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changed, rather than how much has stayed the same—wondering about how drafty the windows would have been, and whether indoor plumbing had yet been installed. Preservation tends to mean sanitization. “Stupidity of people tricking out and altering such a place instead of letting one see it as he saw it and lived in it,” Eliot once wrote when she visited Friedrich Schiller’s home, in Weimar.
    But George Eliot’s childhood home hasn’t been preserved as a monument to her. It’s been almost erased by the present. The ground-floor parlor has been converted into a bar, with an enormous flat-screen television tuned to a satellite sports channel overthe fireplace. In what was once the dining room, there’s a pool table instead of a dining table. Lurid slot machines have been installed on the flagstones of the entrance hall, where a wood-paneled nook that once served as Robert Evans’s office is now a snug little retreat with upholstered armchairs and beer mats on the tabletop.
    It felt ridiculous to be wandering these rooms, trying to ignore the glowing fire-escape signs and the soft rock on the sound system, and attempting to imagine the house as it was. But I tried anyhow, and saw glimmers of what Griff must have been. My first evening there, I sat with a beer at a trestle table on what would have been the lawn in front of the house. The sound of traffic carried over hedges, and someone’s phone kept jangling with “The Entertainer,” but there were bluebells flowering under the trees and daisies growing in the grass, as there must have been nearly two hundred years ago.
    The upper floors of the house are now private, occupied by the hotel manager and his family, but I arranged to see the attic, to which the young Mary Ann Evans sometimes absconded in search of privacy. Later, she transferred her fondness for that elevated retreat to Maggie Tulliver, the heroine of
The Mill on the Floss
: “Here she fretted out all her ill-humours, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves.”
    The attic had been converted into a bedroom since Mary Ann’s day, with steeply sloping walls and uneven floors that were covered with carpet the color and consistency of porridge. Sturdy wooden rafters were coated with chocolate-brown paint. A cob-webbed window overlooked parked cars and the highway and a light-industrial estate beyond. The room’s most recent occupanthad been the manager’s daughter, who was now in her twenties and living elsewhere. A narrow bed was still covered with her pink bedspread, and on top of a laminated dresser stood a ceramic statuette of Tigger from
Winnie the Pooh.
Left behind along with the figurine and the bedding was a slightly melancholy atmosphere of half-formed hopes and enthusiasms. It was a room to look out from, and from which to hope for something more.
    George Eliot did not write an autobiography, though she once said she wished she could, telling a friend—with what strikes me as an uncharacteristic overestimation of her abilities—that “she could do it better than anyone else, because she could do it impartially, judging herself, and showing how wrong
she
was.” Her most straightforwardly autobiographical character is Maggie Tulliver, and as a grown woman Eliot discussed with a friend the ways in which
The Mill on the Floss
was inspired by her own history. Everything in the novel was softened, she said; her own experience was worse.
    Maggie’s is bad enough. She chafes against the complacency and conservatism of the bourgeois mill-owning family into which she has been born. Her relatives are obsessed with propriety: a great deal of attention is paid in Maggie’s house to having the right linen on one’s table while alive and the right comestibles at one’s funeral when dead.
    The child Maggie, meanwhile, is persistently improper. She chops off her unruly black hair in a fit of passion, and she runs away to join the gypsies—occasions for “that bitter sense