My feet.
My interests – people, school, books, theater.
My ability to snip flowers and gather them into resonant arrangements.
My nose, the shape of my eyes.
All from my mother; all, originally, my mother’s.
Since her death last year, I have been gutted by the most obvious of revelations – this woman I loved, admired, struggled with, and certainly took for granted not only modeled a life for me, but from the earliest moments of my childhood and over our 50 years together, practically stamped me in her image. My mother’s opinions, manners, and priorities, whether I acknowledged them or not, were the unseen roadmap by which I charted my own life. And now, in her absence, I often feel like the hiker who, arriving at a fork in the path, doesn’t have any idea which way to go.
When I was growing up and brought her questions, as answers she’d unfailingly pull a book down from her library and place it in my open hands. Standing in her study just after she died, feeling lost in space and time, I saw a stack of Norton editions of 19th century English fiction on her bookshelf. Knowing that no one else in my family would want them, and that she would have given them to me herself if I had asked, I gathered them up in my arms and took them home.
They are now lined up like pretty dolls in a row in my own study, and when I feel the waves of nostalgia and vertigo ripple across my heart, I need only to pick up her copy of Bleak House or Jane Eyre to restore my sense of balance. Just seeing the marginalia written in her distinctive swooping, black cursive gives me the sense that she is still here, guiding me back again to the texts that we trained on in our respective lives as English teachers.
I feel that way especially when I return to Middlemarch, my mother’s favorite novel from the century she loved the best.
Middlemarch: a long book, a book with many chapters.
A book about people in quaint places, a book with pages swimming with letters in tiny typeface.
A book I never wanted to read and refused to read, for all of the reasons stated above and one more: my mother always wanted me to.
For the longest time, I would not open its cover. It belonged to my mother and her world as a professor, her classrooms and her lectures, her students and her office hours. Even at 20 as an English major in college, and 27 as a graduate student in English, I avoided the book that was so important to her. I somehow thought that by not embracing George Eliot, I would maintain my distinctness from my mom. She never got annoyed with me about it, and even laughed.
“Someday you will love this book, Jess,” she told me.
She was right.
Someday has arrived.
Middlemarch is long, yes. And in the era of the immediate and the fleeting, books like Eliot’s can feel insouciant, demanding more of us than we have to give or asking us to be people we no longer are.
Except.
Only a text as long and immersive as Middlemarch can accomplish something as miraculous as what happened to me this year as I read it – it became a new cord connecting me back to my mother, back to the paths we walked together, both literary and real, and back to myself after a year of profound loss.
To make sure that I actually read Middlemarch from cover to cover and didn’t falter in my resolution, I invited three accountability partners to read with me. It goes without saying that getting through this massive tome took time and conviction amid extremely busy modern lives. But we let ourselves read slowly, coming together four times over a full school year to discuss what we’d read, which of course led to additional storytelling about our own lives along the way.
That’s the power not only of literature, but of the act of reading with other people – in knowing, first hand, the stories that inspired the people we love most, and in remembering the times when those same people stood before us, spoke to us, and shared their thoughts and passions with us in moments of sacred trust.
When I read Rose Horowitch’s “The Age of Reading is Over” in a recent issue of The Atlantic, I knew I wanted share this essay in response. She is right: reading habits are changing. But even though that is true, it is also true that people are still reading. They’re reading alone and they’re reading with other people. Book sales and book clubs are strong. That’s because when people read together, whatever they may choose to read, and share stories with each other, in whatever medium they choose, they create bonds that tie them together for the whole of their lives.
Through our year of reading Middlemarch together, my reading partners and I formed new yet equally indelible connections like the one I had – have – with the person who first put the book in my hands.
And through my year in Middlemarch without her, I continued to learn life lessons from my best teacher – my mother.
