My Life in Middlemarch Read Online Free Page B

it seemed as if she must have come into the world fully developed, like a second Minerva,” the evidence suggests that she was, at one point, a squalling infant much like any other. “Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury Farm at five o’clock this morning,” her father, Robert Evans, noted in his diary for November 22, 1819.
    She was his fifth child, the third by his second wife, Christiana, and Robert Evans was already in his midforties when she was born. Evans, like his father before him, had started out as a carpenter and builder, but by the time Mary Ann arrived he had become the trusted estate manager of Francis Newdigate, the local landowner, who lived at a grand house named Arbury Hall. Evans was not a large man, at least on the evidence of a handsome purple-and-green plaid velvet waistcoat that survives in a local museum. But he was known for his physical strength and for his strong moral rectitude. A terrifying anecdote, approvingly recounted in John Walter Cross’s
George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals,
tells of an occasion when Evans was riding atop a coach in Kent. The woman next to him complained that the hulking sailor on her other side was being offensive. “Mr. Evans changed places with the woman, and taking the sailor bythe collar, forced him down under the seat, and held him there with an iron hand for the remainder of the stage,” Cross reports.
    Mary Ann adored her father, and in her fiction the noble-hearted, practical-handed artisan is a recurring type, one whom her critics have sometimes found too good to be true. One such is Adam Bede, the eponymous hero of her first novel, whom Henry James described as lacking “that supreme quality without which a man can never be interesting to men,—the capacity to be tempted.” In
Middlemarch,
there is Caleb Garth, like Robert Evans an estate manager, whose chief fault is that he is too willing to think the best of people. (This is a virtue disguised as a failing, as when an interview subject tells a prospective boss that his worst flaw is being too concerned with detail.) When, in her early thirties, a few years after her father’s death, Eliot spoke in an essay of “virtue or religion as it really exists—in the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter,” it seems an idealized picture from her own childhood. After her father died she saved his wire-rimmed spectacles in their tortoiseshell case and kept them for the rest of her life—an intimate souvenir, as if his perceptive eyes might still watch over her.
    Less information survives about Eliot’s mother, Mrs. Robert Evans, the former Christiana Pearson. In his
Life,
Cross portrays her as the fulcrum of the family, always busy with her knitting, delivering herself of epigrammatic opinions like Mrs. Poyser in
Adam Bede.
But she seems to have been ill for much of Mary Ann’s childhood, her condition doubtless exacerbated by repeated childbearing as well as by grief. George Eliot referred to herself asthe youngest child in her family, but that wasn’t the whole story. Twin brothers, William and Thomas, were born in March 1821, when Mary Ann was barely a toddler; they both died when they were just ten days old. The lost boys are buried in the family tomb at their parish church, in Chilvers Coton, which is where Christiana was also laid after she died, probably of breast cancer, when Mary Ann was sixteen.
    Mary Ann was a bright little girl, already reading the romances of Sir Walter Scott when she was seven years old. Scott was her father’s favorite, too, and he encouraged his clever daughter to read, though books were not exactly plentiful in the Evans household. Once a neighbor loaned a copy of Scott’s
Waverley
to Mary Ann’s sister Chrissey, five years her senior; it was returned before Mary Ann could finish reading it, and so she started writing the story out herself