My Life in Middlemarch (5 page)

Many of them probably had been presents once. Out came George Eliot’s reticule, a leather-covered case that contained, embedded in blue velvet, a penknife, buttonhook, and crochet hook, all with delicate handles of mother-of-pearl. Out came a pair of ornamental china dogs, King Charles spaniels with superior looks on their faces, which were formerly owned by one of George Eliot’s aunts, supposedly the models for the Dodson sisters in
The Mill on the Floss,
Eliot’s second novel, published in 1860. Out came a soup tureen and four matching vegetable dishes in pale, creamy ceramic, which George Eliot and John Walter Cross received as a wedding gift, in 1880. And out came a portable writing desk, decorated on the outside with gilt and mother-of-pearl inlay, and lined inside with purple velvet.

I, too, was wearing latex gloves, and I gently ran my finger along the desk’s lacquered surface. Nisbet said, “You’d feel you had to write something really good with this.” I thought of a letter George Eliot wrote to Harriet Melusina Fay Peirce, an American activist on behalf of women’s welfare, in 1866, just after the publication of her fifth novel,
Felix Holt, the Radical.
In the letter, she gave a surprisingly unguarded explanation of why she made a late
start in fiction. “I was too proud and ambitious to write: I did not believe that I could do anything fine, and I did not choose to do anything of that mediocre sort which I despised when it was done by others,” she wrote. I imagined her as a stiff, self-conscious, inhibited girl, warily examining herself for signs of greatness, too proud and too fearful to lay paper to desktop and try.

G
EORGE
Eliot’s childhood home, Griff House, is on the outskirts of Nuneaton, and seen from the front appears much as it did when Mary Ann Evans lived there, from the age of a few months until she was twenty-two. It has a handsome Georgian facade of red brick, a steep slate roof, and well-proportioned windows that overlook a wide lawn edged with trees. In an engraving that appears in Cross’s
Life,
the house is half obscured by an exuberant growth of ivy, picturesquely if inconveniently creeping into the rain gutters.

These days the ivy has been removed, and that is the least of the changes that have been made to the home that George Eliot loved. A few years ago Griff House was bought by Whitbread, the hospitality company, which appended a sprawling pseudo-Georgian hotel and surf-and-turf restaurant to the rear of the old farmhouse. In the Evanses’ day Griff was in the countryside, on the edge of the Arbury estate, but now there is an incessant roar of traffic from the highway passing only a few hundred feet away. It could not be further from the sleepier atmosphere of the 1820s, when, as Eliot wrote in the opening pages of
Felix Holt,
“the morning silvered the meadows with their long lines of bushy willows marking the watercourses, or burnished the golden corn-ricks clustered near the long roofs of some midland homestead.”

Taken out of context, such beautifully rendered passages can appear sentimental: Eliot’s meadows were surely sodden with rain and dampened with mist far more often than they were silvered or burnished by sunshine. But the purpose to which Eliot puts her passages of natural description is anything but sentimental. They convey an authentic nostalgia—a melancholy homesickness of the sort that might be experienced by a journeying epic hero, if on a more modest scale. Eliot describes a landscape that was already vanishing when she was writing. During her childhood, Griff House looked out over fields, but within a few years a colliery was visible from its upper windows.

I’d gone to Griff with my notebook in hand, hoping, as a reporter does at the outset of a new assignment, to understand something about my subject by surveying the place in which she’d spent so many years. Visiting the former homes of famous writers tends to be a compromised and often unsatisfying endeavor; by contrast with a painter’s studio, the nature of literary creativity is not easily suggested by the site of creation. While shuffling through such places I start thinking about how much has changed, rather than how much has stayed the same—wondering about how drafty the windows would have been, and whether indoor plumbing had yet been installed. Preservation tends to mean sanitization. “Stupidity of people tricking out and altering such a place instead of letting one see it as he saw it and lived in it,” Eliot once wrote when she visited Friedrich Schiller’s home, in Weimar.

