This is a momentous occasion, which I must underscore with a blog entry. I have just finished Middlemarch, one of the giant, imposing, touching, and admirable tomes written by Mary Ann Evans, known as George Eliot to the uninitiated. I started this book several years ago, and never finished. Well I have finished it, to the snoring of two pugs at my feet, and the ominous sounds of Lustmorde currently emanating from my husband's studio.
We go to London in a few short months, and finally finishing this novel was part of pre-London resolve. I started reading it before Christmas, my nightly hot bubble baths being the usual locale for revisiting this book. Since I left grad school and my love of Greek and Victorian lit behind me nearly 10 years ago, it has been difficult for me to pick up a Victorian novel since. But in the past year or two, I have read nonfiction Victorian lit and it has gradually reawakened my old obsession. The Other Victorians was a deliciously debauched and excellent expose on the (sur)real state of supposedly repressed Victorian sexuality, and Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages another an interesting imagining on the differently-married lives of five notable Victorian figures, including such stellar figures as John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle.
The introduction to this, the Oxford UP World's Classics edition of Middlemarch, was written by a professor I had the brief honor of knowing nearly 10 years ago at CUNY, when I attended their Comparative Lit PhD program. Professor Felicia Bonaparte was a singular person who will always live in my memory: she must have been in her late 50s or perhaps 60s, with jet-black hair, a decidedly distinguished nose, possessed of a tiny but wonderful NYC apartment (of which at least 1% was taken up by a copy of the OED), and a penchant for veganism and George Eliot. For a year, I was her research assistant, and it was my job to search through digitized manuscripts of 19th century literature, great and small, for any 'ominous or telling' reference to any number of innocent-seeming words or phrases. I can't recall them exactly now (there were too many items on it), but the nature of them may be reflected by this short, randomly-recalled list: light, diamond, dream, chisel, suffused, invention, book, etc. I still wonder to what purpose she put my findings, if any.
I am happy to discover that my love of literature written in England during the 19th century has not died altogether. My year spent at CUNY is not something I talk about regularly; it is a period of my life that, until recently, I would frankly rather not talk about. Looking back, it was a happy period to discover that I had been accepted into the realms of academia, such as they were, in my humble state as office manager and state-school graduate of English (with honors) from Louisiana, incidentally the first person in her family to attend college. Let me not forget that my future husband and I moved to New York state and to NYC from New Orleans solely so that I could attend this school under the auspices that I wanted to become a PhD professor who studied Ancient Greek and Victorian literature who taught at the college level. Mind you, this was never a dream of mine; it was more like the inevitable result from the unassailable facts that I was really, really good at writing theses, and was drawn to literature and philosophy courses in undergraduate school.
I am now not ashamed to 'own' my former life; indeed I look back upon it with a kind of fond sadness. I'm sorry that no one ever told me then that such a life would end only in teaching, and that if I didn't want to teach, I had better get out of the game altogether. But I am not sorry that I wasted my youth writing papers and treatises on various subjects, when I might have been drinking and living it up; the world of academia seemed vast and inconquerable to me then, but now, looking back, I am amazed that I got on as familiar terms with it as I did.
It is safe to say that my ability to cogitate and string arguments together sentence by sentence hasn't hindered me from being the low-level corporate drone that I am today. Being good at "literature" is not something everyone can claim; it takes a certain application and ability to see beyond the literal into the possible, and a certain amount of bullshit and self-confidence to be really, truly good at it, and to earn the respect of people who have managed to make it their lives. The time period from about age 16 to 26 that I was utterly devoted to literature and thinking I will always look back on as one of the best of my life. For a time, I had the respect of people I admired, Professor Bonaparte being among them, and it's good to be able to look back and know that, if I had really wanted to, I could have been a real contender.
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