My Life in Middlemarch Read Online Free Page A

her relation to this paragon of learning. “There would be nothing trivial about our lives,” she thinks. “Everyday-things with us would mean the greatest things.”
    It’s fun to speculate about what Jane Austen might have done with this premise: would Casaubon have dwindled into Mr. Collins–like irrelevance, Will Ladislaw turned out to be a Wickham-like scoundrel, and Lydgate emerged as a Darcy-like black horse? One thing is beyond doubt: if this were Jane Austen’s story, the courtship of the blossoming Dorothea by the dry-as-dust Casaubon would have been a comedy. And, in fact, when John Blackwood, George Eliot’s publisher, read Casaubon’s excruciatingly stilted letter of proposal to Dorothea he wondered whether it was too comical to be plausible. (The letter reads, in part: “I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated.”) Blackwood queried the tone. “It is exceedingly funny,” he wrote. “But I mean is it not too transparently so not to strike even a girl so devoted to wisdom as poor dear Dodo.”
    There is an Austenian irony in Eliot’s presentation of Dorothea’s ardent nature. Celia, the small, steady voice of sense, recognizes her sister’s fondness for self-denial—“she likes giving up,” Celia tells Sir James. The author knowingly editorializes upon Dorothea’s misplaced infatuation. “Dorothea’s inferences may seem large,” Eliot writes. “But really life could never have gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusion, whichhas facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization.” The reader is invited to recognize the absurdity of Dorothea’s instant devotion to Casaubon, and also to recognize the absurdity of social proprieties—the “difficulties of civilization,” in a marvelously restrained phrase—that require a man and a woman to marry before they have more than a passing acquaintance with each other.
    But as George Eliot presents it, Dorothea’s inward predicament could not be more serious. When the reader meets her she is troubled, restless, discontented. “For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective,” Eliot writes. “What could she do, what ought she to do?” The pages vibrate with Dorothea’s yearning for a meaningful life. Her soul is too large for the comedy of manners into which she at first appears to have been dropped. She is bigger—her longings are grander—than the conventional story that others would write around her.
    This theme—a young woman’s desire for a substantial, rewarding, meaningful life—was certainly one with which Eliot had long been preoccupied. It was a theme that she had been turning over in her mind when she wrote that late-night letter to Mrs. Congreve, confessing the alarmingly unbounded extent of her own ambition and ardor. And it’s a theme that has made many young women, myself included, feel that
Middlemarch
is speaking directly to us. How on earth might one contain one’s intolerable, overpowering, private yearnings? Where is a woman to put her energies? How is she to express her longings? What can she do to exercise her potential and affect the lives of others? What, in the end, is a young woman to do with herself?
    These questions had been among George Eliot’s most pressing ones since long before she became George Eliot—back when she was Mary Ann Evans, an anxious, moody, brilliant Warwickshire girl with ambitions almost too large to bear.
    A LTHOUGH a school friend later remarked to an early biographer that it was impossible to imagine George Eliot as a baby, and “that