But George Eliot’s childhood home hasn’t been preserved as a monument to her. It’s been almost erased by the present. The ground-floor parlor has been converted into a bar, with an enormous flat-screen television tuned to a satellite sports channel over
the fireplace. In what was once the dining room, there’s a pool table instead of a dining table. Lurid slot machines have been installed on the flagstones of the entrance hall, where a wood-paneled nook that once served as Robert Evans’s office is now a snug little retreat with upholstered armchairs and beer mats on the tabletop.

It felt ridiculous to be wandering these rooms, trying to ignore the glowing fire-escape signs and the soft rock on the sound system, and attempting to imagine the house as it was. But I tried anyhow, and saw glimmers of what Griff must have been. My first evening there, I sat with a beer at a trestle table on what would have been the lawn in front of the house. The sound of traffic carried over hedges, and someone’s phone kept jangling with “The Entertainer,” but there were bluebells flowering under the trees and daisies growing in the grass, as there must have been nearly two hundred years ago.

The upper floors of the house are now private, occupied by the hotel manager and his family, but I arranged to see the attic, to which the young Mary Ann Evans sometimes absconded in search of privacy. Later, she transferred her fondness for that elevated retreat to Maggie Tulliver, the heroine of
The Mill on the Floss
: “Here she fretted out all her ill-humours, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves.”

The attic had been converted into a bedroom since Mary Ann’s day, with steeply sloping walls and uneven floors that were covered with carpet the color and consistency of porridge. Sturdy wooden rafters were coated with chocolate-brown paint. A cob-webbed window overlooked parked cars and the highway and a light-industrial estate beyond. The room’s most recent occupant
had been the manager’s daughter, who was now in her twenties and living elsewhere. A narrow bed was still covered with her pink bedspread, and on top of a laminated dresser stood a ceramic statuette of Tigger from
Winnie the Pooh.
Left behind along with the figurine and the bedding was a slightly melancholy atmosphere of half-formed hopes and enthusiasms. It was a room to look out from, and from which to hope for something more.

George Eliot did not write an autobiography, though she once said she wished she could, telling a friend—with what strikes me as an uncharacteristic overestimation of her abilities—that “she could do it better than anyone else, because she could do it impartially, judging herself, and showing how wrong
she
was.” Her most straightforwardly autobiographical character is Maggie Tulliver, and as a grown woman Eliot discussed with a friend the ways in which
The Mill on the Floss
was inspired by her own history. Everything in the novel was softened, she said; her own experience was worse.

Maggie’s is bad enough. She chafes against the complacency and conservatism of the bourgeois mill-owning family into which she has been born. Her relatives are obsessed with propriety: a great deal of attention is paid in Maggie’s house to having the right linen on one’s table while alive and the right comestibles at one’s funeral when dead.

The child Maggie, meanwhile, is persistently improper. She chops off her unruly black hair in a fit of passion, and she runs away to join the gypsies—occasions for “that bitter sense of the irrevocable which was almost an everyday experience of her small soul.” There is no book that I know of that better captures the frustration of being a little girl who feels she is not being taken
seriously. The single page in which George Eliot recalls the small, penetrating miseries of childhood—when one is left out of a game by classmates, or denied sufficiently grown-up clothing when one’s friends are all permitted it, or when, on a rainy day with nothing to do, one falls “from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness”—is worth a shelf of so-called parenting books on its own, so sharp is its delineation of this forgotten anguish. It concludes with this faultless recommendation: “Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.”

As a teenager, Maggie is tormented by the same urgent sense of longing that besets the heroine of “Miss Brooke,” though she comes from a different class and has quite different expectations of life. “She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel, that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best upon this earth,” Eliot writes of Maggie. In
The Mill on the Floss,
George Eliot presents a natural history of yearning. She shows how Maggie’s longing to be elsewhere and otherwise originates. She shows the soil in which it grows; what nurtures it and what blights it.

