Read Online My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead - Free Book Online

passion in Lydgate’s life that makes him most compelling to me. Lydgate was a bright child—“it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid”—and, one wet day during a school vacation, hunting to find a book he hadn’t yet read, he stumbled across an encyclopedia in his family’s library. He opened the first volume to see an entry for “Anatomy,” and his life was changed in an instant. He had found his vocation.
    George Eliot gives a marvelous description of the dawning of an intellectual passion. “Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love,” she writes, in a direct address to the reader. It’s a powerfulevocation of the promise that learning can hold for a reader, and of the thrill of realizing what it might be to have an intellectually creative life—of the realization that one might find one’s destiny in books.
    And one need not have discovered one’s precise vocation at an early age, as Lydgate did, to know something of the experience of developing a germinal passion by browsing in a library. Intellectual passion—a love for that “which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires”—is rarely accorded the attention that romantic love commands, as Eliot points out; but the reader whom Eliot addresses will likely recognize this other, overlooked passion, because the chances are that he or she has felt it, too. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life when I was in my teens; but the solitary lunchtime hours I spent in my school library, looking at art books or reading literature, were both a discovery in their own right, and a taste of the pleasures of study and thought.
    In this passage about intellectual passion, Eliot steps into the story to speak directly to the reader. (Or, as literary critics have pointed out, the contrived persona of a narrator steps into the story to speak directly to the reader.) This was a technique that Eliot used with some frequency, and one of the most celebrated examples of this kind of interjection appears toward the end of Book Two of
Middlemarch,
when the reader is reintroduced to Dorothea Brooke, now Dorothea Casaubon, on her honeymoon in Rome. Dorothea is alone in her boudoir, and is weeping. But, Eliot asks with a note of irony, is an extravagance of emotion so very unusual in a new bride? “That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into thecoarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it,” she writes. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
    This kind of editorializing can strike today’s reader as awkward and off-putting. We’re wiser now, we think, than to believe in the authoritative inclusiveness of the first person plural; feminist or Marxist or post-colonial literary theory has made us conscious of perspectives that have been excluded by, or don’t care to be encompassed by, its embrace. We may even be writing from one of those perspectives ourselves. (I humbly submit: when I write “we,” I mean by it “I, and hopefully you.”) The explicit intrusion of a narrator’s voice in Eliot’s fiction can strike the contemporary ear as old-fashioned. Today’s realist novelists don’t tend to step onto their pages, formally addressing the reader like a lawyer making a case before a courtroom.
    Some contemporary critics of Eliot weren’t particularly enamored of the technique, either—so much so that