauty. We meet Will Ladislaw, a youth of tempestuous passions, full of high-flown aspirations to be an artist or a poet; a cousin of Mr. Casaubon, Ladislaw is drawn—in the most honorable of fashions—to his cousin’s new young wife, who comes also to depend upon him. We meet Rosamond’s brother, Fred Vincy, the feckless but well-intentioned son of the town’s mayor; and we meet the young woman Fred has set his hopes on, clever, practical, sardonic Mary Garth, the daughter of a financially squeezed land agent. We come to know Nicholas Bulstrode, the sanctimonious, overbearing banker, who insists that others conform to religious principles that—it is no surprise ultimately to discover—he has
not always observed himself. And we learn about the Reverend Camden Farebrother, the humane, generous clergyman who understands the frailties of his flock because, being an occasional gambler and a habitual smoker, he is well aware of his own.

This book, which had been published serially in eight volumes almost a hundred years before I was born, wasn’t distant or dusty, but arresting in the acuteness of its psychological penetration and the snap of its sentences. Through it, George Eliot spoke with an authority and a generosity that was wise and essential and profound. I couldn’t believe how good it was.

And I couldn’t believe how relevant and urgent it felt. At seventeen I was old enough to have fallen in love, and I had intellectual and professional ambitions, just like Eliot’s characters. I was, after all, working hard to get into one of England’s ancient universities, something no one in my family had ever done before. The questions with which George Eliot showed her characters wrestling would all be mine eventually. How is wisdom to be attained? What are the satisfactions of personal ambition, and how might they be weighed against ties and duties to others? What does a good marriage consist of, and what makes a bad one? What do the young owe to the old, and vice versa? What is the proper foundation of morality? I marked passages with a fluorescent pen: from chapter 37, as Dorothea realizes Casaubon’s intellectual inadequacies: “Now when she looked steadily at her husband’s failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness”; from chapter 64, where Lydgate and Rosamond’s marital relations are at their most strained: “In marriage, the certainty, ‘She will never love me much’, is easier to bear than the fear, ‘I shall love her no
more.’ ” These seemed like things worth holding on to. The book was reading me, as I was reading it.

My copy’s back cover cited what I later came to realize was the most celebrated characterization of the novel: Virginia Woolf’s observation that
Middlemarch
is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” I was ready for adult literature. I was eager to become well read. I had not grown up in a house full of books, though I was encouraged to be a reader. My family made weekly trips to the library, and my father belonged to a book-of-the-month club from which he ordered me big, presentation volumes: a compendium of fairy tales, a collection of canonical poetry in which I read the most familiar works of John Keats and Rupert Brooke and Philip Larkin. Because I loved words, the Christmas after I turned eleven my parents gave me a hardback edition of
Roget’s Thesaurus.
My father inscribed it to me, formally, with a fountain pen, while my mother covered the dust jacket with sticky-backed plastic to protect it from tearing.

A few months after receiving that gift I passed the examination to get into the local grammar school, and in my teenage years, literature, no less than pop music or fashion, became a common cultural currency. My friend Sarah, who had swinging blonde hair and long tanned legs, came in one day having discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because of her I read and loved
Tender Is the Night,
and now when I come to Fitzgerald’s description of Nicole Diver, with her brown legs and her “thick, dark, gold hair like a chow’s,” it’s Sarah I see. A quiet, intense girl called Kate whose brown hair fell in a heavy braid down her back, and who seemed weighted with mystery and sadness, urged Virginia Woolf upon me. I read
To the Lighthouse
and
The Waves
and admired them while being sure
I was missing more than I was understanding, which was exactly how I felt about Kate. Someone else came across D. H. Lawrence, and then we all read
The Rainbow
and
Sons and Lovers,
and, of course,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
which was stimulating and perplexing at the same time.

Books gave us a way to shape ourselves—to form our thoughts and to signal to each other who we were and who we wanted to be. They were part of our self-fashioning, no less than our clothes. In my case, these were draping layers of black, antiquated lace and silk acquired at thrift shops, fastened with paste jewelry given to me by my grandmother. I was pale and thin, and ringed my eyes with thick black eyeliner so beyond my budget that I slept in it to conserve my supply, touching it up in the mornings. I inwardly hoped that my dress threw my intelligence into relief.

Though I would not have been able to say so at the time, I sought to identify myself with the kind of intelligence I found in
Middlemarch
—with its range, its wit, its seriousness, its erudition, its deep feeling. I admired the little I knew of George Eliot’s life: her daunting, self-willed transformation from provincial girlhood to metropolitan preeminence, a good story to hear if one is an anxiously ambitious girl from a backwater town. I was intrigued by her adoption of a masculine pseudonym, by which she continued to be known throughout her life as a novelist, even after her identity was revealed early in her fiction-writing career. I knew that some important critics considered
Middlemarch
to be the greatest novel in the English language, and I wanted to be among those who understood why. I loved
Middlemarch,
and I loved being the kind of person who loved it. It gratified my aspirations to maturity and learnedness. To have read it, and to have appreciated
it, seemed a step on the road to being one of the grown-ups for whom it was written.

N
EARLY
thirty years later, I found myself in a marble corridor at the New York Public Library, pressing a buzzer to get into the rare books collection. I moved to New York when I was twenty-one, just after graduating from college, where I had spent countless hours in libraries. As a student I had installed myself for long days of study at an oak desk piled high with books of poetry, novels, and critical texts, my pages of handwritten notes illuminated by a window set with stained glass. The library had been a place for studying, but it had also been a place for everything else: seeing friends, watching strangers, flirting and falling in love. Life happened in the library.