George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)
I was relieved when Jenny said it was time for me to propose marriage. I had been wondering about the matter and was glad she brought it up. I can be slow with social clues and if she had told me it was time to put out the garbage I would probably have been equally co-operative.
I had previously been in the Jesuit order for twenty-one years and—without going into connubial details—it was a considerable change. I felt for Jenny. It is not easy to team up with someone whose ex is God. Jenny, as it happens, is a lot easier to fathom than God and hence easier to get along with. God is also slow with social clues, preferring to do things her own way and leave the rest of us to try to figure it out.
I drew comfort from the fact that some of the most horrendous proposals of marriage in the history of literature are delivered by clergy. Perhaps the most famous comes from the insufferable Mr Collins, who wants to take the hand of Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (see Chapter 31):
My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Secondly, that I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly, which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness.
No better is the approach St John Rivers makes to Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë’s novel (see Chapter 29). Rivers, like Collins, is looking for a social accessory and, in this case, cheap labour:
God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife. It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love. A missionary’s wife you must—shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you—not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service.
But the most devastating comes from Mr Casaubon in the early stages of Middlemarch by George Eliot (1819–80). Casaubon is an old fossil of a clergyman who devotes his life to compiling a ‘Key to All Mythologies’, a dry and lifeless academic project which becomes a place for him to hide from his inability to cope with the world or to form relationships. If Collins is looking for an accessory and Rivers for cheap labour, Casaubon is looking for a prisoner to share his cell. His target is the orphaned Dorothea Brooke, one of the most painstakingly drawn heroines in nineteenth-century literature.
My dear Miss Brooke,—I have your guardian’s permission to address you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need…and each succeeding opportunity for observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I had preconceived, and thus evoking more decisively those affections to which I have but now referred.
The difference between Dorothea Brooke and both Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre is that Dorothea accepts this proposal, despite its obvious selfishness. She takes six terse lines to do so: ‘I can look forward to no better happiness than that which would be one with yours.’
George Eliot is a great writer because she takes enormous narrative risks. Daniel Deronda (1876), her last novel, is among the first English novels to explore the complexity of the English Jewish community, as opposed to the retailing of shimmering stereotypes in Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1839). In Middlemarch, Eliot consigns her heroine to a dusty obscurity as early as Chapter 5, which may seem like sabotaging your own book. Most of the other characters (Middlemarch has plenty of them) treat news of the engagement a bit like the announcement of an impending death. It takes more than four hundred pages to work through this tangle and finally get Casaubon into his grave.
Yet, in 2015, Middlemarch was named in a poll conducted by the BBC as the greatest novel ever written in English. The runners-up included books by many women writers: Mrs Dalloway (see Chapter 19), Jane Eyre (see Chapter 29) and Frankenstein (see Chapter 30). Middlemarch is less tightly orchestrated than any of those books. It is a garden in which all sorts of things are allowed to grow, almost unkempt, except they are often fixed with the author’s finely written nameplates, telling you exactly what they are. Eliot often interrupts her own book to make astute observations, a player commenting on the game they are taking part in:
If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.
Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dullness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations.
George Eliot thinks with her heart and feels with her mind, skills that make her novels feel complete. Middlemarch attempts the total portrayal of a regional community in a time of enormous change, represented by the coming of the railway. The railway was, as many have remarked, the internet of the nineteenth century. It rattles settled communities in novels such as Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1848; a neglected masterpiece of melodrama in which the railroad is somewhat on the side of the nasty people) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s episodic Cranford (1853). Middlemarch mourns the passing of one way of life but does not condemn the arrival of its replacement. The book is full of contrasts: there are competing approaches to medicine, politics, land ownership and religious ministry. It is an elaborate portrait.
George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans, often known as Marion Evans, and, when she courted scandal in 1852 by beginning to live openly with a man who was married to someone else and whose wife had children from different fathers, she used his surname. George Henry Lewes, an intellectual and writer, was the love of her life. Both were described euphemistically as ‘plain’, a judgement that often reflects more on the person making it than anyone else. In Lewes’ company, she became M. E. Lewes.
After Lewes died, she married a man twenty years younger than her, John Cross, and became Mrs Cross. Soon after the wedding, Cross tried to kill himself. He survived but she died of renal disease within a few months. Cross later wrote a valuable memoir of his wife. At different times, she also used pet names such Clematis (a flower related to ‘mental beauty’) and, after she had alienated her dear father by switching from a passionate evangelical Christianity to a considered and tentative atheism, she called herself Apollyon, the name of a destructive angel.
None of these names was George Eliot, the author of novels as intricate as the author’s experience of the world. She shed many skins. She was prepared to forfeit a relationship with her brother, Isaac, with whom she was close, in order to live with Lewes. She spent years translating David Friedrich Strauss’s turgid fifteen-hundred-page Life of Jesus, yet was prepared to leave the safety of a secure Christian home and community to enter more intellectual waters as an editor working on the Westminster Review.
I have a copy of Middlemarch I found at a jumble sale for one dollar. Inside it is inscribed:
For Mum, with hopes that you will enjoy this more than the mini-series! I’ve made a star by the sentence that my Victorian Lit teacher thinks is the best sentence ever written. I do like it too. Love Kez.
There’s no knowing if Kez was a son or daughter, but Mary Ann Lewes would have enjoyed this. She may have envied a child able to share literature with a mother; her own mother died when she was seventeen and still in the thrall of an adolescent religiosity, one of the ways the young and insecure can keep people at a safe distance. Sharing literature may have led to something richer and less defensive. More than that, she would have smiled at a young person who repeats what a lecturer has said and then, rather disdainfully, concurs: ‘I do like it too.’
The sentence marked in the book is actually two sentences:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.
I also like them. But neither of these is my favourite sentence in the book. For me, that sentence is the last one. Indeed, readers sometimes offer opinions about the best opening line ever written. But if there was a prize for the last sentence of a book, Middlemarch wins it hands down. It describes Dorothea, who has at long last married the artist Will Ladislaw, a man maligned and wronged by his cousin, Mr Casaubon. Ladislaw is the mirror image of Casaubon and Casaubon was so threatened by the vibrant younger man that he set up his will such that, if Dorothea ever married Ladislaw, she would lose her property. This doesn’t stop her.
Her second marriage brings almost as much opprobrium as her first. Dorothea and Ladislaw have a son and finally Dorothea reaches the end of her days. The book then returns to a gesture it makes in its prelude and invokes the sixteenth-century Spanish contemplative Teresa of Ávila. It goes on, in a vein similar to the sentence Kez approved of above, to celebrate the small fidelities that create the future far more surely that great infidelities: ‘but we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas.’ Middlemarch concludes:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.