I have made light of it, of course. I have said, within the past week, even: If only I were beautiful, Then. I wouldn't feel so unsettled as I sit before a camera, filming
essays about memoir I've given my whole heart and head to. If only I were beautiful, Then. That driver wouldn't have cut me off; it was my turn after all. If only I were beautiful, Then. She would have never
dared. If only I were beautiful, I'd be something.
No self-respecting woman is supposed to say such things, think such things, wallow so ungraciously. I know that. But the thoughts come unbidden, and there they are. Mucking around with me.
How easy it is to cast blame on those things I cannot control. How undignified not to stand up to the superficial me, not to embrace all my good fortune first and only. But there it is. I am.
Earlier this week, while reading the intensely intelligent memoir,
My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, I found myself all caught up in the beauty question again. Mead is pondering George Eliot's appearance—the images she finds as she conducts her deep research into the life and mind of this complicated writer. Eliot did not, it seems, impress others as a beauty. She was possessed of a large nose and jowly facade. She was not svelte. She was not to be found in the fashion pages.
But, Mead writes, something happened when Eliot spoke. Something that contested the physical facts of her matter:
... a first impression of her hideousness, [Henry James] said, soon gave way to something else entirely. "Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her," he continued. "Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking."
Sara Jane Lippincott, Mead tells us, first found Eliot to be "exceedingly plain, with her aggressive jaw and her evasive blue yes.... Neither nose, nor mouth, nor chin were to my liking; but, as she grew interested and earnest in conversation, a great light flashed over or out of her face, till it seemed transfigured, while the sweetness of her rare smile was something quite indescribable."
Mead ends that paragraph with, "Ivan Turgenev, a friend of Eliot's, said that she made him understand that it was possible to fall in love with a woman who was not pretty."
Mead's entire book deserves your time. Mead's deft examination of how Eliot's biography shaped her fiction. Mead's brilliant assertion of the power books have to help us read our own lives. Mead's never-intrusive insertion of her personal journey as a repeated
Middlemarch reader.
And, finally, Mead's lesson—Eliot's lesson—that, in a world of static images, Facebook portraits, video essays, beauty is not a closed one thing. Beauty moves.
Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selections while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 8 July 2014, Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch, leads a discussion on George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
What was your inspiration for choosing Middlemarch?
I first read Middlemarch at seventeen, and have read it roughly every five years or so since, my emotional response to it evolving at each revisiting. In my forties, I decided to spend more time with the book and to explore the ways in which it seems to have woven itself into my life: hence my own book, My Life In Middlemarch.
Did you have an “a-ha!” moment that made you want to be a writer?
Not exactly, but getting my first story published in a national newspaper at the age of eleven in a contest for young would-be journalists—and getting paid for it—must have been a motivating factor.
Which author do you wish had been your 7th grade English teacher?
The best book I can think of that gets into the mind of a thirteen or fourteen year old is Huckleberry Finn, so please may I have Mark Twain?
What is your secret talent?
I used to be able to charm children with my ability to walk on my hands. Then I had my own child, and ever since my balance hasn’t been what it used to be. Luckily, my son doesn’t require charming.
With what word do you most identify?
“perhaps”
Rebecca Mead is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of My Life in Middlemarch and One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. She lives in Brooklyn.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook. Read previous interviews with Word for Word Book Club guest speakers.
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Image credit: Rebecca Mead. Photo by Elisabeth C. Prochnik. Courtesy of Rebecca Mead.
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