Read My Life in Middlemarch for Free Online

I’d failed to appreciate it when I’d been immersed in it, but now could see that it was no less lovely than any of the many places I had traveled far to see.
    I first moved to New York to do a graduate degree in journalism, expecting to return to England after a year. Studying journalism in a classroom turned out to be mostly absurd. One instructor, a weary former city reporter, conducted pretend press conferences in which he would impersonate the whiny, petulant mayor of the city while we, his students, asked pretend questions. Another instructor aired her dispiriting opinion in our first class that most of us would end up in PR. Much of the time I felt like I was wasting time. But I also got a part-time job at a magazine where I did research for writers and answered the phones and even wrote a few short pieces, learning skills and gaining experience that only a real deadline and a real paycheck could provide. When my course was almost over a job in the fact-checking department at the magazine opened up. I was offered it, and a few weeks before I was due to move home to England I decided that I wasn’t going to move home after all.
    I didn’t feel at home in New York, exactly—it was too alien and disconcerting for that. But I enjoyed the sense of estrangement my new life offered me. I shared a small apartment that had sloping floorboards, exposed-brick walls, and an occasional rodent problem, four flights above a busy SoHo intersection. Onsummer nights when it was too hot to sleep I would sit on the fire escape, looking out over the water towers on the buildings opposite and down on the lively streets below, enjoying the exotic sensation of sultry air on my skin. Where I grew up it was always cool at night, even after the warmest of days. I found the abrasiveness of New York exciting, even glamorous. I liked being able to yell at someone who shoved me on the subway, rather than feeling obliged to fume silently.
    After more than twenty years New York no longer felt exotic, and the abrasiveness had become less appealing. Now the mild, middle-class manners and gentle landscapes I found when I returned to England had an emollient quality. It was so soothing, this middling Englishness, that I had to be on my guard lest nostalgia slip into sentimentality. I was in danger of being too invested in my melancholic attachment to a half-remembered, half-idealized homeland. Even so, when I came back to England, I missed it more than I did when I was away.
    My train arrived at Nuneaton, a market town ten miles north of Coventry. There’s a bronze statue of George Eliot in the center of town, where she sits on a low wall, awash in long skirts, thick hair resting on her shoulders, eyes cast down, a book at her side. Not far away, past slightly dilapidated chain stores, there’s a pub named for her, the George Eliot Hotel, that is said to be the one upon which she modeled the Red Lion in
Scenes of Clerical Life,
a collection of three stories that marked her fictional debut. In Riversley Park, the town’s spacious public gardens, there’s an obelisk bearing her name at which members of a local literary society lay a wreath on her birthday.
    Also within Riversley Park is the Nuneaton Museum and ArtGallery, which owns a substantial collection of objects related to George Eliot, many of them acquired from local families. When I visited, the gallery in which the collection was usually displayed was being repainted, and Catherine Nisbet, the museum’s manager, took me into an upstairs room where the objects were being stored. Wearing latex gloves, she drew items out of boxes one by one and carefully unfolded the tissue paper they had been wrapped in, as if they were the most precious and unexpected of Christmas presents.
    Many of them probably had been presents once. Out came George Eliot’s reticule, a leather-covered case that contained, embedded in blue velvet, a penknife, buttonhook, and crochet hook, all with delicate handles of