“My Life in Middlemarch” by Rebecca Mead
Every so often my reading dance card gets so filled up I swear off borrowing library books other than ones for my three book groups. But then I read a review of a book that sounds so good I just can’t help myself, and I’m off to the races with my library queue again. As soon as I finished reading a buttload of books about Hamlet, Rebecca Mead’s memoir/literary appreciation My Life in Middlemarch was next up. Mead uses her lifelong love of George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a frame to weave in a biography of Eliot and a memoir of her own.
On [my] first encounter, I identified completely with Miss Dorothea Brooke, an ardent young gentlewoman who years for a more significant existence. This identification was in spite of the difference between our social stations. Dorothea lives at Tipton Grange, a large estate equipped with household staff. My family lived in a modest house with a small garden, built in the 1950s, and I only had to go back a few generations to find ancestors who had belonged to the household staff on properties like the Brookes’.
It’s been a few years since I read Middlemarch, but the details came back, and I was reminded why I loved Middlemarch when I read it, and affirmed that I want to re-read it, as well as all of Eliot’s works.
Mead is a good guide to the novel and its author’s life, though her own life is drawn more sketchily in the book than is Eliot’s. Also, Mead’s portrait of George Eliot’s relationship with George Lewes is unequivocally loving, which didn’t square with my memory, and sent me back to Marghanita Laski’s book, George Eliot and Her World, which Mead refers to in her book. There is a reference that Eliot may have discovered indiscretions of Lewes after he died, which in turn might have been one factor in her perhaps o’er hasty second marriage. Mead, in spite of an impressive array of research on the author and her works, doesn’t mention the possibility of Lewes’ indiscretion. Whether because she didn’t find the evidence persuasive, or because she has such affection for her subject that she didn’t want to cast aspersions, I don’t know.