Do you need to have read George Eliot’s Middlemarch to be a fully realised human being? Rebecca Mead, author of The Road to Middlemarch, believes so — and says she is barely exaggerating in making her claim.
Mead is a British-born author and New Yorker journalist whose love affair with George Eliot’s famed work began when she was 17.
She’s read Middlemarch every five years or so since then and says it has helped her to identify what really matters in life.
In getting to know the novel’s diverse cast of characters — and in particular its heroine Dorothea Brooke — she has better come to know herself.
Mead is not alone in her praise for the book that puts thorny themes like love and marriage and ambition and duty under the microscope and employs drama and humour, sympathy and wisdom to sharpen the focus.
Virginia Woolf described George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a magnificent book and “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”.
Zadie Smith, in an insightful essay about George Eliot in her recent book Changing My Mind, says, “Middlemarch is a dazzling dramatisation of earthly human striving of conatus in combination.”
Mead says, “Just about every serious writer I know — of fiction or of nonfiction — loves Middlemarch.”
Julian Barnes and Martin Amis say it is probably the greatest novel ever written in English.
Mature perspective
The secret behind the novel’s power lies, in part, as Woolf intimates, in the maturity of authorial perspective.
As Smith writes:
“The young Eliot could exult in only the perfect truths we glean from certain books in our libraries; the mature Eliot had learned to have sympathy for the stumbling errors of human beings.”
Eliot was in her 50s when Middlemarch was published in 1871-72 in serial form. It appeared as a single volume in 1874 and sold well.
Eliot had started life in 1819 as Mary Ann Evans in the Midlands in the UK — later adopting the first name of Marian.
She was from a strong Christian family and the renunciation of her faith in her teenage years was pivotal.
Mead writes: “The loss of faith that she underwent in Coventry was the beginning of a life-long intellectual process of separating morality from religion — of determining how to be a good person in the absence of the Christian God.”
Eliot was a remarkable woman said to be the intellectual equal of the celebrated politicians and writers of her day.
She became the editor of a leading journal for philosophical radicals called the Westminster Review and from this she became the centre of a literary circle. Through this circle, at the age of 32, she met George Henry Lewes with whom she lived but never married.
Eliot’s love had previously been spurned by Herbert Spencer who, among other things, was a prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. It seemed Spencer was unable to fall in love with a plain woman even if she was finely matched emotionally and intellectually!
Eliot’s relationship with Lewes was considered scandalous as Lewes was still married to the mother of his three sons and could not divorce her.
Although Eliot’s family and friends shunned her, she found great sustenance in her relationship with Lewes and much joy in being a stepmother to the boys.
Lewes is said to have been the model for Will Ladislaw, the man Dorothea falls in love with after her unhappy marriage to Edward Casaubon ends with his death.
Humane characters
At a time when women were discouraged from writing, Marian Evans used the pen name George Eliot so her works would be taken seriously.
Middlemarch was Eliot’s seventh novel.
Through multiple voices and plotlines, Eliot highlights issues of the era like the Great Reform Bill, the beginning of the railways and the death of King George IV. The novel also probes political reform, the status of women, medical science, religion, education and self-interest.
But what is it about the characters in Middlemarch that makes them so moving to readers almost a century-and-a-half after they were created?
Smith thinks the characters stir us because they seem so humane.
“Eliot dissects the degrees of human velleity, finding the conscious action hidden within the impulse hidden within the desire hidden within the will tucked away inside the decision we have obfuscated even from ourselves.”
Mead says Eliot is fun (at least as fun as Jane Austen) and remarkably intelligent — “and the intelligence shines through despite the distance in time”.
She also says Eliot insists on taking moral questions seriously and considering them in their complexity. This means Middlemarch is not a book for those who like easy answers or their novels tied off neatly.
“The pathos of Dorothea’s lack of triumph is a huge part of the power of the book. When I finish reading Middlemarch … I have a sense of the enormous challenge of living a good life, the ever-present possibility of making mistakes. That to me is where the greatness of the book lies.”
Mead also praises Eliot’s ability to illuminate the diverse kinds of love people might encounter within a lifetime — the love of parents for children, the love of friends, the evolving love of longstanding partners and the unexpected love found late in life that can be so comforting.
Mead says the necessity of growing out of self-centredness is the theme of Middlemarch.
She describes how Casaubon, for example, “is crippled by caution and undone by close-heartedness … a frail creature tortured by his own sense of his insufficiencies, whose soul was ‘too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight’.”
Mead says Eliot was once asked who she had in mind as the original for Casaubon. “In response she silently tapped her own breast. And as I [Mead] read Middlemarch in middle age, his failures and fears no longer seem so remote or theoretical to me as they once did, when I was in my Dorothea youth.”
Wrestling with questions
In The Road to Middlemarch, Mead blends accessible scholarship with human sympathy to good effect.
She deftly weaves aspects of her own life with the novel’s themes along with fascinating details from Eliot’s life.
Mead wrestles with questions similar to those faced by Eliot’s characters: What makes a good marriage? Where does ambition fit with our duties to others? What should morality be based on? How should we behave towards our fellow creatures?
Her later in life reading of Middlemarch helped her to see how Eliot’s experience of “unexpected family” was woven deep into the fabric of the novel, “not as part of the book’s obvious pattern, but as part of its tensile strength”.
Through this Mead realised that, although she might both succeed and err in being a stepmother and mother, there were riches to be gained through opening her heart wider.
Mead writes: “A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book.”
As The Road to Middlemarch shows so beautifully, great novels resonate profoundly through all life’s stages and engaging with them as deeply as we can brings great fulfilment.
[...] I have to say that George Eliot wasn’t my favourite author at uni, but my cousin MLJ and Rebecca Mead have different views http://www.abiggerbrighterworld.com/why-does-middlemarch-still-move-us/ [...]