The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

If you have just finished reading "Middlemarch", this is the book for you.

George Eliot

This is a book that does three things: firstly, it takes you on a guided tour of places associated with George Eliot, and tells you all about her life, and her struggle to escape the limiting parameters she had grown up with. Secondly, it is a considered appreciation of the novel and guides you in your understanding of why this book is rated so highly. Thirdly, the narrative also acts as a kind of autobiography, telling you about the development of Rebecca Mead as a writer and as a woman.

So we have not one but two good writers to enjoy when we take up this book. Eliot is quoted liberally from her letters and novels, and Mead takes the role of a knowledgeable guide to her life and works who is also prepared to open up to the reader and share her personal experiences, some of which are similar to Eliot's.

I have to quote from the book to give you a feeling for how it works, and for me it works beautifully and is a delight to read, but I have had to cut it a lot:

One morning in late spring I caught the train from London to Nuneaton. I'd only been to the Midlands once before, when I was eighteen, on a week-long school trip spent on a barge that wended its way through the area's network of canals.... The journey takes about an hour on the fast train, which further flattens the fields and pastures and turns the canals into leaden streaks alongside its tracks.

The Midlands are lacking in drama, topographically speaking, and George Eliot is the great advocate of the loveliness to be found in their modest plainness. In chapter 12 of Middlemarch, she paints a picture of the land in which she grew up that is as attentive to each facet and flaw of its subject as the portraits by Dutch masters she admired. "Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood," she writes. "The pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and the trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew..." 

The countryside I saw through the train window wasn't at all like the coastal English landscape of my youth,... , but the note of nostalgia in Eliot's description resonated with me. It was more than twenty years since I'd lived in England, and returning always induced a melancholy in me... These days when I took the train from London to my hometown I was always struck by the understated beauty of the countryside. I'd failed to appreciate it when I was immersed in it...

I first moved to New York to do a graduate degree in journalism, expecting to return to England after a year... Much of the time I felt like I was wasting time. But I also got a part-time job at a magazine where I did research for writers and answered the phones and even wrote a few short pieces, learning skills and gaining experience that only a real deadline and a real pay cheque could provide....

.....

My train arrived in Nuneaton, a market town ten miles north of Coventry. There's a bronze statue of George Eliot in the centre of town, where she sits on a low wall, awash in long skirts, thick hair resting on her shoulders, eyes cast down, a book at her side. Not far away, past slightly dilapidated chain stores, there's a pub named for her, the George Eliot hotel...

A rather romantic (modern) statue of George Eliot

Also within Riversley Park is the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery, which owns a substantial collection of objects related to George Eliot, many of them acquired from local families. When I visited, the gallery in which the collection was usually displayed was being repainted, and Catherine Nesbit, the museum's manager, took me into an upstairs room where the objects were being stored. Wearing latex gloves, she drew items out of boxes one by one and carefully unfolded the tissue paper they had been wrapped in, as if they were the most precious and unexpected of Christmas presents.

.... I thought of a letter George Eliot wrote to Harriet Melusina Fay Peirce, an American activist on behalf of women's welfare... "I was too proud and ambitious to write: I did not believe that I could do anything fine, and I did not choose to do anything of that mediocre sort which I despised when it was done by others," she wrote. I imagined her as a stiff, self-conscious, inhibited girl, warily examining herself for signs of greatness, too proud and too fearful to lay paper to desktop and try.

Griff House, Nuneaton, according to Mead it is impossible to imagine as it was.

As it was when George Eliot grew up there.