My Life in Middlemarch (33 page)

They went in the first week of May, anticipating a stay of four months while renovations were under way at the Priory. (A new bath was being installed, among other improvements.) At first,
Eliot was slightly dismayed at her new circumstances. A blind was not working in the bedroom; a set of keys was unforthcoming; the housekeeper was painfully slow in her work. The local tradespeople were unhelpful: the butcher did not bring the meat, nobody seemed to want to sell them fresh milk, and eggs were scarce. “An expedition we made yesterday in search of fowls showed us nothing more hopeful than some chickens six weeks old which the good woman observed were sometimes ‘eaten by the gentry with asparagus,’ ” she wrote with arch amusement to Mrs. Gilchrist.

But apart from these minor domestic frustrations there was much to be grateful for. “There is an exquisite stillness in the sunshine, and a sense of distance from London hurry, which encourages the growth of patience,” Eliot wrote. Her letters from Shottermill became increasingly contented. She wrote in the mornings and in the early evenings walked with Lewes under a broad sky across the common, and the book began to fall into place at last.

The countryside “could hardly be surpassed in its particular kind of beauty,” she wrote, remarking on the “perpetual undulation of heath and copse and clear veins of hurrying water, with here and there a grand pine wood, steep wood-clothed promontories, and gleaming pools.” Having once been a girl on a farm, she was able knowledgeably to discuss fruit growth and butter manufacture with the wife of the local farmer, surprising the latter enormously. She came to love the quaint house, with its oddly shaped rooms, its prints of Reynolds and Romney on the mantelpiece, and the effect of afternoon sunshine in the parlor, where, she wrote to Charles Lewes, “The sun is sending yellow and blue patches through our painted glass onto my paper.”

The village of Shottermill doesn’t exist anymore; in 1933 it was officially incorporated into the neighboring town of Haslemere. I went to Haslemere one day in late summer, arriving at the train station that opened in 1859. The railway hastened the gentrification of the area; after the artists and writers came wealthy Londoners, entranced by the area’s rural charms. Those charms were swiftly eroded by the construction of housing to accommodate the employees—gardeners, housekeepers—whose services the wealthy new residents required. These terraced houses look pleasant enough now, with more than a hundred years of accrued attractiveness, but they and the growth they were part of left the old village, with its mills and its taverns and its tannery on the river, utterly transformed.

Brookbank, a pretty house with a shingled facade and leaded windows, is close to the old tannery, up the hill from the river, past the railway bridge. A few years ago, a civic group put a sign up over the door. “George Eliot, Author, 1819–1880, Wrote Middlemarch while living here in 1871,” it reads, with a perhaps understandable degree of overstatement. Brookbank’s current occupants have lived there since the late nineties, and when I visited they served me tea and cream cakes in what was once Mrs. Gilchrist’s parlor. It was a delightful room, with pale yellow walls and two large bay windows overlooking the garden, where shadow was cast by a thick-trunked yew tree that was already four or five hundred years old when Eliot was there. The glass of the windows was decorated with diamond shapes painted blue and yellow, through which the sun cast patches of colored light.

Eliot and Lewes were obliged to leave Brookbank at the end of July, Mrs. Gilchrist having let it to another tenant. But because
the Priory was not yet finished, and because they had been so contented in this quiet corner of the world, they rented another house, Cherrimans, which lay directly opposite, across the lane. This was a more substantial residence that belonged to a local landowner named James Simmons. There was an old half-timbered section, but much of it had been built in the eighteenth century.

The house had a large garden in which Eliot liked to sit and write when the weather permitted, her head shaded by a large deodara tree. One day Mr. Simmons found her there and reproached her for the exposure to the sun. “Oh, I like it!” she said. “Today is the first time I have felt warm this summer.” Most of the time she sat and worked in the parlor, the deep country silence broken only by the rush of an occasional train. “Imagine me seated near a window, opening under a verandah, with flower-beds and lawn and pretty hills in sight, my feet on a warm water-bottle, and my writing on my knees. In that attitude my mornings are passed,” she wrote in a letter. This must be the most vivid picture Eliot ever gave of herself in the act of creativity, and the least anguished. She sounds contented, comfortable, and self-aware. One evening she read aloud to Lewes the pages she had been working on—Book Three of
Middlemarch
—and he declared it splendid.

