The New Yorker:
By Rebecca Mead
February 7, 2011
The first time I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” I was seventeen years old, and was preparing to take the entrance examination for Oxford University. For several hours every weekend, I would join three or four classmates to discuss the novel, which was published in 1872, at the home of a benevolent teacher who lived on the outskirts of Weymouth, the English seaside resort where I grew up. Weymouth is in Dorset, a rural county in the southwest of the country; its rolling farmlands are traversed by narrow roads and hedgerowed lanes that discreetly delineate the ancestral holdings of landed families. A quarter century ago, as I looked out from my teacher’s living-room window at hills that seemed perpetually sodden, my domain felt hardly less provincial and remote than the Midlands of the eighteen-thirties, which Eliot had described in her novel.
I identified completely with Dorothea Brooke, the ardent young gentlewoman yearning for a more significant existence, even though my upbringing was barely similar. Dorothea lives at Tipton Grange, a large estate equipped with household staff; my family—a few generations from being household staff—occupied a modest house, built in the nineteen-fifties, with a carefully tended patch of garden. Dorothea, who at the novel’s outset is nineteen, disdains her suitor, Sir James Chettam, an amiable, pink-faced baronet whose land is adjacent to the property that any future son of hers will inherit. Instead, she makes a spectacularly unwise marriage to Edward Casaubon, the pedantic scholar laboring on the interminable “Key to all Mythologies”—“Our Lowick Cicero,” as a dismissive neighbor calls him. Ultimately, she is united with Will Ladislaw, a passionate, idealistic lightweight, a journalist turned politician.
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