Middlemarch: A Little Introduction

I’m looking forward to our first week of reading Middlemarch together.

I thought I’d start by acknowledging how many people I’ve failed to persuade to read Middlemarch.

I’ve come to believe that this great novel would be more widely read if the preface had been eliminated. It’s possible that even a masterpiece could have benefitted from some judicious editing.

The preface to Middlemarch opens with a question:
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? 

To which I answer: “Me, that’s who.”

Eliot goes on, 
Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning.

I disagree. That child pilgrimage does not seem to me a fit beginning for this delightful book. 

It is a truth not often enough acknowledged that all great books do not have equally great openings.

The preface does—eventually—offer some relevant sentences, such as “Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life,” but they might have been better deployed later, once we’d met this novel’s heroine, Dorothea. I could go on a bit more about the preface but I suggest that we all agree to skip the preface and come back to it later and start with the wonderful Chapter 1, which reads like a Jane Austen novel.

The contemporary reviews of Middlemarch were decidedly “mixed.”

Those by Henry James and Virginia Woolf, a few years later, were no more perspicacious. James called Middlemarch “at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels.” He thought that its predecessors “as they appeared might have been described in the same terms; Romola is especially a rare masterpiece.” (Romola? Really. History would tend to disagree.) What James objected to most was what he considered the apparent lack of an “organized, molded, balanced composition, gratifying the reader with a sense of design and construction.” (Remember: he called War and Peace, published several years before between 1865 and 1869, a “baggy monster.”) He wasn’t persuaded by the characters of Will Ladislaw or Nicholas Bulstrode, though he maintained that Eliot’s “heroines have always been of an exquisite quality.”

As if to prove that no two critics will agree, Woolf, while calling Middlemarch “the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” specifically objected to Eliot’s heroines. She claimed
they bring out the worst in her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic and occasionally vulgar … Her self-consciousness is always marked when her heroines say what she herself would have said. She disguised them in every possible way. She granted them beauty and wealth into the bargain; she invented, more improbably, a taste for brandy.

Woolf wrote,
In fiction, where so much of personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack; and her critics, who have been, of course, mostly of the opposite sex, have resented, half consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality which is held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was not charming; she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccentricities and inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing simplicity of children.

And yet, whatever quibbles and quarrels James and Woolf have with Eliot, it’s undeniable that they felt her genius, perhaps even a little oppressively.

Consider the generations. Henry James was twenty-nine when Middlemarch was published. Virginia Woolf was born a year after Eliot’s death. Of this woman of her grandmother’s generation, Woolf wrote, “Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not novels, when he banned all fiction from the London library. She was the pride and paragon of her sex.”

Woolf quotes Lady Ritchie’s portrait of Eliot:
“She sat by the fire in a beautiful black satin gown, with a green shaded lamp on the table beside her, where I saw German books lying and pamphlets and ivory paper-cutters. She was very quiet and noble, with two steady little eyes and a sweet voice. As I looked I felt her to be a friend, not exactly a personal friend, but a good and benevolent impulse.”

And continues:
A scrap of her talk is preserved. “We ought to respect our influence,” she said. “We know by our own experience how very much others affect our lives, and we must remember that we in turn must have the same effect upon others.” Jealously treasured, committed to memory, one can imagine recalling the scene, repeating the words, thirty years later, and suddenly, for the first time, bursting into laughter. 

One somehow feels James and Woolf bursting into laughter.

There is always something giddying in the toppling of an idol.

Woolf can’t stop herself from reminding us that “the culture, the philosophy, the fame, and the influence were all built upon a very humble foundation—she was the grand-daughter of a carpenter.”

When he was twenty-three, Henry James already objected to what he considered Eliot’s “optimism.” “I do not remember, in all her novels, an instance of gross misery of any kind not directly caused by the folly of the sufferer.”

James wrote this in the Atlantic Monthly in 1866, before Middlemarch was published. “Both as an artist and a thinker, in other words, our author is an optimist; and although a conservative is not necessarily an optimist, I think an optimist is pretty likely to be a conservative,” deriding the “old tradition” to which she allegedly adheres requiring that “a serious story of manners shall close with the fictitious happiness of a fairy-tale.” Perhaps this shadow of resentment is cast by his intuition that Eliot’s work would find a huge popular audience, as his would not.

Eliot made a fortune and became famous worldwide. James’s writing life ended less happily. He spent four years, from age sixty-three to sixty-seven, preparing and editing his novels and stories into a definitive New York Edition. When the first royalty statement arrived for this enormous effort (which he described as “really a monument (like Ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice done it—or any sort of critical attention at all paid it”) he was devastated. “Is there anything at all?” he asked, before having a nervous breakdown, which left him in a deep depression, unable to write.

Even James, though, had a posthumous fairy-tale ending. Literary history, like the Old Testament God fond of cruelty to its favorites, waited thirty years for F.R. Leavis not only to resurrect James’s reputation but to elevate it to a position far higher than it had been in his lifetime. We now count Eliot, James, and Woolf as masters.

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Our first installment of Summer Reading, considering Chapter One of Middlemarch, will go out to Book Post Summer Reading subscribers on Sunday, June 4. Meet us here for conversation in the comments!

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Mona Simpson is the author of seven novels, most recently Commitment, which appeared this spring.

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