On George Eliot’s birthday, revisit Rebecca Mead on “Middlemarch,” the classic novel about how to bear one’s share of sorrow, as well as to enjoy moments of hard-won happiness.
George Eliot’s own parlor—at the Priory, the London home that she shared with Lewes for fifteen years—is re-created at the Nuneaton museum. It has wainscoting, dark-green wallpaper, and a table draped in lace, set with an oil lamp and a tea cake. Life-size models represent Eliot, in a silk-and-jet gown with a notepad in her hand; George Henry Lewes, standing by red curtains and holding a cup of tea; and John Cross, the couple’s business manager, sitting in an armchair and looking stricken.
George Eliot is an author whom dilatory writers can point to with some optimism: she didn’t start writing fiction until she was thirty-six, and then only at the encouragement of Lewes, who suspected that she might have a talent for “concrete description,” as she wrote later in an essay titled “How I Came to Write Fiction.” When Eliot met Lewes, she was already the translator of Strauss’s “Life of Jesus,” and a brilliant, if underappreciated, editor and critic at the.
Main might have been expected to include an insight as succinct as “It is never too late to be what you might have been,” but the quotation does not appear in either book, or in a later anthology, “A Moment Each Day with George Eliot,” which was edited in 1902 by Ella Adams Moore, a lecturer at the extension school at the University of Chicago. The “never too late” quotation was not merely overlooked by Main, I discovered on rereading her novels; it is nowhere to be found in Eliot’s fiction.
“I was putting on my makeup one day, and I was going, ‘Oh, it’s too late, sweetheart, you are going to be sixty next year and you are still single after all these years, and you are still overweight and you are still not rich,’ ” she told me. “I was depressed for a few days, and then I remembered the quote.” The possibility that George Eliot hadn’t actually said the words did not diminish their resonance. “We tend to like wisdom when it comes from famous people,” Gallagher said.
I half hoped that someone at the study day would provide me with the missing citation for the quotation, but nobody seemed to know where it came from. But while I was in Nuneaton I received an e-mail from Leah Price, a professor at Harvard, who has written about the anthologizing of Eliot during her lifetime—the sifting of “Eliot’s reusable wisdom from her ephemeral plots.” If anyone had come across the quotation, it might be Price.
“We met through local history,” she said, with unexpected sauciness. “John founded the Bedworth Society, and I did a tour of the almshouse. Within three weeks, I was on the committee.” She paused as if finished, and I asked how that had turned into marriage. “Both our marriages split up,” she went on. “And then for a while it was just commiserating.
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