A Ramble in Middlemarch
Book Choice for May 2020: My Life in Middlemarch by R. Mead
At this very moment, I am not feeling creative. Nor witty, clever or smart. I’m tired. Of course I could save this review (in the loosest sense of the term) for later, but also, I can’t. I’m up to my neck in it here, and there isn’t going to be a later. There is only going forward, so, so imperfectly.
Time has passed. It seems that you only need about a week to get over happenings, barring the life-altering ones. I did get over my book hangover, gradually, and lately I have just wanted to read, read, read, which I suppose is a good thing, except I need to be doing so many other, practical, real-world [thesis] reading, so it is probably just a last-chance spasm of procrastination —a vice I have almost conquered, after twenty years of halfheartedly trying. And what’s next Ozymandias? Or was it Alexander? No more worlds to conquer.
While I was coming out of the haze brought on by the absolute gripping-ness of The Mirror and the Light, I tried to nudge myself gently back into listening to my audiobook of My Life in Middlemarch. It was an enjoyable thing, pleasant to have on while cooking, sometimes I wanted to snort derisively and I will tell you why, but overall it was very pleasant. I might even hear it again someday. It’s like listening to a lecture about George Eliot’s life —what would you call that? Oh yes, biography.
You see, she was this passionate, creative, ahead of her time woman (the first two characteristics do not really come across in this book), one of her stepsons was a racist (Oh the times, oh the days—he was also quite a live wire, or as we would say now, a a weirdo). George Eliot was quite ugly and this lost her a potential mate, from this one can only assume he wasn’t worthy (the charms of her face or lack thereof is dwelt on at length, was this really necessary?) but these are the sections that come to mind as not quite satisfactory.
Also not quite satisfactory was the fact that the Audible book at first sounded like it was narrated by a seventy-five-year-old lady with rather a scratchy voice—you get used to it in time but in the back of your mind for the whole experience, you think: How old is this author? When was she in university? From the timeline of her parent’s marriage which she describes at the end of the book, it would seem that the author went to university in the late 1970s (?)
That would make her a member of my mother’s generation, and as I am well into child bearing age, almost out of it, this is indeed going back awhile.
But this last point should be seen as extremely marginal. There was a lot I liked about the book, as I wanted to know more about George Eliot. And, as sometimes can happen with authors, there isn’t too much to say. I mean, she stayed at home all day and wrote. She must have employed servants in order to give her the free time to work but she never mentions them (a housekeeper’s account is mentioned once) and neither does the author. Mead therefore was left to do four things:
- Visit every house, meadow, and unattended post-box which may ever have been glanced at by Elliot (yes, I exaggerate, but only slightly)
- Touch every manuscript ever worked on by Eliot, regardless of where they are housed in the world
- Read every Victorian letter with even the slightest relationship to Eliot (rather you than me)
- Go on imaginative flights of fancy regarding who may have inspired certain characters from Eliot’s oeuvre.
Because I am feeling like a bit of an ass, I’ll start with Number 4. One very long discussion (or was it a chapter? the audible version only has numbers not chapter titles so we will never know) centered on whether a real-life Oxford don (actually a Rector) and his young, beautiful, vivacious, religious wife could have provided the inspiration for the characters of Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch. The lives, loves, and letters of these two real-life people are completely (I mean it) rehashed, and one visit–ONE summer’s afternoon visit of George Eliot to their residence for tea is reconstructed in FORENSIC detail. Oh my goodness, it did seem a bit to me like “filler” even though there are certain parallels (the Rector’s wife was after all a woman, and beautiful, and pious. What more evidence do you need?) Well, a lot actually, as Mead ends this very, very long imaginative foray with “but it could all just be a coincidence and the Rector, while significantly older than his wife, doesn’t seem to have been an extremely priggish dried old prune” (I’m paraphrasing).
Umm, thank you. I enjoyed that I guess?
But as I don’t really care about Dorothea, as everyone seems to, so keen to cast themselves as a spiritually-inspired, strikingly beautiful woman who goes on to do very average things–ho-hum. I’m team Casaubon as you all well know. He’s my spirit animal.
By the way, here is a picture of me taken during quarantine:
Points 2 and 3 of the above list are quite self-explanatory, Mead seems to have touched ALL the papers, even the creepy ones written by a superfan of Eliot’s that for some reason were saved for the last chapter of the book. Basically, Mead, who seems to live in New York and England at the same time, has retraced the steps to every.single.landmark ever associated with George Eliot –“perhaps, she thought to herself, “what a superbly decent Chinese laundry” as she strolled under the majestic Elms, now the site of several trashcans, in Beromseypudding Middlesborough Londonstreet.” (Again, I’m paraphrasing).
Actually, I did kind of laugh when, after a truly good chapter on George Eliot’s marriage, which struck me with its sustained, and mutually sustaining, passion—-which is not at all a small victory! Well, the MAJOR thing about their marriage was that they weren’t—yes, they were Not Married, In the Victorian Era. Because they didn’t give a damn, they just loved each other, wow, I found it truly inspirational. There was so much social pressure, and Georgie just let the false friends fall away. Less people to call on her to make annoying chit-chat probably.
So the author goes to visit the scene of this twenty years of domestic bliss and ends up just rambling around a tiled subway station, romantically musing whether G.E’s garden once ran down to the very edge of the wastewater stream. I was on a train and I almost screamed with laughter. Oh my god, thank you, I wasn’t expecting such gifts.
This memoir was so detailed for several reasons: the author obviously has an academic bent and takes that research-process seriously. All the imaginative fictions are as well-founded as they could be, and also, in very rare moments, supplemented by her own experiences, for example, as a mother, she can understand that having several boys in the house can be a rather smelly experience. (Yeah, these asides are not always the deepest. The author seemed to want to preserve her professionalism and thus remained distant). Actually once she was like “I had a lover,* who wrote me poetry, probably he would have been attracted to Beaudelaire over Wordsworth” (or some such high-register tosh). I’m sorry, I have spoken Oxford in the past and even I don’t….
Mainly, this memoir was so detailed, and extracted every ounce of water it could from various scattered materials, because it was the product of obsession. And we should all be so lucky to be so obsessed with something—a thing and not a person. A thing–better yet, a work of art, or a thought/theme— that runs with you through your whole life and changes, sometimes with you, sometimes away from you, or you turn away from it only to rediscover it cropping up later. And that is what this book is—a love affair, that when communicated turns rather dryer and a teensy bit ludicrous to the hearer.
It’s not a must, at all. But it is rather lovely, if you want to hear a million fond remembrances of dear ideas fondly recalled. While none of G.E’s other works particularly grab me, I agree that Middlemarch is essential reading once in your life, but at least for me, who does not doubt its rich humanism, it is not a lifestyle.
Some other star guides me.
*Not a boyfriend. A lover. Not a one-time canoodle. A lov-AHhhh!
