My Life in Middlemarch Read Online Free PDF Page A

from scratch. Like lots of imaginative children, she told herself stories peopled by characters from the fictions she consumed. “I could not be satisfied with the things around me; I was constantly living in a world of my own creation, and was quite contented to have no companions that I might be left to my own musings and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress,” she later wrote. She preferred the company of adults to children and was regarded as something of an odd duck—“a queer, three-cornered, awkward girl,” said a neighbor. Once, when given the assignment of writing an essay about God, she sat down and drew a picture of a large, watchful eye.
    At Miss Wallington’s, the school in Nuneaton she attended between the ages of nine and thirteen, and later at the Miss Franklins’ school in Coventry, instructors and students recognized that she had an unusually powerful intellect. Not that a powerful intellectwas strictly necessary, or even preferable, when it came to a girl’s education: her studies included French and English but also dancing and needlework. In
Middlemarch,
she acidly illuminates the deficiencies of what was considered a desirable education for a young lady by characterizing the ignorant and trivial Rosamond Vincy as “the flower of Mrs. Lemon’s school,” where “the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage.” The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry has among its holdings an example of work supposedly executed by Mary Ann Evans and some of her classmates at the Miss Franklins’ school: a little white cloak with a ruffled edge perhaps intended for a doll, though it would also be fit for a baby’s christening, or its funeral.
    Mary Ann was good at things other than needlework. Her essays in English were “reserved for the private perusal and enjoyment of the teacher, who rarely found anything to correct,” a classmate said. She was the best pianist in the school, came at the top of all her classes, and cried when school closed for the holidays—“to the astonishment and perhaps disgust of her schoolfellows,” one of them reported. Another former classmate said that Mary Ann always seemed a different order of creature, and added, “Her schoolfellows loved her as much as they could venture to love one whom they felt to be so immeasurably superior to themselves”—an observation with enough of a sting in the tail to be worthy of George Eliot herself.
    After leaving school she continued to write to a favorite teacher, Maria Lewis, who was only a few years her senior. From these letters and others to an aunt and uncle, scholars and biographers have gleaned much of what has been established about Eliot’s earlylife, and many critics have found this correspondence extremely unpalatable. By her teens, Mary Ann had become enthusiastically evangelical, and priggishly judgmental. She liked giving up. She disapproved of singing, other than hymns; she dismissed novels as dangerous and frivolous. “I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing even a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life,” she wrote. “Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?” It would be satisfying to discover that the young George Eliot resembled Elizabeth Bennet, the clever if initially misguided heroine of
Pride and Prejudice.
Instead, she brings to mind Lizzy’s prim younger sister, Mary, who, charged with playing the piano at a dance, wants to supply concertos instead of reels.
    She was equally quick to deliver her opinions about the choices of others, however unearned her authority to judge. “When I hear of the marrying and giving in marriage that is constantly being transacted I can only sigh for those who are multiplying earthly ties which though powerful enough to detach their heart and