Subtitled "My Life with George Eliot" this book is part personal memoir, part literary biography, and part literary analysis of Middlemarch and George Eliot's other works. It is structured so that the chapter headings correspond to the names of the Books in Middlemarch.
I have read Middlemarch and found it heavy going but this book has inspired me to read it again.
It's very readable and shows considerable insight into the book. It does the usual thing of trying to equate characters with people (was the then Rector of Lincoln College Oxford whom the model for Casaubon whom Eliot knew?: he had married late and unhappily to a much younger wife, his most ambitious book was never completed and he wrote a book about Renaissance scholar Isaac Casaubon) and fictional places with real places (was Middlemarch based on Coventry where Eliot lived for a while?: it had new hospitals and a new railway station at the right time).
It notes one or two inconsistencies (mistakes?) in the text:
- It treats Dorothea's being an orphan with scant regard and is vague about when they died, saying it was when Dorothea and her younger sister were “about twelve years old" though they can’t both have been.
- It points out that “For all Dorothea's purported longing to be learned she doesn't take much effort to educate herself, even though she has access to her uncle's no doubt well-stocked library.” (C 1)
But it is particularly interesting when Mead makes observations pertaining to the craft of the novelist:
- She sees Middlemarch as Eliot’s “ ingenious revision of the marriage plot. What might happen if, if instead of ending with a wedding, a novel were to begin with one.” (C 1)
- “Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls ... ‘the home epic’ - the momentous, ordinary journey travelled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood.” (C 1)
- Eliot is unwilling "to let one sentence stand for many” (C 2)
- “Eliot’s hold on dialogue is often slack.” (C 2)
- “The explicit intrusion of a narrator’s voice in Eliot's fiction can strike the contemporary ear as old-fashioned.” but Leslie “ Stephen suggests that Eliot's use of the magisterial authorial interjection is one of the things that make her novels suitable for grown up people. ... By directly addressing us, Eliot draws us deeper inside her panorama. ... We are granted a wider perspective, and a greater insight, then is available to their neighbours down in the world of Middlemarch.” (C 2)
- “It is central to Elliot's novelistic intention that the reader understand the unfolding of events from the perspectives of multiple characters.” (C 5)
- “Strange coincidences do occur in real life as well as in novels, but it is in the plot concerning Raffles and Bulstrode that a reader sees most clearly the machinery of the novelist at work.” (C 7)
It was interesting to me at any rate, having lived in Bedford for nearly thirty years, that when Eliot (as Marian Evans) worked as a journalist on the Westminster Review, living over the shop at 142 Strand, London, a colleague and fellow-resident was William Hale White who would go on to become the similarly pseudonymous (but rather less celebrate) novelist Mark Rutherford.
The character of Casaubon is, I presume, named after the scholar Isaac Casaubon who knew James I and is credited with, among other things, dating the esoteric magical writings known as the Corpus Hermeticum, previously thought to date to the time of Moses, to the third or fourth century of the Common Era, as noted by Ross King in his novel Ex-Libris, set at a time roughly contemporary with Casaubon.
Selected quotes:
- “A book that had once seemed to be all about the hopes and desires of youth now seemed to offer a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the parts untrodden and the choices unmade.” (Prelude)
- “Novels are places in which authors explore their own subjectivity.” (Prelude)
- “When I first left England as a young woman, I didn't consider that there would be a finite, and unknowable, number of times I would return. Eventually, though, each goodbye came to be freighted with the possibility that it might be the last.” (Prelude)
- “Once, when given the assignment of writing an essay about God, she [Eliot] sat down and drew a picture of a large, watchful eye.” (C 1)
- “Visiting the former homes of famous writers tends to be a compromised and often unsatisfying endeavour; by contrast with a painter’s studio, the nature of literary creativity is not easily suggested by the sight of creation.” (C 1)
- “Being absolutely sure that one is right is part of growing up, up.and so is realizing, years later, that's the truth might be more nuanced.” (C 2)
- “Only a child believes a grown-up has stopped growing.” (C 2)
- “the always-present threat of futility that looms over any scholarly endeavour.” (C 5)
- “To ... intellectuals of the early part of the twentieth century, Eliot was part of a bygone era that was the better for being gone.” (C 7)
This is a well-written, easily readable yet authoritative, introduction to the work of George Eliot, especially what is regarded as her masterpiece, Middlemarch
George Eliot wrote the following books, reviewed on this blog:
December 2021; 278 pages
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