When it came time to enlist a faculty member to direct my dissertation, I turned to Alice Fredman. She was not Columbia’s foremost nineteenth-century novel scholar—that was Steven Marcus, the disciple of Lionel Trilling, who had recently published a well-received book on early Dickens, From Pickwick to Dombey, which combined close textual analysis with Freudian insights, and who would later write on Victorian pornography in The Other Victorians. But my awe of him was too great to imagine myself as his student. I had sat through two years of his lectures on Victorian literature, which after one week in a regular classroom had been shifted to an amphitheatre in the Law School to accommodate his following. At the end of the first year we were only halfway through the syllabus, so Marcus said he would assume the privilege of European lecturers and continue the course the next year. I still have his notes and use them in my teaching. But despite my sense of receiving, almost like Leda from the swan, his brilliant insights and interpretations, Steven Marcus still seemed a god and I a lowly mortal. Gender as well as rank entered into my sense of the gap between us, for Columbia in those years right before second-wave feminism was not an encouraging environment for women. When female students applied to be preceptors—graduate students who taught freshman English—it was rumored that we were chosen on the basis of our legs. I’m not sure that’s true, but the culture was one of male luminaries and their male acolytes. Of the four young women in our first-year proseminar in the modernist period—my major period through my PhD orals—I was the only one who finished the degree. Two dropped out at the end of the first year—one choosing the alternative of a career in music and the other drifting to London where she got a low-paying job in publishing. Today the musician is a well-known conductor and the woman who went to London a successful poet, courted by academic institutions. Probably they made good decisions. The fourth woman, whom I’ve lost track of, completed the M.A., then married her boyfriend and took a teaching job in a private day school in New Jersey.
I alone persisted, as much from doggedness and lack of interest in other possibilities as from any sense of talent or calling. To myself I was the opposite of a George Eliot heroine. Rather than needing my ego to be scourged, I saw it as needing to be bolstered. As I write, I can hear my friends and children laughing at this notion. Perhaps I was already more strong-willed and strong-minded than the person I remember being. It’s hard to reconstruct the reality of one’s earlier self. Nonetheless, I wonder how I would have fared without Alice Fredman, the tough-talking, cigar-smoking New Yorker with her family tucked away on Long Island, whom I knew I could turn to and count on. She sagely steered me through Columbia politics, guided the dissertation, and later wrote generous references to help me get a job. Or perhaps it was the most help of all that I knew she liked me. She and Freddy even came to my wedding. I have a wedding-album photo of her dressed in a no-nonsense checked spring suit and smoking, as best I can make out, not a thin cigar but a cigarette that is held out in one hand. Freddy is in the background of the photo, standing a bit diffidently behind her.
iii
THE FOUR YEARS I spent researching and writing about George Eliot coincided for me with the early years of marriage. In a sense this is a random link, but given everything that happened, it’s one that became filled with meaning.
In the fall of 1970, I was twenty-eight years old. I had been married for a year and a half to Donald Fairey, given birth to my first child, Emily, passed my PhD oral examinations, as it turned out, with distinction, and, despite short legs inherited from my father, been now teaching for two years as a Columbia preceptor. It was a time of great turmoil for the university and the nation, as we protested the Vietnam War, grieved the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and supported the SDS university strikes and shut downs. And yet it was a settled and harmonious time for me personally. Donald and I were tenants on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, owned by one of my Bryn Mawr classmates, who had married an architect. My classmate and her husband lived on the first two floors, and another couple rented the garden apartment. Susan Suzman, the garden-level neighbor, and I gave birth to our daughters within weeks of one another. That meant all three families were raising small children, and we fell into easy semi-communal living. Susan and I traded off babysitting with her taking care of Emily the two mornings a week I went to teach. One day, up at school, having scheduled an appointment with Alice Fredman to discuss a thesis topic, I decided, only as I walked across the campus to her office, that I would propose working on George Eliot. I didn’t yet have a specific focus other than a general interest in Eliot’s heroines. I didn’t know then, because feminist criticism was not yet a formulated literary approach, that feminist critics would be angry with George Eliot for not giving these heroines their author’s own options and that other feminists would defend her for her compassionate sense of fellowship, not just with all women, “even those still in ‘bondage,’” but “with men as well” (See Zelda Austen—surely a renaming—“Why Feminist Critics Are Angry with George Eliot,” 1976.) Eliot simply seemed an author whose novels gave me the satisfactions I’ve described and about whom I