When it comes to Dorothea Brooke, however, yearning is a condition for which no originating cause is given. One of the odd things about “Miss Brooke” is how little of the heroine’s personal history is revealed. We learn that Dorothea is of privileged social background, without any “yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers,”
and that she has an extremely comfortable if not exorbitant fortune of seven hundred pounds a year—the equivalent of about three quarters of a million dollars today. But of the parents who left her that fortune we know virtually nothing, except that they died when she and Celia were “about twelve years old.”

I stumble over this sentence every time I read it. How can Dorothea and Celia, who are different ages,
both
be characterized as “about twelve years old” when their parents die? And why is nothing more said about such a significant loss? Dorothea herself is oddly untroubled by the absence of her parents: she barely thinks of them. In the novel’s first chapter, she consents to divide the jewels that she and Celia have inherited from their mother, and her disdain for what she considers the frivolousness of personal decoration is one of the ways in which George Eliot signals her heroine’s unusual priorities. (“ ‘A cross is the last thing I would wear as a trinket.’ Dorothea shuddered slightly.”) When Dorothea finally is enticed by their beauty into accepting an emerald-and-diamond ring and bracelet, she thinks of the poverty of the miners who dug the gems out of the earth rather than of the presumably once-beloved hand they last adorned. The deaths of the Brooke parents are treated with barely more reverence in the pages of
Middlemarch
than is the bereavement of Jack Worthing in Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest
—whose loss of one parent, as Lady Bracknell points out, may be regarded as a misfortune, but whose loss of two looks like carelessness.

Eliot’s reference to the age at which the sisters lost their parents also looks like carelessness: I suppose they could be eleven and thirteen, but then why be so confoundingly nonspecific? (In fact the manuscript of
Middlemarch
reveals that the phrase
referring to these parental deaths was an afterthought, written in above the text.) But it soon becomes clear that the lack of a fuller biographical sketch is not an oversight. George Eliot doesn’t need to provide Dorothea with a fleshed-out childhood, or a detailed history. She comes into the world of the novel fully developed, like a second Minerva.

Or rather, she comes into it partly developed. The only growth that matters is that which occurs within the novel’s pages—the growth that turns her from a prematurely opinionated, occasionally priggish, alarmingly passionate, and inchoately ambitious young woman into something else.

Dorothea has this in common with her creator, though there are important differences between them. Nina Auerbach, of the University of Pennsylvania, has made the persuasive observation that for all Dorothea’s purported longing to be learned she doesn’t make much effort to educate herself, even though she has access to her uncle’s no doubt well-stocked library. Mary Ann Evans, by contrast, was so fervently eager to expand her knowledge as an adolescent that Francis Newdigate, her father’s employer, gave her access to the library at Arbury Hall. (She read up on ecclesiastical history, which she intended to condense into a chart: a
Key to All Mythologies
of sorts.) At nineteen, she told Maria Lewis that her mind was filled with disjointed specimens—“of history, ancient and modern, scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton, newspaper topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry entomology and chemistry, reviews and metaphysics.” She set herself a fiercely demanding curriculum. A tutor, Signor Joseph Henry Brezzi, was hired to teach her Italian; he then started her on German. In another letter
to Maria Lewis she recounted with excitement her discovery of the correct pronunciations of
sch
and
ö,
which she and her correspondent had previously been getting wrong. “Goethe, the German way of spelling which is Göthe, is pronounced as though the former vowel were the French eu in peu,” she wrote, with palpable enthusiasm. Mary Ann Evans was so determined to learn German that she set about doing so without, in all possibility, ever having heard it on the lips of a native speaker. Within a few years she would be the first English translator of David Friedrich Strauss, the German theologian.

I find this diligent effort to become an educated person tremendously moving. In this acquisition of languages it is possible to glimpse the effort that would be required for Mary Ann Evans to turn herself into George Eliot. Years later, a friend from Geneva commented that she spoke French badly, but she knew it well. Once, when she was in her fifties, Eliot urged a German correspondent to write in that language. “I am as quick in reading foreign languages as I am slow to speak them,” she said, wryly. Coming to languages too late for effortless fluency, she set about achieving what she could through resolution and determination. She found an outlet for her hungry ambition by reshaping herself into an intellectual. She turned her yearning into learning.