I gave you a brief break from our ongoing journey in pursuit of My Life in Middlemarch. That break is now over. Get back to My Life in Middlemarch, slatterns. No! We’ll go into it easily, I’d love to just talk about the first three chapters. Let’s!
Now, last time, we talked about gawky, bookish adolescences. (Which may not have been all of you, incidentally! Perhaps some of you were poised and stylish and enjoyed drinking malteds with a bevy of would-be lovers and hangers-on.)
I’m excited, though, to get into one of my very favourite parts of My Life in Middlemarch, which is the story of George Eliot herself. Her life is utterly and completely fascinating, and I hope you felt the same way.
The biographical portion of the book begins, for all intents and purposes, with the 22 y/o Eliot making one of the defining choices of her life, and I love how Mead handles it stylistically, first talking about the church interior at Coventry where Eliot and her widowed father had moved in 1841, and a particularly grim 15th century nave painting that set the tone for churchgoers:
The image of the ultimate judgment being delivered upon those ordinary, anonymous people would have confronted Eliot every Sunday, when she entered the church on her father’s arm.
Until that Sunday when she didn’t. On the second day of January in 1842, not even a year after moving to Coventry, Mary Ann Evans declined to accompany her father to church. Two weeks later she again did not attend the service. “Went to church in the forenoon Mary Ann did not go to church,” Robert Evans wrote in his diary.”
I love the quiet cataclysm there! And what’s wonderful, too, in these passages, is how Mead returns to her idea that Middlemarch is, in some ways, a book about young people for older people, in her decision to move swiftly to Eliot’s own reflections on this time in her life, even though Mead finds them overly self-critical:
In 1869, the year she started writing the story that would end up being Book Two of Middlemarch, Eliot described her conflict with her father to Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College, the first women’s college at Cambridge. She said that she regretted how she had conducted herself during those months, when tensions were so great between herself and her father that instead of speaking directly to him she was reduced to writing from her study upstairs to his office downstairs. Davies recalled that Eliot “dwelt a little on how much fault there is on the side of the young in such cases, of their ignorance of life, & the narrowness of their intellectual superiority.”
Oh, God, nothing ever changes. Surely none of us feel bad about THAT sort of thing, right? And we haven’t even discussed her “marriage”/partnership to Lewes yet! Please talk about George Eliot’s life with me.
Tags: books, george eliot, middlemarch book club, my life in middlemarch, rebecca mead
I just started reading Middlemarch the other week. I am about half way through it, reading it interspersed with ‘easier’ books.
I am enjoying the complex and sympathetic treatment of women who marry for the ‘wrong’ reasons, and how it affects them, and the examination of how young women are taught to rpize a certain way of thinking and taught that they should be utterly delf-denying as per their husbands wishes and this is not intelligent or well-thought-out so I’ll s op.
I started reading Middlemarch out of an urge for a sense of accomplishment — it’s quite a long book, and Everest was way too expensive. I ended up liking it very much.
I just started reading Middlemarch the other week. I am about half way through it, reading it interspersed with 'easier' books.
I am enjoying the complex and sympathetic treatment of women who marry for the 'wrong' reasons, and how it affects them, and the examination of how young women are taught to rpize a certain way of thinking and taught that they should be utterly delf-denying as per their husbands wishes and this is not intelligent or well-thought-out so I'll s op.
One of my profs said that George Eliot’s relationship gave her hope for her own love life because it was good to know that such a plain woman could still find love. Ugh. I am still shaking my head over Henry James’ and Herbert Spencer’s reactions to George Eliot’s physiognomy.
Although I guess one consolation of being plain is that George Eliot didn’t marry Spencer and isn’t now forever linked with social darwinism.
One of my profs said that George Eliot's relationship gave her hope for her own love life because it was good to know that such a plain woman could still find love. Ugh. I am still shaking my head over Henry James' and Herbert Spencer's reactions to George Eliot's physiognomy.
Although I guess one consolation of being plain is that George Eliot didn't marry Spencer and isn't now forever linked with social darwinism.
Oh, Dorothea.
Over Easter weekend, I listened to the beautifully-read audiobook of “My Life In Middlemarch.” It really deserved slower, more attentive consideration than what I gave it but it was still more than worthwhile. (No, I have not actually read Middlemarch yet, but now that I might actually be grown folk I might give it another try. Junior year of college was not the time to start the book.)
When Lewes came into the picture, I wanted to stand up and cheer. Mead writes about the jealous, Jeannie-Buehleresque neighbors making snarky comments about Lewes and Eliot out for a stroll with their little dog. In any other circumstance this would have enraged me, but you know that Lewes and Eliot DID NOT GIVE A SHIT. So HA NEIGHBORS, go back to your chilly official marriages, and make sure to bring a hot water bottle.
Dream casting: Bob Hoskins in his forties as Lewes and Emma Thompson in super-frump mode as Eliot. Yes, it will never be, but that’s why it’s dream casting.
I loved that detail about the neighbor commenting on them walking the dog. So very obviously sour-grapey. HA NEIGHBORS indeed.
Yay, MLIM is back!
The thing that strikes me about George Eliot’s early religiosity and then her principled reaction of same is that she clearly always had a huge wealth of both intellectual and moral energy, and that Christianity and thinking about Christianity was a way of channeling that energy in the 1830s when she was a teenager in a way that is mostly hard for us to realize now. (Until it wasn’t.) Mead makes a big deal about how priggish her early letters are, and that’s sort of true, but they’re also really charming in their earnestness and their desire to understand things about how the world is and about how people are & should be. Being religious and being Serious about Religion let her explore her ideas about morality but it also let her learn how to be intellectual, and the latter isn’t something that most of us associate with religion much anymore.
I was also interested in Mead’s ideas about Caleb Garth as a stand in for GE’s father – that’s obviously true, but Mead seemed to think that Caleb is a more idealized character than I took him to be. There was a lot that was critical in the portrayal of Caleb as well.
I don’t have the book on me but I took a few notes when I was reading it, and one of them says “Bodichon quote on p 34!!” so apparently I liked that as well…
One of the many things I’ve learned from My Life in Middlemarch: if things had gone just slightly differently, George Eliot might have wound up married to a man who liked to wear a giant knitted onesie. Which maybe he wouldn’t have done if he’d married her, but still. She dodged a bullet!
I was rooting SO HARD for Eliot and Lewes all through this book. And I loved the contrast between Dorothea’s honeymoon from hell and Eliot’s happy not-exactly-honeymoon trip with Lewes.