{"id":69525,"date":"2014-04-10T14:56:30","date_gmt":"2014-04-10T18:56:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=69525"},"modified":"2014-04-10T16:47:17","modified_gmt":"2014-04-10T20:47:17","slug":"new-candor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/10\/new-candor\/","title":{"rendered":"New Candor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Mead, Jill Lepore, and a new direction for biography.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"George_Eliot_7\"<\/a>

A portrait of George Eliot by Frederick William Burton, 1864.<\/p><\/div>\n

Feminism, Paula Backscheider explains in Reflections on Biography<\/i><\/a>, transformed the study of history. \u201cThe arresting power of women\u2019s deepest feelings, their comments about their own bodies, and the stark force of their drive to work\u201d are part of the new candor, she says. And there are new things to consider: \u201cHow do you do justice to boundary-breaking acts, such as learning to read, or, as with [George] Eliot, not<\/i> marrying?\u201d<\/p>\n

It was thanks to feminism that the relationship between biographer and subject took on a new life\u2014for women to tell other women\u2019s stories, they had to find ways to reconstruct those women\u2019s lives. Ordinary women and their domestic lives became respectable subjects. Their diaries, letters, photographs, and other records could be taken seriously as evidence. Minor details, even in non-events, nuance the undertaking.<\/p>\n

Reading Rebecca Mead\u2019s intimate and scholarly My Life in Middlemarch<\/i><\/a>, her memoir about George Eliot\u2019s masterpiece, got me thinking about this shift in biography. What is it that compels one woman to explore the work and personality of another, often with centuries between us\u2014and what are we trying to say? <\/p>\n

Mead grew up in southwestern England, in a provincial town not unlike Eliot\u2019s Coventry or the town of Middlemarch itself. And like Middlemarch<\/i>\u2019s heroine Dorothea Brooke, she too longed to escape the \u201cprovincialism of the soul.\u201d For Mead, Middlemarch<\/i> became representative of growing into one\u2019s intelligence and, through it, outward into the larger world of ideas.<\/p>\n

My Life<\/i> eloquently tracks between Mead\u2019s experiences and Eliot\u2019s. This kind of approach is on the upswing. It has become acceptable to use your experiences as a lens through which to understand another writer. What emerges most powerfully in My Life<\/i> is not Middlemarch<\/i>, but Mead herself\u2014it\u2019s her sympathetic gaze, her<\/i> connection to Eliot and her masterpiece, that hooks us. Joyce Carol Oates called Mead\u2019s book a bibliomemoir (\u201ca subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography\u201d) in the vein of Nicholson Baker\u2019s U and I<\/i>, Geoff Dyer\u2019s Out of Sheer Rage<\/i>, and Phyllis Rose\u2019s My Year of Reading Proust<\/i>. However you slant it genre-wise, My Life<\/i> is scented with the same close readings, scholarly elbow grease, forensic evidence collection, and leap-of-faith search for character and motivations that characterizes all serious\u2014if formally now fluid\u2014literary biographies.<\/p>\n

My Life <\/i>follows on the heels of Jill Lepore\u2019s Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin<\/i><\/a>, which reconstructs the stunted but brilliant sensibility of Ben Franklin\u2019s sister through a miscellany of sources. Unlike the wildly prolific, well-archived, and canonized Eliot, Jane only produced a sixteen-page Book of Ages that she fashioned herself, and which recorded the births and deaths of her children. Scant letters remain. \u201cIt explains what it means to write history not from what survives but from what is lost,\u201d Lepore says, emphasizing that she was writing not only a biography but \u201ca meditation on silence in the archives.\u201d Jane\u2019s accomplishments, compared to Ben\u2019s, were few: \u201cHe signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. She strained to form the letters of her name.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s emerging in biographies of women, as both Mead and Lepore demonstrate, is another way of looking at the facts. In her 1985 essay, \u201cFact and Fiction in Biography,\u201d the critic and biographer Phyllis Rose points out that as novels increasingly embrace fact, biographies increasingly try to embrace fiction. Facts, or the lack of them, can tilt you in different directions. Eliot has been amply written about, and Jane Franklin not at all. Mead telescopes the multitude of facts available on Eliot in ways that bring clarity to Eliot\u2019s domestic life and her attitudes\u2014all of which, Mead shows, illuminate the intentions of Middlemarch<\/i>\u2019s characters.<\/p>\n

Lepore does the opposite: leaning on public records, Ben\u2019s writings, newspapers, and Jane\u2019s surviving letters, she recreates the world Jane Franklin lived in and then puzzles together the shards of information to fill in the facts. She guesses at what Jane read through her allusions to events in the papers, to sermons, and to political events leading up to the American Revolution. Lepore also makes it clear that her technique \u201cborrows from the conventions of fiction.\u201d She dwells on Jane\u2019s girlhood silence instead of treating it as an obstacle. And she takes a magnifying glass to Jane\u2019s letters, seeing a jab in the closing salutation to Ben\u2019s wife: \u201cyour Ladyships affectionat Sister & most obedient Humble Servant.\u201d (Jane usually signed off with \u201cYour loving Sister.\u201d \u201cMust she curtsey?\u201d Lepore asks.) We get a sense of Jane\u2019s capacious and frustrated intellect in her recipe for crown soap<\/a>. It is four pages long. \u201cThere is a good deal of Phylosephy in the working of crown soap,\u201d Jane tells Ben, who requested it for his autobiography. Their father was a soap boiler, and this was the secret recipe.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

