Why didn’t anyone tell me how good this book is? People did tell me, teachers and mothers and that sort of people. One teacher in particular may have mentioned it. She was teaching a class on Victorian heroines in which I was a student. Mind you, this isn’t a post about how I never did any work in college. It’s possible I did all my work in college, excepting any assignments in subjects biological, chemical, mathematical, or musically educational (History of Jazz? Withdraw).
I read Middlemarch. I even liked it, judging by all the little stars and things I marked in the margins. But I wasn’t ready for it, or I would have remembered it. I was ready for The Mill on the Floss. The heroine is named Maggie, for one thing. Totally approachable! I read the last 100 pages on the floor of my mom’s living room during winter break. It must have been Christmas day or Christmas Eve because we had a fire and one side of my face turned flaming pink.
But Middlemarch. At nineteen, I couldn’t have known what to make of this:
“Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labours; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause.”
But I did put a star next to it. Now it seems to me impossible that my rambunctious, wildly hopeful self could get a bead on the deeper fixity of self-delusion, but maybe I’m wrong. My mother asserts you can’t understand Proust until you turn sixty, but I only read Proust in French class, which narrowed my chances of understanding it to nil. That’s what’s interesting about keeping old school books around. They can make you look pretentious and sentimental and kind of lame, sure, but they also work as a record of a very private self, the reader self, marking off moments of discovery and revelation.
A month ago, if you’d asked me what I remember about reading Middlemarch, I would have said something about how horrified I was at the prospect of someone young marrying someone old and ghoulish and skinny-legged. I wouldn’t have claimed to remember much about the plot, but I would have been confident about who I was and what my concerns were when I read it. I would have been confident in the recollection of my own plot, and I would have been wrong. Because all the things I put stars and dashes and question marks beside then are the things I’m most interested in now. I’m the same. I was young, I’m older, but my sense of humor hasn’t changed, my anxieties haven’t changed, my rabid desire for annotation hasn’t changed. It’s so weird. I’m so invested in the idea of progress. I feel like I’ve been through so much and am so different than I was at Dorothea’s age. But I loved this book at nineteen, and then I forgot it.
