My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead

George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans, chose a male pseudonym when she began writing fiction, including  Middlemarch.  I've not read the novel, but I've watched it on Netflix, along with Daniel Deronda.   I've been too engrossed in Rebecca Mead's book (an excellent book for English major types like me) to read the actual novel, but I'm about to start.

Some of the George Eliot's English contemporaries (and near contemporaries) were the Bronte sisters,  Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale,  Henry James, and William Wordsworth, grandson of the poet by the same name.

I like knowing stuff like that.  In my school days, we read authors without any sense of how they fit together in time and place.

It's fascinating to read in Mead's book about the social and intellectual connections among those who were living and writing at exactly the same time, or close to the same time, in Victorian England.   Here's a tidbit:

According to Henry James, who called on her in 1869, when he was a handsome twenty-six-year old, "She is magnificently ugly--deliciously hideous....She has a low-forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth...."

Later, he writes: "Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her."

Herbert Spencer, whom she loved and hoped to marry, who enjoyed her company as a friend, ate alone in a dining room so as not to "face someone so ugly over the dining table." 

In his old age, however, Spencer took credit for having encouraged her to write fiction.  Rebecca Mead writes:  "She did not find her fictional voice until she was loved by someone who saw beyond her capacity for brittle cleverness--in whose company she did not feel the need to be on her emotional guard." She did have a long-standing happy love life with George Lewes after being rejected by Herbert.

She has been described as personable, brilliant, unconventional, ferocious, and physically unattractive.  Before she began writing fiction, she often used her pen (as James did) writing snarky essays about other writers and public figures.

Rebecca Mead, however, traces Eliot's changes as a writer: she came to her full maturity and compassion as a writer when she began writing fiction.   Middlemarch is considered one of the greatest novels of English literature.

I'll close with Mead's words:

"Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book.  But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.  There are books that seem to comprehend us jus as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree."