Luís’s Reviews > My Life in Middlemarch > Status Update

'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. (...)

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.

A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book. Now, when I read the novel in the light of Eliot's life and my own, I see her experience of unexpected family woven deeply into the novel's fabric—not as part of the book's evident pattern, but as part of its tensile strength.

I've never read the works of George Sand, but I think about this line, and what it has to say about the experience of reading Middlemarch. Eliot's novel is intensely moral, but it is not a moral codebook, and no one would want to read it if it were. Rather, through her delineation of human passions—romantic and intellectual—Eliot reveals her morality. (...)

(...) I felt as if my life were an unread book - the thickest and most daunting of novels - that I was holding in my hands. I didn't know what the story would be, or where it would lead, and I was almost too overawed to crack its spine and begin.

This kind of book becomes part of our own experience and part of our endurance. It might lead us back to the library in midlife, looking for something that eluded us before.