If writing about the life of another begins with the desire to answer a set of questions, it can end with discovering new questions that are harder, perhaps impossible, to answer. Now that I have spent a long time in the company of George Eliot, the question that lingers with me is this: How did she feel about never having borne children? Was she, as the current expression has it, childless by choice? Or did she arrive there by default, or by half-willed accident, or by some other, sadder path? Was it a decision she made, or one that was in some sense made for her?
There are writers about whom this question of motherhood looms less large, at least for me. Parenthood forgone would not be the first thing I would be inclined to discuss with Jane Austen; nor is it how I would use up my time with the shade of Henry James. But it comes pressingly to mind in the case of George Eliot because of the acuity and perception with which she depicted the many varieties of love—romantic, marital, filial, but also paternal and maternal. How did she know everything she knew?
George Eliot was not exactly childless, though many who have written about her have taken her to be so. In her mid-thirties, she became stepmother to the three adolescent sons of George Henry Lewes, her partner of nearly a quarter of a century, and in my book “My Life in Middlemarch” I explore the complicated ways in which that unexpected role influenced George Eliot’s life and fiction. What I take to be a genuine desire to be good and generous to her partner’s children was sometimes at odds with her own sense of creative autonomy. At the same time, the problems faced by young men at the outset of their adult lives found vivid expression in her fictional work—look at Fred Vincy, Will Ladislaw, and Tertius Lydgate, the three young men in “Middlemarch,” each struggling, with greater or lesser success, to determine his course in life.
I am also the stepmother of three sons, who are now able young men in their twenties who came into my life more than a dozen years ago, at around the same age that George Eliot took on the three sons of Lewes. If this on its own does not qualify me to speak with authority about Eliot’s treatment of young men in her fiction, it certainly informs my reading of it. (For some years, I have had this quotation from “Middlemarch” pinned above my desk: “People may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.”) It also leads me to believe that, while George Eliot may not have been a mother in the narrowest sense of the word, by taking on the partial charge of Lewes’s sons—for whom she became financially responsible, and over whose life courses she had a great deal of influence—she was unequivocally a parent.
Eliot sometimes referred to her books as her children, and the writing of them as a form of parturition. She once wrote in a letter of the experience of completing a novel: “the sense that the work has been produced within one, like offspring, developing and growing by some force of which one’s life has served as a vehicle, and that what is left of oneself is only a poor husk.” The image of a new mother as dried out and used up is one of the few places where Eliot’s comprehension strikes me as limited. There are doubtless many new mothers who do feel this way, but it seems to me that a more typical experience might be that which combines utter exhaustion with an unprecedented sense of vitality. (Nothing has ever made me feel so alive as actually producing a new life.) Perhaps this image of being devoured or despoiled by a voracious, needy infant helps explain why Eliot did not follow a conventional course of motherhood. The way she describes it doesn’t sound particularly appealing. Eliot may have decided that she could meet the needs of only one incessantly demanding voice, and that was the voice of her inner creativity.
And yet in her fiction she was able to give expression to an entirely different experience of motherhood than the one she sketchily characterizes in that letter. As I write in my book, one of the most moving moments in “Middlemarch” occurs when Fred Vincy, the mayor’s son, is dangerously ill. Suddenly his mother, the silly, frivolous Mrs. Vincy, is catapulted from her mundane diversions into the direst fears for her firstborn. “All the deepest fibres of the mother’s memory were stirred, and the young man whose voice took a gentler tone when he spoke to her, was one with the babe whom she had loved, with a love that was new to her, before he was born,” Eliot writes. The precision and comprehension in that characterization floors me. How did she know so well, and so exactly, what that experience was like? In a few, perfectly apt words she expresses what was for me at least the most dumbfounding surprise about motherhood: the way in which becoming a mother granted me access to—forced me into—an entirely new sphere of love, care, selflessness, and terror, a dimension that I had no idea was there. From out of nowhere, I knew a love that was new to me.
But Eliot had access to that dimension, too, without having passed through the delivery room. That’s what fiction writers try to do: inhabit the experience and imagination of a life different from their own. One of the things Eliot sought explicitly to do in her fiction was to induce a reader to move beyond simple identification with people who are easy to comprehend because they are like us, and instead to feel with someone who is entirely unlike ourselves. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures,” she once wrote.
And so even if time travel back to the nineteenth century were possible, I would not ask my impertinent hypothetical question to George Eliot—not because it is unforgivably rude, although it is, but because it reframes her experience within the very limited range of my own. As Eliot’s fiction reveals, both in its stories and in her overarching ethical project, mothers have no monopoly on love and selflessness, on empathy and care, even if it might take motherhood for some of us to discover what the greatest novelists already know.
Illustration by Frederick Burton/Universal History Archive/Getty.
[#image: /photos/59096aaaebe912338a3762c6] See more Mother’s Day posts from The New Yorker.
