My Life in Middlemarch Read Online Free

upstairs immediately after finishing breakfast, at 8:00 a.m., and worked steadily for five hours. Affairs were arranged so that she was as free from domestic concerns as possible. Two servants—sisters named Grace and Amelia—kept the household running along well-established lines. “She never knew what was to be for dinner until she came down to it,” one of her servants later told a visitor.
    She and Lewes, her partner of the last decade and a half, often lunched alone, but on that day a friend joined them. Maria Congreve was a bright young woman almost twenty years Eliot’s junior: “one of those women of whom there are few—rich in intelligence without pretension, and quivering with sensibility, yet calm and quiet in her manners,” Eliot once reported with approval to another friend. Over lunch, Eliot mentioned that she was feeling more cheerful than she had been of late, and that the sense of anxiety by which she often felt crippled had abated.
    Later that evening, by the fire in the study, Eliot read aloud to Lewes an article about the ongoing Franco-Prussian War: Paris was enduring its second month under siege. The article made her cry, and she was troubled that she had spoken at lunch of her own relative contentment when there was so much suffering elsewhere. Before she retired to bed she wrote a note to Mrs. Congreve. “It rang in my ears that I had spoken of my greater cheerfulness as due to a reduced anxiety about myself and my doings, and had not seemed to recognize that the deficit or evil in other lives could be a cause of depression,” she wrote. “I was not really so ludicrously selfish while dressing myself up in the costume of unselfishness. But my strong egoism has caused me so much melancholy, which is traceable simply to a fastidious yet hungry ambition, that I am relieved by the comparative quietude of personal cravings which age is bringing.”
    The manuscript upstairs was also concerned with egoism, melancholy, and ambition—and with the question of what an individual might do to alleviate the suffering of others. The story she had begun “without any very serious intention of carryingit out lengthily” would become “Miss Brooke,” Book One of
Middlemarch.
    In describing the subject of the story as being among the possible themes she had long been considering for fictional treatment, Eliot was probably referring to her ingenious revision of the marriage plot. What might happen if, instead of ending with a wedding, a novel were to begin with one—that of a young woman and a much older man to whom she is eminently ill-suited? The marriage plot was a well-established form in nineteenth-century literature, exquisitely mastered by Jane Austen, whose novels George Eliot had reread immediately before she made her own first effort at fiction. And the first four chapters of “Miss Brooke” present a decidedly Austenian scenario. There are two well-born sisters, both unmarried, one filled with sense and the other—like Mrs. Congreve—quivering with sensibility. (Dorothea “was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.”) The clever older sister is under a willful romantic misapprehension. Failing to recognize that her amiable, titled neighbor is courting her, she instead imagines that he is enchanted by her younger sister.
    The older sister has entirely other ideals. She hopes to find a husband of exalted intellectual and moral stature. She imagines she would have been happily wed to “John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure.” Before too long, she meets a clergyman and scholar who appears to her—if to no one else around her—to be endowed with greatness, “a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint.” Naturally, sheconstructs mentally a future in which she unites the glories of wife and helpmeet in