A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Lydgate has the impulse to mercy and healing and the ambition to research. But he is impatient and too self-confident and does not mind it being known that he is better born than other country surgeons. He is drawn, by fatal degrees, into the evil secret of Bulstrode’s past (a favourite theme of George Eliot’s and as old as fiction itself). And yet his only real error is his marriage to Rosamond Vincy. He is overwhelmed by the ‘terrible tenacity of this mild creature.’ She is, what is more, one of the world’s unteachables. Whatever George Eliot’s scheme of moral effort and retribution may be, Rosamond is quite exempt from it. Through all vicissitudes she quietly keeps her self-esteem. Her dream of existence is shocked, then rights itself, and she will continue, blonde and imperturbable. The world as it is seems created for Rosamonds.

  Dorothea, on the other hand, never comes into direct conflict with Middlemarch. Her faults, like Lydgate’s, are put to us very clearly, since George Eliot’s methods are analytic. Having set herself, as she said, to imagine ‘how ideas lie in other minds than my own,’ she begins ironically, with Dorothea and sensible Celia dividing the jewellery their mother left them. Dorothea, who has renounced finery, feels an unexpected wish to keep one set of emeralds (a delicate premonition of her passion for Will Ladislaw). We are shown that she doesn’t know her own nature, doesn’t know life, certainly doesn’t know ‘lower experience such as plays a great part in the world,’ is ruthless to Sir James and, of course, to herself, and hopelessly astray in her search for ‘intensity and greatness.’ But Dorothea is noble. On her honeymoon visit to Rome, for instance, she is so much the finest spirit there, seen in contrast not only with those around her but with the motionless statuary of the Vatican Museum. She doesn’t know this. She has ‘little vanity.’ She says: ‘It is surely better to pardon too much than to condemn too much.’ We would give anything to be able to step into the novel and join Celia and Sir James in trying to stop this rare spirit from making her disastrous choice.

  But why can’t Dorothea aim at something greater? Why is she left, as the Finale puts it, to lead a ‘hidden life,’ and be buried in an ‘unvisited tomb’? Florence Nightingale, among many others, asked this question, giving as an example not herself, but Octavia Hill, the pioneer of public-housing management. It is true that Dorothea (born about 1812) was too early to have been, for instance, a student at Girton College, Cambridge (founded in 1869). But George Eliot’s attitude to the position of women was, in any case, perplexing. In October 1856 she signed a petition for women to have a legal right to their own earnings, and in 1867 she told a friend that ‘women should be educated equally with men, and secured as far as possible with every other breathing creature from suffering the exercise of any unrighteous power.’ She was, however, resolutely opposed to women’s suffrage. But these questions are not stressed in Middlemarch, and Dorothea is not shown as a great organizer, but as having ‘the ardent woman’s need to rule beneficently by making the joy of another soul.’ The drawback here is that the other soul turns out, in the end, to be Will Ladislaw’s; and what are we to make of Ladislaw? Critics usually consider him to be, like Stephen Guest in The Mill on the Floss, one of George Eliot’s failures. But perhaps she intended him to be exactly what he appears—that is, at the best, ‘a bright creature full of uncertain promises.’ He becomes, of course, a Radical MP, but ‘in those times’—as she reminds us—‘when reforms were begun with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days.’

  George Eliot’s point, however, made both in the Prelude and the Finale of her book, delivers us from having to think of Dorothea as nothing more than a noble woman who loses her head over a questionable young man. Dorothea’s decisions were not ideal, George Eliot tells us, and conditions are not right for a nineteenth-century St Theresa, but her life was not wasted: ‘the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive.’ This is part of the book’s great diminuendo, not tragic but majestic, drawing back, after all its vast complications, into itself, the characters’ prospects narrowing as the story closes. But we have actually seen the effect of Dorothea’s being on those around her, in her generous gift to Lydgate and—in a superb chapter—her yet more generous visit to Rosamond. On these ‘unhistoric acts’ in an undistinguished ribbon-manufacturing town in the Midlands, the growing good of the world may partly depend. We must believe this, if we can.

  There was nothing in Middlemarch, George Eliot assured her long-suffering publisher, John Blackwood, ‘that will be seen to be irrelevant to my design, which is to show the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional.’ This, however, suggests a deliberate, even mechanical method of construction that is quite at odds with the intensely human effect of her great novel. One of the advantages of its sheer length is that there is room in it for hesitations, even moments of relenting, which give the story another dimension, like music heard at a distance. At the end of Book Four, for instance, Dorothea has not only admitted to herself the misery of her marriage to Mr Casaubon but has glimpsed that his lifetime’s work, the ‘Key to all Mythologies,’ is a meaningless accumulation of references. She has gone to her room, and waits for him in the darkness to come upstairs from his library.

