My Life in Middlemarch (6 page)

D
OROTHEA
Brooke does not make of herself what George Eliot did. The prologue to
Middlemarch,
which Eliot called the “prelude,” compares the heroine we are about to meet with Saint Teresa of Ávila, whose “passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life.” Now an epic life is impossible, Eliot writes. Perhaps all that
is available for “later-born Theresas” is “a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity.”

Saint Teresa fades pretty promptly from view once
Middlemarch
begins, as a contemporary reader in particular may not be sorry to discover. But it seems that George Eliot had at one point intended that Dorothea would more actively seek a vocation, or at least identify a possible one. According to a schema Eliot sketched out for the novel in a notebook known as
Quarry for Middlemarch,
Dorothea, after being widowed and asserting that she would never remarry, was to declare an intention to “go on some heroic errand of carrying away emigrants etc.”

That didn’t happen. Dorothea’s heroism, such as it is, turns out to be of a much smaller and more domestic kind.
Middlemarch
offers what George Eliot calls, in a wonderfully suggestive turn of phrase, “the home epic”—the momentous, ordinary journey traveled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood. The home epic has its own nostalgia—not for a country left behind, but for a childhood landscape lost. It’s a journey we may not even realize we are undertaking until we are halfway through its course.

When I first read
Middlemarch
as a provincial teenager chafing against the provinces, beginning to discover for myself the difficulties of civilization, I was disposed to concur with the prologue and to believe that Dorothea’s limitations lay outside her—“the meanness of opportunity”—rather than within her. As a young woman coming of age at a moment when legal equality had been won but social equality still seemed some distance off, I
was indignant on Dorothea’s behalf about her limited opportunities and appreciated Eliot’s ironical commentary about women’s lack of rights. (The novel can easily be mined for arch, feminist apothegms, such as “A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”)

But now, when I look at Dorothea again, I don’t find myself regretting her lack of accomplishment, or not exactly. I care less about what she represents as a “later-born Theresa”—bound by her mean opportunities to remain unfulfilled—than I am impressed by the way in which she gives expression to what George Eliot refers to as “the common yearning of womanhood.” This yearning seems to have changed little over the years, even if a girl’s education no longer demands lessons on carriage descent.

As Miss Brooke, Dorothea remains for me the embodiment of that unnameable, agonizing ache of adolescence, in which burgeoning hopes and ambitions and terrors and longings are all roiled together. When I spend time in her company, I remember what it was like to be eighteen, and at the beginning of things. I remember going for my entrance interview at Oxford and meeting with the senior English literature tutor at what was to become my college—a forbidding-seeming Scotsman who, I learned much later, was possessed of a magnificently dry sense of humor and was particularly partial to bright, ambitious, state-school students from the provinces. His study was furnished with low-slung easy chairs upholstered in mustard-colored corduroy; one could either perch on a chair’s edge or sink into its depths. During my interview I shifted uncomfortably between one position and the other while talking passionately about
Middlemarch.
Afterward I
walked across the cobblestones of a narrow lane and stepped onto the wide, lovely sweep of the High Street in a state of exhilaration and anxiety. I felt as if my life were an unread book—the thickest and most daunting of novels—that I was holding in my hands. I didn’t know what the story would be, or where it would lead, and I was almost too overawed to crack its spine and begin.

W
hen Virginia Woolf described
Middlemarch
as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” what did she mean? The observation was made in an essay that appeared in the
Times Literary Supplement
to mark the centenary of George Eliot’s birth, in November 1919. Before writing it Woolf immersed herself in Cross’s
Life
and in the novels—“in order to sum her up once and for all,” as she wrote to a friend, with a note of self-mockery.

The phrase she coined has become the one that is most often used to sum
Middlemarch
up once and for all, but Woolf’s assessment of the novel was more qualified than is usually acknowledged. In the essay, she begins by describing the accomplishment of the early works,
Scenes of Clerical Life
and
Adam Bede
and
The Mill on the Floss,
which seem drawn from Eliot’s own rural experience and are peopled with characters so true to life that readers forget they are fictional. “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 originals only,” Woolf writes. “We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.”

It is in contrast with this sure-handedness that Woolf makes reference to
Middlemarch.
Here is her full characterization: “It is not that her power diminishes [after the early novels], for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature
Middlemarch,
the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

“With all its imperfections.” What are these imperfections? Woolf gives few specifics, though she cites Eliot’s unwillingness to let one sentence stand for many and contrasts it with the delicacy shown by Jane Austen in
Emma.
(“ ‘Whom are you going to dance with?’ asked Mr. Knightley, at the Westons’ ball. ‘With you, if you will ask me,’ said Emma; and she has said enough,” Woolf writes. “Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour and we should have looked out of the window.”) She says that Eliot—the granddaughter of a carpenter, as she reminds us—is out of her depth when it comes to the depiction of higher social strata, and resorts to stock images of claret and velvet carpets. Eliot’s hold on dialogue is often slack. Occasionally, she lacks taste. She suffers from “an elderly dread of fatigue from the effort of emotional concentration.”

According to Woolf, though, these failings are more than compensated for by the pitiful truth that is revealed in Dorothea’s thwarted aspirations. “The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in [Eliot’s heroines] to have brimmed and overflowed and
uttered a demand for something—they scarcely know what—for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence,” Woolf writes. This melancholy acknowledgment of limitation makes the book distinctively appropriate for “grown-up people,” those who are old enough to appreciate the artistic representation of failure rather than success.

