Middlemarch by George Eliot

I recently reviewed My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, and she inspired me to return – for the third time – to one of my all-time favorite novels: Middlemarch by George Eliot.  Fortunately, on my first two reads, I used two different pencils, so I was able to compare my readings as I went along.

First page of the manuscript of Middlemarch

According to the BBC History Website, George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the leading English novelists of the 19th century.  She was born on November 22, 1819 in rural Warwickshire. When her mother died in 1836, Eliot left school to help run her father's household. In 1841, she moved with her father to Coventry and lived with him until his death in 1849. Eliot then travelled in Europe, eventually settling in London.  In 1850, Eliot began contributing to the Westminster Review, a leading journal for philosophical radicals and later became its editor.  She was now at the centre of a literary circle through which she met George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived until his death in 1878.  Lewes was married and their relationship caused a scandal.  Eliot was shunned by friends and family.  Lewes encouraged Eliot to write. In 1856, she began a series of novels, which proved to be great successes.  She used a male pen name to ensure her works were taken seriously in an era when female authors were usually associated with romantic novels.  The popularity of Eliot's novels brought social acceptance, and Lewes and Eliot's home became a meeting place for writers and intellectuals.  After Lewes' death Eliot married a friend, John Cross, who was 20 years her junior. She died on December 22 1880 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in North London.

Eliot underscored the importance of teaching reading and the humanities when she wrote in a letter to Frederic Harrison the following:  “aesthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity” (593).  This quintessential novel of the nineteenth century conveys, in a wonderfully entertaining fashion, the complex tangled web of love, marriage, and relationships.

My worn Norton Edition has hundreds of passages underlined and annotated.  The attempt to encapsulate this novel in a single passage proves almost impossible.  So, I decided to quote the opening passage, which describes the main character:

“Miss Brooks had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.  Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, -- or from one of our elder poets, -- in a paragraph of today’s newspaper.  She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common sense” (1).

Middlemarch by George Eliot is one of the great novels of British Literature.  Rather than simply read, it should be experienced.  Do not be deterred by its 578 pages.  You will visit Middlemarch and soon return after what will seem like the briefest of vacations.  5 stars

--Chiron, 3/22/14

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

Recently, I mentioned my interest in nineteenth century women writers including George Eliot.  Her greatest work is Middlemarch, the quintessential novel of the nineteenth century.  While reading the book for that review, I came across a book about Eliot’s wonderful tale of life in the fictional town of Middlemarch, something like Coventry, England.

Rebecca Mead is a staff writer for my favorite magazine, The New Yorker.  Eliot’s novel profoundly influenced her love of reading, and, while she admits to slacking off on the amount of books she reads, she still has a special, intimate corner of her mind firmly fixed in Middlemarch.  My Life in Middlemarch examines the qualities of the novel which make it the great piece of literature it has become.  I remember the first time I read this novel, and I immediately became awestruck by the power of the prose, the meticulous detail, and the close bond I developed with the characters.  Middlemarch grabbed me by the lapels, dragged me into the nineteenth century, and introduced me to all the residents there – Jane Austen, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and, of course, George Eliot.

Born Mary Ann Evans to Robert Evans, the manager of the Arbury Hall Estate for the Newdigate family in Warwickshire, in 1818.  She lived a rather unconventional lifestyle for the nineteenth century, and adopted a male pseudonym.  She wanted her fiction to be taken seriously and separate herself from most female writers of the century know for light comedies.  She also wanted to shield herself from criticism because of a long-standing affair she carried on with the married George Henry Lewes, whom she met in 1851.  They began living together in 1854 until his death in 1878.  While many Victorians carried on affairs, Eliot and Lewes scandalized the world because of their open admission.  They considered themselves married for the rest of their lives.  She died in 1880.

Mead focuses on the effect the novel had on her from her first encounter with Eliot at age 17.  She quotes extensively from the novel, letters, and contemporary reviews and comments by those who knew George.  She also explains her philosophy of books, writing, and reading.  Mead writes, “Reading is sometimes thought of a s a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book.  But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.  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 on a tree” (16).  Rebecca mead and I have a lot in common!

Rebecca Mead

One frequent source for Mead is Virginia Woolf.  Rebecca writes, “the early works, Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss, … seem drawn from Eliot’s own rural experience and are peopled with characters so true to life that readers forget they are fictional” (45).  She then quotes, Woolf, “‘We move among them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always with that unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and do, which we accord to the great orginals only.  We scarcely wish to analyse [sic] what we feel to be so large and deeply human’” (45-46).

I haven’t read Middlemarch in quite a few years, but I will get back to it soon.  If you haven’t read it, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch will surely whet you appetite for one of the most noted authors of the nineteenth century.  5 platinum stars.

--Chiron, 2/9/14