  But she did hear the library door open, and slowly the light advanced up the staircase without noise from the footsteps on the carpet. When her husband stood opposite to her, she saw that his face was more haggard. He started slightly on seeing her, and she looked up at him beseechingly, without speaking.

  ‘Dorothea!’ he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. ‘Were you waiting for me?’

  ‘Yes, I did not like to disturb you.’

  ‘Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.’

  When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together.

  The possibility is there, for long enough for us to think about it, of perhaps not happiness between them, but peace. The moment passes, as it does for Mary Garth, who has never realized that Mr Farebrother cared anything for her, and still doesn’t, fully, when he comes to see her to plead Fred Vincy’s cause. But ‘something indefinable, something like the resolute suppression of a pain in Mr Farebrother’s manner, made her feel suddenly miserable, as she had once felt when she saw her father’s hands trembling in a moment of trouble.’ Here Mary herself can’t define her sensation. There is time in Middlemarch, as in life itself, for these echoes or intimations of paths not taken. Another one, which remains just under the surface but is never put into words, is: what if Dorothea had married Lydgate?

  There is another complication in Middlemarch, which runs very deep. Meliorism looks cautiously forward, and indeed George Eliot agreed with Gladstone that there was no use in fighting against the future. But she was always true to her own past, her rural childhood when she had been a ‘little sister,’ running through green fields. All around Middlemarch stretches northeast Loamshire, ‘almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty, and to spread out coral fruit for the birds…These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls.’ (This recalls the passage from The Mill on the Floss, ‘We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it…’) It is noticeable that although 1830 saw the height of England’s agricultural distress and, in consequence, of rioting and rick burning—the Cambridgeshire fires could be seen at a distance of eight miles against the night sky—Loamshire, in this novel, is relatively tranquil. (Unrest is represented by Mr Brooke’s visit to Dagley’s smallholding, where he is defied by the drunken Dagley and behaves in a way much less dignified than his own dog, the sagacious Monk.) The reason for this, surely, is that George Eliot needs to indicate an ideal experience and existence. In Middlemarch the country represen
ts work, steadiness, harmony, peace. If we ask ourselves, or let ourselves feel, how human happiness is measured, we have to turn to Fred Vincy. Fred’s love for Mary, in spite of his shortcomings, is the truest emotion in the book, and it is as an expert on the cultivation of green crops and the economy of cattle-feeding that he steadies down to a happy life: ‘On enquiry it might possibly be found that Fred and Mary still inhabit Stone Court—that the creeping plants still cast the foam of their blossoms over the fine stone walls…’ Their marriage is a pastoral. Then again, late on in the book, Dorothea has a moment of vision that is in the nature of an epiphany. It is after her sleepless night of extreme misery over Will Ladislaw.

  She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance…

  What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

  Dorothea’s inspiration, at this late stage, comes from the early-morning sight of the labourer and the wayfarer. This, too, is pastoral. George Eliot, of course, did not deceive herself. If her Warwickshire childhood had been an Eden, it was one that she had lost. But it remained as her surest way of judging life as it hurried forward through the unpeaceful, expanding nineteenth century.

  Introduction to the Folio Society edition

  of Middlemarch, 1999

  Not Herself

  George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography, by Frederick R. Karl

  ‘[Burne-Jones] came across her standing monumentally alone at Waterloo Station, and, as he talked with her, they walked for a short distance along the platform. Suddenly Lewes rushed up to them, panic-pale and breathlessly exclaiming “My God! you are HERE!” George Eliot gravely admitted it. “But,” stammered Lewes, “I left you THERE!”’

  This story (from Graham Robertson’s Time Was) belongs to the 1870s, when George Eliot had become not only a precious charge to G. H. Lewes but also an object of general reverence as the greatest of secular teachers and (after Dickens died) the supreme English novelist. Opinion turned against her not long after her death in 1880. (A book I’ve got here, a Practical Text Book for Senior Classes published by Harrap in 1923, doesn’t even include her in its chart of the Chief Victorian Novelists.) She had to wait for rescue by F. R. Leavis and above all by Professor Gordon Haight, with his nine volumes of letters and a classic biography (1968). Endlessly helpful, Haight reckoned to be able to say what she was doing at any given moment on any day of her life, even before her written diaries begin, in 1854.

  Frederick Karl’s new biography is seven-hundred-odd pages long and has taken him five years’ hard labour. He has consulted, he thinks, all the available material, notably Eliot’s brave but embarrassing letters to Herbert Spencer (‘If you become attached to anyone else, then I must die’). In his acknowledgements he thanks Haight as the most dauntless of scholars, but, six hundred pages on, he calls the 1968 Life ‘narrow, squeezed, protective, and carefully conventional.’ This leads you to expect a bold treatment of some debatable points, but that would be a mistake. Of John Chapman, the publisher in whose house she lodged when she first came to London, he says ‘it is quite possible she and Chapman were intimate, although we will probably never have definite proof one way or another.’

