So for one reason or another—George Eliot’s exclusion from the College of One, her not being taught in high school, the fact that in college I elected the year-long course in Romantic poetry instead of the course on the novel—I had not encountered even Middlemarch until I got to graduate school, by which time I was more or less a grown up and, Virginia Woolf would argue, ready for this great work and for its author.
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MIDDLEMARCH AND I CONVERGED in Professor Alice Fredman’s seminar on the nineteenth-century novel. Alice, who later became my dissertation advisor, was one of three tenured women at that time, the late ’60s, in the Columbia English department. The other two were Carolyn Heilbrun, who seemed every bit as intimidating as Alice, and Elizabeth Donno, a Renaissance scholar who I think wasn’t intimidating at all, but I never took a course from her or heard much about her.
But for Alice Fredman I might never have finished graduate school. She was tough-talking and known for smoking thin cigars, but she was someone who fought for the students she took under her wing. She had been a brilliant undergraduate at Swarthmore, and at Columbia she wrote a prize-winning dissertation on Diderot and Sterne under the tutelage of Marjorie Hope Nicholson, the first woman chairperson of the Columbia English Department. Alice’s dissertation became her first book, a second small book followed on Trollope for the Columbia Modern Writers series, but here the list ends. Her long-awaited magnum opus, a critical biography of Mary Shelley, remained always a work in progress. I think Alice’s teaching combined with her family life to absorb her. At the end of the nineteenth-century-novel seminar, she invited our whole class to a picnic at her house in Kings Point, Long Island, where we met Irwin “Freddy” Fredman her husband, who had retired from a modest career in advertising to write arcane books on Long Island history, her two pleasant teenaged daughters, and Alice’s widowed mother who lived with the family. Going to that picnic was like discovering the clerk Wemmick’s domestic nest in Great Expectations, complete with an “Aged P,” after encountering him in the harsh public world of Mr. Jaggers’s law office. I think George Eliot would have rendered Alice sympathetically if she had been a character in one of the novels—perhaps as someone who strove for greatness but settled in many ways for “the common yearning of womanhood.” At least, though, Alice got to be a wonderful professor. When she died in 1993 of a heart attack at, alas, only sixty-eight, her New York Times obituary stressed how “she became a mentor to many Columbia students and was known for her generosity to them and to her colleagues.” I also learned that “twice offered teaching awards, she refused them, saying they would be more helpful and encouraging to younger colleagues.” Of this egoless, self-subsuming gesture George Eliot would certainly have approved.
In the nineteenth-century-novel seminar Alice drove us hard, expecting us to read two major novels each week. This was, of course, completely unrealistic. How can one, for example, read Dombey and Son and Bleak House in one week? I can’t remember now what I actually managed to read, but I did tackle Middlemarch, falling completely under the spell of its breadth and intricacy, its melancholy and its moments of great tenderness, the author’s wise and vast understanding of human nature, and her sardonic wit, as uncompromising as her sympathies are broad.
Daniel Deronda followed, even more mesmerizing in its wise, cynical understanding of society and human nature. I remember being struck by the way Grandcourt’s entry into the novel echoes the famous opening of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife.” Austen’s irony is unsurpassed. Yet Bingley, the man in possession of the fortune at hand, proves the socially and morally appropriate husband for Jane Bennet, and his even richer and more aristocratic friend Darcy the supremely right husband for Elizabeth. In Grandcourt, the social and the moral part company. Coming on the scene at the archery meet at Arrowwood, Sir Hugo’s heir to the baronetcy is described as “good looking, of sound constitution, virtuous, or at least reformed,” an irony then extended as the perspective of Gwendolyn’s worldly cleric uncle, the Reverend Gascoigne:
He held it futile, even if it had been becoming, to show any curiosity as to the past of a young man whose birth, wealth, and consequent leisure made many habits venial which under other circumstances would have been inexcusable. Whatever Grandcourt had done, he had not ruined himself; and it is well known that in gambling, for example, whether of the business or holiday sort, a man who has the strength of character to leave off when he has only ruined others, is a reformed character.
The effect on me of reading such a passage was to feel the strengthening of my own moral anchor and sound judgment. George Eliot led me to understand the intricate social maneuvers of her provincial world, and somehow that put me on the author’s plane of perspicacity. Characters in the novel may be willfully or naively obtuse about Grandcourt, but George Eliot is wise to him, and so am I, her reader. I join the author in penetrating the ways of the world and also share, through my discernment, in the linguistic tools at her command—her irony, her apt metaphors, her well-controlled sentences. If Eliot fails to find interesting gestures for Daniel, who can pull only at his shirt collar, she creates wonderful ones for
