My Life in Middlemarch (2 page)

I didn’t go to libraries so much anymore. I’d become a journalist, so rather than immersing myself in books I tended to consult them fleetingly, then shelve them. I read much less for pleasure than I liked, and my grasp on literature—the field in which I’d sought to distinguish myself at seventeen—grew a little shakier every year, like a foreign language I didn’t have sufficient opportunity to speak.

And in all my years in New York, I’d never had reason to go to the rare books collection, a cooled, darkened room lined with glass-fronted cabinets that now a librarian was buzzing me into. I’d requested to see a volume from its holdings, a notebook that had belonged to George Eliot. She started using it in 1868 and made notes there for a few years, precisely the period in which she wrote what would turn out to be her greatest work. “I have set
myself many tasks for the year—I wonder how many will be accomplished?” she wrote in her journal on January 1, 1869. Among those projected tasks: “A Novel called Middlemarch.”

Scholars have cataloged the notebook’s contents, but my reasons for going to spend time with it were not so much scholarly as they were personal, almost mystical. I wanted to know what was in the notebook—but more than that, I wanted a tactile encounter with something that had been Eliot’s, as if the ink and paper itself might reveal something I didn’t already know about her, and about
Middlemarch.

Middlemarch
was one book I had never stopped reading, despite all the distractions of a busy working life. I went back to it as a student: “Discuss George Eliot’s treatment of ‘oppressive narrowness’ and its effect on her characters” was the essay title I selected to answer in my first-year exams at college, where the hard chair and the grand hall amounted to my own escape from oppressive narrowness. I read it again in my twenties, when I was working my way up from an entry-level job, preoccupied by ill-fated romantic entanglements but captivated by city life. In my thirties, trying to establish myself as a writer to be taken seriously, I was struck with new, poignant force by the story of Lydgate—the ambitious would-be reformer who becomes, instead, a society doctor known for a treatise on gout, “a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side,” in Eliot’s pointed observation.

The novel opened up to me further every time I went back to it; and by my early forties it had come to have yet another resonance. In a far from singular crisis, I had recently become consumed by a sense of doors closing behind me, alternative lives unlived: work I might have done, places I might have moved to,
men I might have married, children I might have borne. In this light, a book that had once seemed to be all about the hopes and desires of youth now seemed to offer a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the paths untrodden and the choices unmade.

So why was I back in the library? It was, I suppose, in a bid to become a little less melancholy, a little less resigned. For the past two decades I’d thrived professionally by delving for a few weeks or months at a time into a wide variety of different subjects, many of which it might never have occurred to me on my own to have an interest in. But I was growing restless, and I felt ready to turn my deep attention to something that mattered to me. I wanted to recover the sense of intellectual and emotional immersion in books that I had known as a younger reader, before my attention was fractured by the exigencies of being a journalist. I wanted to go back to being a reader.

Still, being a journalist for all these years had taught me a few things: how to ask questions, how to use my eyes, how to investigate a subject, how to look at something familiar from an unfamiliar angle. What would I find, I wondered now, if I used this experience to read
Middlemarch
differently from the ways I’d read it before? What if I tried to discern the ways in which George Eliot’s life shaped her fiction, and how her fiction shaped her? I wasn’t so naive as to think that novels could be biographically decoded, but novels are places in which authors explore their own subjectivity, and I wanted to think about what George Eliot might have sought, and what she might have discovered, in writing
Middlemarch.

And cloaked in this quasi-objective spirit of inquiry was
another set of questions, these ones more personal, and pressing, and secret. What would happen if I stopped to consider how
Middlemarch
has shaped my understanding of my own life? Why did the novel still feel so urgent, after all these years? And what could it give me now, as I paused here in the middle of things, and surveyed where I had come from, and thought about where I was, and wondered where I might go next?

S
O
here I was, a student of sorts, back in an imposing library after a quarter century’s absence. I took my seat at a carrel opposite a young man who was bending over a work by E. M. Forster, and after a few minutes the librarian returned with a leather-bound volume the size of a slender paperback, which she settled into a book rest.

