Status Updates From The Road to Middlemarch: My...

Is this my George Eliot (Mary Ann Evan’s) era?

'Imagine me seated near a window, opening under a verandah,' George Eliot had written. And I should imagine her there: I could conjure her more vividly than anywhere else I had pictured her in my travels. But through that window lay a larger vista: a landscape transformed by books, reshaped by reading, and transfigured by the slow, green growth.

The mother tongue of my son's imagination has a very different accent from mine, and this will be his inheritance if he chooses to claim it. I cannot share my experience with him. (...)

Main has been dismissed as trivial and erring by Eliot's biographers, but his letters suggest that he, too, felt his young life to be maimed - that he feared that his life-juice was being wasted. In this respect, he was Eliot's perfect reader, in whom some of her most preoccupying novelistic themes were embodied. (...)

Eliot wrestled for herself an alternative course. Her best work began with being beloved, while middle age granted her an expansion rather than a diminishment of possibility. I cannot exactly call this a comfortable doctrine: the physical and mental exigencies of growing older deny us the prospect of ease, as Eliot knew, too. But even so, I think it is one worth trying to believe.

(...) It is where part of the pleasure and the urgency of reading lies. It is one of the ways that a novel speaks to a reader and becomes integrated into the reader's own imaginative life. Even the most sophisticated readers read novels in the light of their own experience, and in such recognition, sympathy may begin.

(...) Even so, her experience with Spencer informed her understanding of the situation. He was part of her education, as Dorothea was part of Lydgate's education, and as all of our loves, realized or otherwise - all our alternative plots - go to make us who we are and become part of what we make.