Discovering George Eliot

I remember my mother telling me that she didn't appreciate SILAS MARNER until she read it as an adult. Maybe that's why George Eliot never made it on the reading lists for AP English in High School or for any of my liberal artsy classes throughout College. Or maybe it's a function of her gender, still working against her after all these years. Whatever the case, I had to wait until after college to discover her on my own, just as I had with Virginia Woolf and Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty.

I'd read SILAS MARNER and thought it good, but it's MIDDLEMARCH that has made  me a devotee, with its rich complexity of human experience, wrought in compassionate yet unflinching detail. And now, I'm reading MY LIFE IN MIDDLEMARCH, by Rebecca Mead, and finding there is so very much more to love about George Eliot as a person, too.

Her life is a reminder to me that lives can, do and have traveled many and varied roads, and that human beings change and grow and shift over time. In today's age of social media's curated lives, it's easy to fall back on the notion that there is a "right" kind of life to have - the kind portrayed in the media and then reinforced by our own hands through our culled and cropped and sanitized facebook posts. George Eliot was complicated and shifting, a brilliant, ugly, opinionated working woman, religious and then not, a stepmother of sorts, living for years with another woman's husband as if he were hers and his children were hers, a woman moving fiercely and confidently through a man's world, grabbing hold of her identity, opening herself to belief, experience, love, change. Her work is full to bursting with the varied truths of human life, forcing us to look at and understand a full tapestry of characters shaded in grays, not black and whites, characters whose lives are not writ large and grand but march in the middle (which I believe is the intent of that title).

I am tremendously excited by the prospect of reading her other works, more excited, at the moment, than I am about working on my own writing. Perhaps I am beset a bit by the humility that always overcomes me when I stand face to face with truly great literature, and then look back at the dwarfed image of my own work. But writers read, and become better writers in the process, and I can think of no better mentor, just now, than George Eliot, nee Mary Ann Evans.

Inspiration from Mentors

A few nights ago, a friend offered free tickets to hear Margaret Atwood and Ursula LeGuin speak here at Portland's gorgeous Arlene Schnitzer concert hall as part of the Literary Arts series here in town (which used to be called "Arts and Lectures" back in the day). The concert hall is a huge space, and we were, understandably, way up in the nose-bleed seats. On the stage were two armchairs and a small table with a pitcher of water and two glasses. In other words, it was an intimate arrangement in a cavernous setting.

I was prepared to feel disconnected and distant, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Atwood and LeGuin established a warm and personal rapport that somehow managed to climb up into the rafters and span across the wide, ornate concert hall as if we were all just a bunch of friends sitting in a room together. But beyond that, for the roughly two hours we were there, I had the feeling I was meeting with mentors - smart, creative women who had seen a thing or two, who had opinions, and who knew what it was to struggle in the dark to illuminate a story that hadn't yet been called into existence.

It got me thinking about the power of mentors. Whether they are people you know personally or writers you've never met whose work you admire, it makes a difference when you have someone who feels like an elder of your particular tribe, who knows the journeys, who can serve as a guide, point the way, honor the struggles, share their wisdom.

There are a lot of "mentor programs," but the best mentors I have had are never assigned or named as such. They emerge from the relationships I have. With women, it can be a strange and challenging thing to honor someone as a mentor. I worry that I will offend them by pointing out the fact that they are older than me. But the older I get, the more I love talking with older women who are smart and creative and can help show me the way.

Who are your mentors? How have they changed over time? How did you find them?