Middlemarch in My Life
I have just devoured or rather inhaled in two deep gulps The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. It is a book I wish I had written, or could have written or had thought of writing. Because this is not just a critical essay on the book. This is the book of a woman just as obsessed by Middlemarch as I have been throughout my life.
I am fond of urging my friends to read Middlemarch by assuring them ‘it’s the Bible, it’s the Talmud, the E-Ching, the answer to all life’s questions.’ And they smile and promise they will read it and almost never do. Probably for most people it is just a heavy Victorian novel and many who read it will be tempted to skip the author’s asides which are to me the most vitally important aspect of the book. Those witty, sympathetic, and ethical passages have provided me with a moral compass since I first read the book, coincidentally at the same age as did Ms Mead, at seventeen. It is my contention that no one who has completely understood and internalised (horrible word but I can’t think of a better one) Middlemarch can lead a dishonourable life. Or at least cannot do so without self-knowledge and self-loathing.
What I find uncanny are the many points of similarity between Ms Mead and myself. Although I’m nearly twenty years older, our experience has been remarkably parallel. We both first read the book at seventeen; we both became writers; we both moved to New York as young women; we both married scholarly American men and we both became the mother of sons. I have to ask myself if there is some strange combination of characteristics that we share or is it all coincidence? Well, obviously the sex of our children is a 50/50 chance but is there some inherent trait that makes a love of Middlemarch in particular (Eliot’s other books leave me cold) an impetus to cross the Atlantic? Does a hearty dislike of Mr Casaubon make one more likely to marry a charming American academic? It’s all very puzzling.
Ms Mead identifies with the heroine of the book, Dorothea. I never have. I recognised myself as that ‘brown patch’ Mary Garth very early on. We can all find ourselves and our loved ones in Middlemarch. When I was exhorting my husband, a modernist, to read it, I used to tell him there was a character in the book who portrayed him exactly. He eventually read it and said yes indeed, he recognised himself as Fred Vincy. Except that I had meant Dr Lydgate. But then Fred eventually marries Mary, so perhaps our marriage was made, not in heaven, but in Middlemarch.
Middlemarch (Penguin Classics)
The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot
My Life in Middlemarch