Free My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead Page A

represent is indicated by her choice of name for the town. Eliot’s made-up place names—Broxton, Treby Magna, St. Ogg’s—typically adhere closely to the conventions of actual English place-names. But while there are many towns in England that begin with the word “middle”—Middleton and Middlesbrough and Middlewich and Middleham—there are no towns that end in the suffix “-march.” There is a town called March, in Cambridgeshire, which is recorded in the Doomsday Book as Merche; the name derives from the Old English word
mearc,
meaning boundary. And there are towns that end in “-marsh”—Michelmarsh, Saltmarsh, Widemarsh—deriving from the Old English word
mersc,
meaning marsh, of which there were plenty around Warwickshire when George Eliot was writing.
    But the word “march” is suggestive of more than just boundaries or marshes. It implies that the book, with its subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life,” will be concerned with that which is absolutely pedestrian and ordinary. Provincialism—geographical, emotional—will be at its heart. “You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure. We are very stupid, and you have been used to something quite different,” Rosamond tells Lydgate, charmingly, on their first encounter. He replies, equally charmingly: “I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike, but I have noticedthat one always believes one’s own town to be more stupid than any other.”
    If one is from a provincial town, it’s easy to assume that in the great elsewhere people are enjoying far more sophisticated and complex lives. I assumed it when I looked out from the town in which I was raised toward the tantalizing city of London, from which my parents had moved when I was three. (I was, I insisted, a city person forcibly removed to the provinces, even if I had only the sketchiest memories of London life, mostly involving playgrounds.) And there’s some truth to the assumption, if by sophistication and complexity one means access to museums and arts and neighbors unlike oneself. But
Middlemarch
is not just concerned with the social consequences of geographical provincialism. It is also concerned with the emotional repercussions of a kind of immature provincialism of the soul—a small-minded, self-centered perspective that resists the implications of a larger view.
    Eliot didn’t think Coventry was stupid, not entirely, though she missed the “free range for walking” which she had enjoyed at Griff, she wrote to a friend. Rather than tramping widely through fields, she was now required to step daintily through drawing rooms, perhaps wearing the fancy pair of kid ankle boots decorated with ribbons that is in the Nuneaton museum’s collection. (The boots are extremely narrow, with soles that are barely worn, as if they have only ever trodden on carpets.) Often, she chose to stay home with her books rather than to socialize. A couple of months after her move, she reported to Maria Lewis that she had failed to call on some acquaintances, “young ladies being the animals that would possess the minimum of attraction for me in a menagerie of the varieties of the human race.”
    She had a study upstairs at Bird Grove where she could escape the menagerie and the requirement to be a presentable specimen within it, and could devote herself to her books instead. “I have been rather humbled in thinking that if I were thrown on an uncivilised island and had to form a literature for its inhabitants from my own mental stock how very fragmentary would be the information with which I could furnish them,” she wrote to Lewis. “It would be a good mode of testing one’s knowledge, to set one’s self the task of writing sketches of all subjects that have entered into one’s studies, entirely from the chronicles of memory.”
    As I walked through Coventry, I thought about this serious-minded young woman stocking the chronicles of her memory for future use. Now a real estate agent’s