It takes a certain combination of diligence and restraint for a woman to write about another woman. Perhaps she fills your imagination, and perhaps you lose your impartiality. But so what. What makes Lytton Strachey\u2019s Eminent Victorians<\/i> a delightful example of the biographer\u2019s art, Rose observes, is its \u201culterior intentions, its deliciously wicked absence of impartiality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lepore and Mead, both dogged researchers, stick to the facts, but it\u2019s the way they stick to them that betrays their biases. Both sort through nuances in their subjects\u2019 correspondences in an effort to correct or expose. Mead is eager to correct a literary misreading or shortsighted approach to the work, and Lepore exposes the intellectual slights and social injustices that Jane endured. Their<\/i> sensibilities undergird the narratives.<\/p>\n

Such devotion is common with women, Backscheider observes: \u201cWomen often bring an overt intensity to the writing of lives about women that seems rather rare in male biographers.\u201d Because women need to be discovered, they depend on other women to tell their stories. The two are in it together. And because the relationship is more equal, there\u2019s reciprocity to it. These days, the biographer is a meaningful participant in the telling of a life, a trend that has shifted dramatically in the past century. The Bloomsbury men\u2019s group believed the writer\u2019s voice should predominate, until the New Critics demanded an \u201cobjective history presented in neutral tones,\u201d at which point the biographer went invisible. Feminism brought the biographer back, Backsheider says.<\/p>\n

Mead at first appears very much a subject of her own, though the more you read, the more you realize that she herself is a trope. Like Eliot, Mead longed to escape a provincial coastal town in England and build an intelligent, book-centric life. Mead\u2019s frankness about these longings makes you wonder: If she\u2019d married young, rather than in her mid-thirties, would she understand Eliot\u2019s concerns about being a single woman in her thirties in quite the same way? If Mead hadn\u2019t been compelled to sort out her feelings about caring for another man\u2019s children, just as Eliot had, perhaps she\u2019d have given short shrift to Eliot\u2019s maternal feelings, and the ways in which they played out in her life and work. Mead transforms Eliot from a canonical writer to a woman with an urgency of feelings, a whip-sharp intelligence, psychological acuity, and self-possession that deepened over time and through her relationships. As is the fashion with many women\u2019s biographies, Mead takes Eliot out of the grand dame spotlight and shapes her into a social being.<\/p>\n

In the epistolary relationship between Ben and Jane Franklin, Lepore\u2019s feelings about the inequities between the siblings come bitingly across. \u201cA correspondence really is a kind of account, and not without its price,\u201d Lepore says tellingly. Back in the eighteenth century, the recipient paid the postage. That is, unless you were Ben Franklin, deputy postmaster general of America. Because Jane was poor, and had to cover the cost of Ben\u2019s letters, he warns her not to write. She asks to have their letters franked (prepaid), but he refuses and offers to reimburse her. It\u2019s all a little thoughtless\u2014you feel outrage at the slight. \u201cHe received her letters, but the letters themselves are lost,\u201d Lepore says witheringly, an undercurrent of emotion beneath the facts. In a letter, he lists the six letters she sent him that year, all unceremoniously discarded. His four letters to Jane, of course, survive.<\/p>\n

Mead, meanwhile, is adept in her treatment of Eliot\u2019s famously bad looks. Mead is protective of Eliot; she spends a lot of time reflecting on other people\u2019s perceptions of her. \u201cShe is magnificently ugly,\u201d said Henry James, who famously called Eliot a horse-faced bluestocking. Mead finds a more beautiful aspect: She wore black velvet (gauche for unmarried women), she held her own among first-rank politicians and authors. And Mead scrutinizes what Backscheider describes as \u201cwomen\u2019s\u201d evidence: an oil painting, a watercolor, a photograph, a pen-and-ink drawing. No doubt these are not flattering images, but Mead drily remarks that one chalk drawing of Eliot exposes her as, well, middle-aged<\/i>. She ponders that for a bit, along with the fate of all women who in their forties begin to lose their ironed looks. Then, in a masterful move, she angles back to Middlemarch<\/i>\u2019s Lydgate, the doctor for whom, like Eliot\u2019s would-be lover Herbert Spencer, beauty was sine qua non<\/i>. Lydgate, of course, chooses the wrong woman, a shallow blonde rather than the woman with ideas. With this subtle reckoning, Mead feeds us an ironic twist and a new way of seeing. After all, Henry James and others fell in love with Eliot within minutes of hearing her speak, Mead counters. She feels defensive on Eliot\u2019s behalf, and hints at what might be construed as Eliot\u2019s self-defense: \u201cI feel that way especially about representations of women,\u201d Ladislaw says to a friend, about the deficiencies in paintings, in Middlemarch<\/i>, \u201cAs if a woman were a more colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone.\u201d<\/p>\n