The house’s current residents had recently restored the verandah according to its appearance in a photograph from the Victorian era, as they showed me when I visited, pointing out the grapevine that had begun to wreath its way around the wooden supports. The verandah borders an elegant living room, from which three French windows face the garden. Two of the windows look over the garden toward the lane, while one faces a lawn, with countryside beyond.

The house’s owners left me alone in the living room, from which I could hear the banging of further renovations under way in the kitchen, where windows installed in the 1950s were being replaced by new ones with decorative cast-iron frames, painstakingly reproduced from a Victorian original. I looked around at the living room windows, under the verandah. The third one, facing away from the lane, must have been the one before which Eliot sat as she wrote the letter. There was an armchair by the window, and I perched on it and looked out over the view Eliot had described as she sat warming her feet.

There was still a stretch of grass and pretty flower beds before me. But I could not see any hills beyond—only a dense growth of trees, like that which could be seen all around the neighborhood. Then I remembered something I had learned from a local historian: that in the nineteenth century, there had been far fewer trees in Shottermill. In those days, the hills had been sparsely covered with grasses and heather. The trees had come later, and were due to changes in the local economy. Partly, their growth was tied to the decline of the broom industry, which had depended upon cutting down birch trees. But a more important change, the historian told me, had been the Education Act of 1880.

The Education Act, which ushered in mandatory elementary school education for all children, was an inevitable consequence of the changes to the political landscape that had begun with the Reform Act of 1832—the transformative event that reverberates through
Middlemarch.
The Reform Act of 1832 led ultimately to the Reform Act of 1867, in which working-class men were given the vote for the first time. These new voters needed an education; as one disdainful parliamentary opponent of Reform put it
to his colleagues, “I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters.”

But when Eliot saw Shottermill, the Education Act was still a decade in the future. When she knew the village many of its young boys were not in school, but were instead tending to the flocks of sheep that grazed its hills—sheep that trampled upon and ate up seedlings before they had a chance to turn into trees. Within not too many years, though, the village children were in school, required to learn writing and arithmetic instead of animal husbandry. Then the sheep left the hills, and the trees were free to grow unchecked.

As I looked out from the window toward the obscured hills, I felt a quiet thrill of excitement at the idea that the landscape itself had been transformed by the reading of books. The trees were there because ordinary children not much older than my late-Victorian grandfather—children close to the age of George Eliot’s baby granddaughter, Blanche—had learned their letters. Some of them would have learned not just to read books but also to love them. Some of those children would have become writers themselves, and so would some among their descendants.

“Imagine me seated near a window, opening under a verandah,” George Eliot had written. And I could imagine her there: I could conjure her more vividly than anywhere else I had pictured her in my travels. But through that window was a larger vista: a landscape changed by books, reshaped by reading, transfigured by the slow green growth.

Many books been written about George Eliot, and I am indebted to the work of many biographers whose scholarship has revealed the contours of her life, the processes of her work, and the development of her thought. I first read Gordon S. Haight’s
George Eliot: A Biography
(Oxford University Press, 1968) as a teenager; it remains indispensable. For readers wishing to learn about George Eliot’s life in greater detail, I recommend Rosemary Ashton’s excellent
George Eliot: A Life
(Penguin Press, 1996) and Kathryn Hughes’s very readable
George Eliot: The Last Victorian
(Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998). Among critical biographies I particularly admire Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s
The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction
(Cornell, 1994), and Barbara Hardy’s
George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography
(Continuum, 2006). As I was finishing this book, Nancy Henry’s
The Life of George Eliot
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) was published, offering a fascinating critical reading of earlier biographies.

Before I began writing this book—but after I had published
an essay in the
New Yorker
about my love of George Eliot—I received out of the blue from K. K. Collins a kind note and a copy of his volume,
George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). This fascinating collection of firsthand accounts of meeting George Eliot has been extremely useful, while its author, Ken Collins, has patiently answered many questions and pointed me to other sources. A number of scholars have graciously responded to my queries both for the
New Yorker
article and for this book, while others have been kind enough to engage in longer conversations with me. I am grateful to Rosemary Ashton, William Baker, Harold Bloom, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Kathleen McCormack, Edward Mendelson, Jeff Nunokawa, Leah Price, and Ilya Wachs. I accosted James Arnett on the subway one day because I saw him reading Haight’s biography; he subsequently invited me to sit in on the classes on
Middlemarch
he was teaching at Hunter College, and I am grateful for the insights of both James and his students. I am in perpetual debt to Roy Park and Helen Cooper, my own former tutors at University College, Oxford.

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.