I opened to the first page, and as I did so I became vaguely aware of a slight scent in the air that was at once out of place and oddly familiar: the smell of a spent hearth. For a moment, I wondered if there could be a fireplace in the adjoining room—a silly thought, quickly dismissed. But then it dawned on me that the smell was coming from the notebook itself.

Glancing at the young man reading his Forster, I inclined toward the notebook and surreptitiously inhaled. There was something there beyond the usual mustiness of an old, infrequently opened book, I was sure—something that smelled like the lingering trace of a fire burning in a long-cooled grate. Perhaps, I quickly said to myself, one of the notebook’s previous owners had shelved it near a fireplace. Since George Eliot’s death it had passed through many hands. First were those of Charles Lewes,
her stepson, and his wife, Gertrude; their daughter, Elinor Carrington Ouvry, had sold it at auction in 1923, where it had been purchased by Walter T. Spencer, a London bookseller who later sold it to Owen D. Young, the diplomat and founder of RCA, whose collection was acquired by the New York Public Library in 1941. The notebook might have sat on a shelf in an ill-ventilated room on either side of the Atlantic. And maybe the smell wasn’t smoke at all. Perhaps it was just the aging pages decaying, surrendering infinitesimal fragments to the atmosphere every time they were opened.

Still, there the smell was. And maybe—just
maybe
—the book had absorbed molecules of smoke from a fireplace at the Priory, the house in St. John’s Wood, London, that George Eliot bought in 1863 and in which she lived with George Henry Lewes, the exuberant critic and writer whom she spoke of as her husband despite the fact that he remained legally married to someone else. Perhaps the notebook—inscribed by George Eliot’s hand and containing a record of her thought and mind—had also been imbued with a trace of her material world, and could lead me back there.

The Priory was a substantial house a few steps from Regent’s Park and close to Regent’s Canal, on a street called Northbank. Eliot lived and worked there until Lewes’s death, in 1878. On Sunday afternoons they opened the house to friends and to some lucky admirers, whom they received in a drawing room decorated with Persian rugs, casts of antique statues, paintings and engravings, and books. She might have kept the volume in her study upstairs, on the first floor, where her desk stood before a tall window overlooking the garden. The room was boldly decorated with green wallpaper, a dado of dull red, and yellow skirting boards
and doors. “Herein were the many wonderful books written,” said Elizabeth M. Bruce, an American writer who visited the house when it was put up for sale after George Eliot’s death, in 1880. “We felt within it as pilgrims at a shrine may feel. We were moved by an impulse to enter with unsandalled feet.”

Or perhaps the notebook had been used in the library downstairs—“a cheerful room like the others, lined with well filled bookshelves,” observed Charles Eliot Norton, an American professor of art at Harvard, who visited the Priory in January 1869. (He noted, irritably, that the house was “surrounded with one of those high brick walls of which one grows so impatient in England.”) Over the fireplace was a portrait of George Eliot by Sir Frederic Burton. The portrait was made in 1865, when George Eliot was in her midforties. Her face is framed by abundant, shiny, light-brown hair, and there is a soft expression in her gray, heavy-lidded eyes.

Norton considered the portrait “odious” and “vulgarizing,” and it is certainly sentimental. Eliot looks wise and beneficent, like the headmistress at a good girls’ boarding school. The portrait seems too respectable—which is how William Hale White, a writer who had known Eliot in her thirties, characterized the first, overly reverent biography of her,
George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals.
That book was published in 1885 and written by John Walter Cross—who was George Eliot’s widower, a man twenty years her junior whom she had married a year and a half after George Henry Lewes’s death and only seven months before her own. White remembered Eliot quite differently, and he gave a suggestive characterization of her. “She was really one of the most sceptical, unusual creatures I ever knew, and it was
this side of her character which to me was the most attractive,” he said. White hoped that in some future literary portrait, “the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot’s entirely unconventional life.”