But what an interesting choice of phrase it is. “Grown-up people” is a juvenile expression. It’s what children call adults, or how adults refer to themselves when talking to children. (“A merry day for the children, who ran and shouted to see if they could top the wind with their voices; and the grown-up people, too, were in good spirits, inclined to believe in yet finer days when the wind had fallen,” Eliot writes in
Adam Bede.
) It’s not how adults usually speak of themselves, at least not without irony. “Grown-up people” is an expression from the nursery.

In Woolf’s case, this was a nursery on the third floor of a house on Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, where she grew up amid social privilege and intellectual sophistication. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the
Cornhill Magazine,
who had attended Eliot’s Sunday salon at the Priory. Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, had been a celebrated beauty since childhood and served as a model for Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, among other artists of the moment. The Stephen children’s quarters lay above rooms filled with books and hung with art, frequented by cultured people who had an easy familiarity with claret and velvet carpets.

Downstairs, a small sunroom adjacent to the large double drawing room had been ceded to the younger generation. “From
this room too we could spy on the grown-ups,” Vanessa Bell, Woolf’s older sister, once recalled. In this hideaway with a view over the garden Vanessa would paint while Virginia read aloud from the Victorian novelists. “I can still hear much of George Eliot & Thackeray in her voice,” Vanessa wrote.
Middlemarch
may be a book for grown-up people, but it is also a book for precocious girls like the Stephen sisters; and to my mind, Woolf’s use of this formulation has a touch of archness about it, a slight affectation of youthful arrogance. Woolf was thirty-seven when she wrote her Eliot essay and didn’t any longer think of herself as young, but she certainly thought of herself as doing something new in fiction. She had published her first novel,
The Voyage Out,
four years earlier; her second,
Night and Day,
appeared in October 1919. In the essay Woolf expresses her admiration and respect for George Eliot—“We must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose” is its swelling conclusion. But at the same time she positions herself as the clever child, watching quietly from the neighboring room, ready to supersede her distinguished but fatigued elder.

Or perhaps I impute a youthful arrogance to Woolf because I remember what it was to be a young person chafing to compete with her professional elders, instead of being, as I was, subservient to them. In my first job, as a fact-checker at a weekly magazine, I worked with four other checkers, all of us in our early twenties. Our department amounted to a very small pen hemmed in by filing cabinets stuffed with old proofs and bookcases lined with reference books. This was well before the Internet, and we spent long hours on the phone to sources, or visiting libraries to find articles on microfilm. Our desks were jammed close together, piled
high with newspapers and marked-up manuscripts of stories that it was our job to make sure were free of errors.

It was a demanding and stressful occupation. We were blamed if an article was published with a mistake, but, it seemed, rarely thanked when we prevented it. Often we would be there until late at night, long after more senior editorial staff had gone home, and we’d order dinner on expenses from the Italian restaurant across the street and make jokes at the expense of certain writers we worked with. How lazy they were, we’d complain; how badly they wrote. In truth, I was learning a lot from doing this work: seeing how to build a story, discovering where to find a fact. But still, I was eager for my chance to show how I could do it better.

“A
BOUT
his ordinary bearing there was a certain fling, a fearless expectation of success, a confidence in his own powers and integrity much fortified by contempt for petty obstacles or seductions of which he had no experience,” Eliot writes of Dr. Tertius Lydgate in the opening chapter of Book Two of
Middlemarch,
“Old and Young,” which was published in February 1872, three months after the first installment had appeared. Readers of the first volume, including the reviewer for the
Athenaeum,
predicted that “the tale is to centre around a woman’s life.” But they were in error. While
Middlemarch
opens with its focus upon the inward struggles of Dorothea Brooke as she becomes Dorothea Casaubon, it soon expands beyond her. Dorothea is only one element within a much wider social panorama.

Lydgate, at twenty-seven, is fresh from his medical studies in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, and determined to make the
provincial town of Middlemarch the crucible of his own scientific advances. He holds this ambition notwithstanding the already established medical practices of Messrs. Wrench and Toller and Drs. Minchin and Sprague, who hitherto have tended to the health of the community without resort to suspicious modern methods. (Eliot’s thumbnail sketch of Mr. Wrench is evidence of her ability to let one sentence stand for many if she wants to: “Mr. Wrench was a small, neat, bilious man, with a well-dressed wig: he had a laborious practice, an irascible temper, a lymphatic wife, and seven children.” You could learn more about how to write from a description like that—its compression, its rhythm—than in a year’s worth of classes.)

Lydgate brims with self-assured ambition and focus, determined to be above the petty politicking of his elders. A new hospital is opening in Middlemarch, underwritten by Nicholas Bulstrode, the rich, pious banker, and Lydgate hopes that the establishment of a medical school will one day follow. In this anticipated center of scientific enterprise he aspires to identify the “primitive tissue”—the foundational building block of life. He is convinced, Eliot writes, “that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good.” He seems to have found what Dorothea seeks—a cause and a passion to which to devote his life.

Unlike Dorothea, Lydgate has a history, some of it quite vivid, and several pages are devoted to his backstory. While in Paris, Lydgate became infatuated from afar with an actress who was married to a fellow actor; during a performance she stabbed her
husband to death, apparently by accident. Lydgate rushed to the stage to tend to her, and an acquaintance began. When she upped and left Paris he traced her to Lyon, and rushed there with a proposal of marriage. She told him that the stabbing was no accident: her husband bored her, and she decided to dispatch him. “You are a good young man. But I do not like husbands. I will never have another,” she informed the stunned Lydgate, who quickly fled back to his galvanic experiments upon frogs and rabbits, resolved to take a “strictly scientific view of woman,” with ideas of marriage postponed until an indefinite future.