
My first foray into George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) was when I had to read Silas Marner as part of my O-level course in my mid-teens. While even then I recognised her writing as more refined and indeed charming (not that I would have used the word ‘charming’ then) than other Victorian novelists I had read, it did not change my life in any way.
Then came my A-levels and I had to read what initially seemed like the impossibly long Middlemarch. As I ploughed through the first hundred pages, dismayed that there were another six hundred to go, something happened. It happened gradually, perhaps taking a further hundred pages, but it finally dawned that I was enjoying the best novel I had ever read. By the end of it I was fairly sure that it was also probably the best novel I ever would read. Nothing has happened since to make me change that opinion.
The story itself, which has four interconnected pairs of main characters and a host of supporting ones, could easily be dismissed as a soap, which in a sense it was. So was much of Dickens. Yet Eliot goes deeper into the souls of her subjects than any major novelist until then. In this novel 'stream of consciousness' was born, those inner thoughts and fears that make it impossible not to have some sympathy even with seemingly unattractive people. We recognise their inner turmoil, their fear, even their loneliness, as our own. It is not done perfectly – later writers such as Anita Brookner were to build on it (albeit with less interesting characters) and bring it closer to perfection, but it was Eliot who broadened the horizon for future English novelists.
The idealistic young Dorothea Brooke has to be seen as the main character, followed closely by her love interest, Will Ladislaw (who soon edits a newspaper supporting electoral reform), but by the time she realises she loves him she is already married to the much older, ailing, humourless and seemingly asexual academic Casaubon, whose tragedy lies in his realisation that the scholarly work to which he has devoted his life has been disproved by others and can never be finished. Casaubon fortuitously dies half way through, though his will stipulates that Dorothea can only inherit his estate if she does not marry Will. Meanwhile Dorothea is working closely with Lydgate, an equally idealistic young doctor, to help enlarge the local hospital, a project to which she gives generously. While not engaged in trying to set up this early local health service, Lydgate courts and marries the spoilt and frivolous Rosamond Vincy, who in her own pretty way is one of the most grotesque women in English literature. She does not understand her husband’s idealism, gets him into debt with her extravagance and eventually succeeds in ensuring he reverts to rich patients so that he can keep her in the manner she expects. Then there is Bulstrode, a pious banker and leading light in the community (or a saintly killjoy, as another character describes him). Yet Bulstrode has a dark secret from his past, one that threatens to destroy his reputation and eventually explodes like an 1830s Watergate (for the story is set forty years earlier than its publication, so it was an historical novel even when it was written).
But haven’t we seen many similar stories since? Haven’t we seen many TV series with similar characters? Probably, but we have never seen the inner workings of their minds like this, and they certainly hadn’t seen it in the early 1870s when Middlemarch was published. George Eliot pushed the boundaries and, although she did not know it, wrote a Twentieth Century novel when the Nineteenth Century was still only two-thirds of the way through.
I remember the exact point when, at seventeen, I realised this was a novel like no other. It’s the part where Harriet Bulstrode (the polar opposite of Rosamond) finds out about her husband’s shady earlier life which is now becoming public knowledge.
She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently: the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him. Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited dishonour as bitter as it could be to any mortal.
But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly cherished her - now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach. But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob
out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life. When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation. She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap…
If ever our own relationships are going through a rocky patch, we could probably do worse than read that.
Then came my A-levels and I had to read what initially seemed like the impossibly long Middlemarch. As I ploughed through the first hundred pages, dismayed that there were another six hundred to go, something happened. It happened gradually, perhaps taking a further hundred pages, but it finally dawned that I was enjoying the best novel I had ever read. By the end of it I was fairly sure that it was also probably the best novel I ever would read. Nothing has happened since to make me change that opinion.
The story itself, which has four interconnected pairs of main characters and a host of supporting ones, could easily be dismissed as a soap, which in a sense it was. So was much of Dickens. Yet Eliot goes deeper into the souls of her subjects than any major novelist until then. In this novel 'stream of consciousness' was born, those inner thoughts and fears that make it impossible not to have some sympathy even with seemingly unattractive people. We recognise their inner turmoil, their fear, even their loneliness, as our own. It is not done perfectly – later writers such as Anita Brookner were to build on it (albeit with less interesting characters) and bring it closer to perfection, but it was Eliot who broadened the horizon for future English novelists.
The idealistic young Dorothea Brooke has to be seen as the main character, followed closely by her love interest, Will Ladislaw (who soon edits a newspaper supporting electoral reform), but by the time she realises she loves him she is already married to the much older, ailing, humourless and seemingly asexual academic Casaubon, whose tragedy lies in his realisation that the scholarly work to which he has devoted his life has been disproved by others and can never be finished. Casaubon fortuitously dies half way through, though his will stipulates that Dorothea can only inherit his estate if she does not marry Will. Meanwhile Dorothea is working closely with Lydgate, an equally idealistic young doctor, to help enlarge the local hospital, a project to which she gives generously. While not engaged in trying to set up this early local health service, Lydgate courts and marries the spoilt and frivolous Rosamond Vincy, who in her own pretty way is one of the most grotesque women in English literature. She does not understand her husband’s idealism, gets him into debt with her extravagance and eventually succeeds in ensuring he reverts to rich patients so that he can keep her in the manner she expects. Then there is Bulstrode, a pious banker and leading light in the community (or a saintly killjoy, as another character describes him). Yet Bulstrode has a dark secret from his past, one that threatens to destroy his reputation and eventually explodes like an 1830s Watergate (for the story is set forty years earlier than its publication, so it was an historical novel even when it was written).
But haven’t we seen many similar stories since? Haven’t we seen many TV series with similar characters? Probably, but we have never seen the inner workings of their minds like this, and they certainly hadn’t seen it in the early 1870s when Middlemarch was published. George Eliot pushed the boundaries and, although she did not know it, wrote a Twentieth Century novel when the Nineteenth Century was still only two-thirds of the way through.
I remember the exact point when, at seventeen, I realised this was a novel like no other. It’s the part where Harriet Bulstrode (the polar opposite of Rosamond) finds out about her husband’s shady earlier life which is now becoming public knowledge.
She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently: the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him. Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited dishonour as bitter as it could be to any mortal.
But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly cherished her - now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach. But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob
out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life. When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation. She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap…
If ever our own relationships are going through a rocky patch, we could probably do worse than read that.