The Burton portrait, executed in pastel-colored chalk, is lacking in salt or spice, but many who knew her thought it a good likeness. Her mouth is closed and she has a sober expression, although the faintest trace of a smile line can be seen on her cheek. She smiled rarely—“like a fitful gleam of pale sunshine,” wrote Sophia Lucy Clifford, another guest at the weekly gatherings at the Priory, who later became a novelist herself. The thrill of witnessing that smile and hearing George Eliot’s low, measured voice—a voice that many remarked was very beautiful—“was beyond all description, and had the effect of making you feel that there was nothing in this world you would not do for her; and that to be with her, even on one of those rather terrible Sunday afternoons, for a single hour, was a great achievement in your life.”

I paged through the notebook carefully, looking at the hand-numbered pages, their contents carefully indexed in the back. (Why had I never thought to index a notebook? My own organization of research tends to be haphazard and disorderly, like that of Mr. Brooke, Dorothea’s scatterbrained uncle and guardian, who demands of Casaubon to know his method of arranging documents. “In pigeon-holes, partly,” replies a startled Casaubon. “Ah, pigeon-holes will not do,” says Mr. Brooke. “I have tried pigeon-holes, but everything gets mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is in A or Z.”) Eliot had listed the episodes of
The Canterbury Tales,
made notes on Hindu literature, named the colleges of Oxford University. She had transcribed
lines from Wordsworth, Blake, and Spenser, and made notes in Italian on Machiavelli. There were quotations from sacred Jewish literature, the Hebrew letters carefully if inexpertly copied, and I remembered a line from the first chapter of
Middlemarch,
about Dorothea’s unusual hopes for marital life even before she has met Casaubon: “The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.” This wonderful sentence shows Eliot’s dexterity with comedy and with pathos: Dorothea is so wrong, and so earnest, and so completely recognizable in her well-intentioned misprision.

After a while I closed the notebook, but before I left I took one more look around the reading room. In a corner stood a small desk that had once belonged to Charles Dickens, Eliot’s near contemporary. I thought about his wildly popular American tours—draining but profitable excursions into celebrity that were the sort of thing Eliot avoided completely. She never traveled to America, as a literary celebrity or otherwise, though in 1872, when she was in the midst of
Middlemarch,
an acquaintance from New England urged her to visit. She declined, writing, “Boston I always imagine to be a delightful place to go straight to and come straight back from. But the Atlantic is too wide for that.”

I’ve crossed the wide Atlantic many times, and it never gets any easier. In my early twenties, I went home to visit my parents once a year or so, and they would come to see me; in my thirties I would stop off for a day or two in England en route to or from an assignment somewhere more extraordinary—Paris, Mumbai, Tokyo—feeling jet-lagged and glamorous. And then, as my parents became elderly and their lives constricted, I went back more
often, for walks with my mother that would be filled with accounts of doctors’ visits, and dinners at which my father would pour Rioja with an increasingly shaky hand. Five days here, a week or two there: I did not want to stop and count the meager total. When I first left England as a young woman, I didn’t consider that there would be a finite, and unknowable, number of times I would return. Eventually, though, each good-bye came to be freighted with the possibility that it might be the last.

Upon Dickens’s desk was a flower in a vase and a calendar set to the date of his death: June 9, 1870. In the years Eliot lived with Lewes she came to know Dickens socially, and he had been to lunch at the Priory not long before his death. “I thought him looking dreadfully shattered then,” she wrote in a letter afterward. Dickens was a famous writer before she even became a novelist, and he had been an early admirer of the mysterious new author who went by the pseudonym of George Eliot. When
Scenes of Clerical Life,
her first work of fiction, was published in 1858, Dickens astutely wrote to the author via the book’s publisher, John Blackwood, with the sly observation, “If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began.” Eliot’s identity was revealed after the publication of her first novel,
Adam Bede,
in 1859. This time, Dickens wrote to her in person and offered praise in terms that would thrill any writer: “ ‘Adam Bede’ has taken its place among the actual experiences and endurances of my life.”