If women are tireless investigators of one another\u2019s lives and motivations, they\u2019re twice so when looking at other women\u2019s romantic dealings. \u201cEdward Mecom was either a bad man or a mad man,\u201d Lepore decides. \u201cEvery one of Jane\u2019s children who had children named a child after her. Not one of them named a child after their father.\u201d Lepore is an astute observer of silence. The fact that Jane never mentioned her husband until he died, while certainly able to express plenty of emotion about her children and about the books she read, suggests the marriage was a wash. \u201cMarrying the man she did, when she did, determined the whole course of Jane Franklin\u2019s life. Marriage determined the whole course of every woman\u2019s life,\u201d Lepore says.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince marriage is so often the context within which a woman works out her destiny, it has always been an object of feminist scrutiny,\u201d Phyllis Rose explains in her prologue to Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages<\/i>. And while marriage is a perfectly good hinge around which to elucidate a life, writing about domestic life is fraught. \u201cTo write about women it was necessary to write about compromise and failure and to acknowledge that tragedy can be enacted in a bourgeois setting,\u201d Rose says, nodding to George Eliot\u2019s portrait of Dorothea Brooke.<\/p>\n

Mead is attentive to all the varieties, shades, and failings of love in Middlemarch<\/i>. \u201cWe each have our own center of gravity, but must come to discover that others weigh the world differently than we do,\u201d she writes, recognizing that the marriage between Casaubon and Dorothea is at the heart of what Middlemarch <\/i>teaches us about sympathy. \u201cThroughout Middlemarch<\/i>, Eliot has shown from different angles the demands that marriage makes,\u201d Mead says as she considers the trials of young love, the \u201cunbridgeable distance\u201d between Dorothea and Casaubon, and the \u201cromance of enduring love.\u201d Mead also battles critics who find Ladislaw undeveloped, and suggests that his role might be \u201cto show us what it is like to be fallen in love with<\/i>\u2014the delight of discovering oneself to be the object of love.\u201d If this is what Eliot needed him for, perhaps that\u2019s enough.<\/p>\n

But the most sincere love story, Mead impresses on us, is the uncommon arrangement between Lewes and Eliot. Their liaison deserves the attention, and the admiration, that Mead pays to it, given the notoriety Eliot received for flouting social convention and for not <\/i>marrying. It proved she had mettle. Eliot benefited from a power dynamic that fed her creativity: Lewes encouraged her to try writing a novel and provided her with a supportive working environment. He left Eliot alone to write a death scene one evening, after which she writes, \u201cWe both cried over it, and then he came up to me and kissed me, saying \u2018I think your pathos is better than your fun.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as it is clear that without Edward Mecom, Jane Franklin might have amounted to something, it\u2019s equally clear that without George Lewes, George Eliot might never have tried her hand at fiction. What does it mean<\/i> to spend years with someone? Perhaps you want to get wrapped up in someone. Could this be what women are after, when writing about other women? Certainly you have a job to do, but perhaps you also have a commitment of caring. Giving women their due in history creates a kind of historical empathy, with the expectation that someone else might give us the same time and attention one day.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want people to feel with us, more than to act for us,\u201d Eliot wrote to a friend, says Mead. Eliot took her readers seriously, and Mead suggests that we take ourselves seriously, too. \u201cI have grown up with George Eliot,\u201d she explains. \u201cI think Middlemarch<\/i> has disciplined my character. I know it has become part of my own experience and my own endurance.\u201d Our subjects give us something, too.<\/p>\n

On June 2 at Housing Works Bookstore, Diane Mehta will launch a VIDA roundtable on literary biography with Jill Lepore, Rebecca Mead, Ruth Franklin, and Salamishah Tillet. Follow her @DianeMehta.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Mead, Jill Lepore, and a new direction for biography. Feminism, Paula Backscheider explains in Reflections on Biography, transformed the study of history. \u201cThe arresting power of women\u2019s deepest feelings, their comments about their own bodies, and the stark force of their drive to work\u201d are part of the new candor, she says. And there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":584,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7555],"tags":[199,13501,1102,6432,13499,3635,13500,12722,11578],"class_list":["post-69525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-history","tag-biography","tag-book-of-ages","tag-feminism","tag-george-eliot","tag-jane-franklin","tag-jill-lepore","tag-my-life-in-middle-march","tag-phyllis-rose","tag-rebecca-mead"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe New Candor of Literary Biography<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Diane Mehta on Rebecca Mead, Jill Lepore, and a new direction for biography.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/10\/new-candor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"New Candor by Diane Mehta\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 10, 2014 \u2013 Rebecca Mead, Jill Lepore, and a new direction for biography. 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