  Why did John Cross, her second husband, twenty years younger than herself, jump from the balcony during their honeymoon into the Grand Canal? Professor Karl examines the evidence at length, and concludes that the incident only seems amusing ‘if we put on hold the pain of the participants.’ In fact he is more protective of his subject than Haight himself, refusing to accept that she was emotionally dependent on a succession of men, beginning with her father and her elder brother Isaac.

  Although she believed that ‘there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it,’ George Eliot invented herself (though probably not more than most women). She let it be understood that her right hand was larger than her left because of the dairy work she did as a girl, but Isaac declared she had never made a pound of butter in her life. She gallantly defied society when she threw in her lot with the all-purpose journalist and philosopher George Henry Lewes, and yet what she longed for was acceptance and solid respectability, the right wallpaper, the right callers on her Sunday afternoons. Karl patiently admits these contradictions, but relates them to the troubled consciousness of Victorian society, with all its divisions and paradoxes. George Eliot trusted passionately in the individual, coming to believe that each of us should create his own church, but at the same time dreading the chaos and disorder to which freedom might lead. To Karl she is the ‘voice of the century.’ All her changes of name, he says—Mary Anne, Marian, Mrs G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Mater, Mutter, Madonna—correspond to willed transformations, the moral and spiritual versions of self-help.

  Her responsibilities, as she said, weighed heavily on her, and Professor Karl can’t be called light-footed either. For the most part he plods along with dignity by the side of his Mary Anne. He is strong on her years with Chapman’s Westminster Review and on the details of her business affairs. Lewes, acting as her manager, was a sharp customer, and John Blackwood, most noble-minded of publishers, had reason to complain. But respectability had to be earned, or, as Karl puts it, ‘the inflow of money was an indisputable form of empowerment.’ In the background were Lewes’s legal wife and children, whom he supported to the very end.

  The book goes less well when it parts company from hard facts. In the last twenty years or so, Karl tells us, we’ve come to expect from the biographer ‘the psychological analysis of possibilities and potentialities’ from patterns in the work itself. If by ‘we’ he means the readers, then we have brought deconstructionism on ourselves. From these patterns Karl feels able to suggest that the theft of Silas Marner’s life savings from the floor of his cottage ‘does seem linked to Eliot’s uncertainty about her work,’ or perhaps ‘Eliot saw herself as part of a “theft”…she had “stolen” a particular kind of life in the face of social opprobrium,’ while Hetty, the kitten-like dairy-maid in Adam Bede, is a ‘subtle yet demonic double of Eliot’s own desire to rise, achieve, emerge.’ It’s as if he was allowing himself a well-earned holiday from his long search for exactness.

  The search itself is on the grand scale, but never, it seems to me, quite arrives. Frank Kermode was surely right in distinguishing, in George Eliot’s fiction, between the given and the calculated. Dorothea Brooke is ‘given.’ Middle-march, when the novel begins to expand in Chapter 10, is ‘calculated.’ Silas Marner was ‘given’ to such an extent that his image ‘came across my other plans by a sudden inspiration’ and Eliot had to write it before she could go back to the ‘calculated’ Romola. Of course, she was well aware of the difference, telling Cross that ‘in all she considered her best writing, there was a “not-herself” which took possession.’ Certainly it would be difficult to write the story of a not-herself, but that is what is missing from this biography.

  Observer, 1995

  MRS OLIPHANT

  The Heart and Soul of Carlingford

  I. A Fighting Life

  In the winter of 1860—61, Mrs Margaret Oliphant, a penniless, undaunted little Scottish ‘scribbling woman,’ called at the office of the brothers Blackwood.

  It was a very severe winter, and it was severe on me too…I had not been doing very well with my writing. I had sent several articles to Blackwood’s [Magazine] and they had been rejected. Why, this being the case, I should have gone to them…I can’t tell. But I was in their debt, and had very little to go on with. They shook their heads, of course,
and thought it would not be possible to take such a story—both very kind, and truly sorry for me, I have no doubt. I think I see their figures now against the light, standing up, John with his shoulders hunched up, the Major with his soldierly air, and myself all blackness and whiteness in my widow’s dress, taking leave of them as if it didn’t matter, and oh! so much afraid that they would see the tears in my eyes. I went home to my little ones, and as soon as I had got them into bed, I sat down and wrote. I sat up all night in a passion of composition, stirred to the very bottom of my mind. The story was successful, and my fortune, comparatively speaking, was made.

  This is Mrs Oliphant’s own account, in what she called her ‘few autobiographical bits,’ of the origin of the Chronicles of Carlingford.1 If we get the idea that she saw herself to some extent as the heroine of her own novel, and that she knew it perfectly well, we should be right, and right too in recognizing her as a woman with a strong visual imagination and an even stronger sense of human relationships. She sees the group in terms of dark and light, and feels the publishers’ embarrassed decency and her own desperation.