Recently, I read an article written by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker about one of her favorite writers, George Eliot. Mead had encountered a quotation attributed to Eliot that reads as follows, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” Mead thought that neither the wording nor the sentiment sounded like her understanding of George Eliot. So she set out to find the source of the quotation in Eliot’s writings, or to prove that Eliot didn't write it.
After many weeks of investigation, Mead was unable to find the quotation in any of Eliot's work. However, she did learn that it was first published less than a year after the novelist died in 1880. Eliot was famous for writing aphorisms and other quotable text, and this sentence, “It is never too late to be what you might have been,” was published with several other Eliot quotes. The other quotes were each linked to a specific work of Eliot’s, but this particular quotation was not. In the end, Mead had to confess that although she didn’t think the quotation sounded like the George Eliot she knew, she could neither prove not disprove conclusively that Eliot wrote it.
Mead’s suspicions about the quotation came from two directions. First, the sentence frankly sounded far too direct and simplistic for the famously verbose and subtle novelist. More importantly, Mead believes that the idea seems to contradict one of the key themes in Eliot’s most important work, Middlemarch.
The protaganist of that novel, a young woman named Dorothea Brooke, marries a much older man, a scholar whom she perceives to be a first-rate intellectual. To her great dismay and regret, after they marry, she comes to understand that her husband is engaged in tedious, obscure research for a multi-volume work of philosophy that centers on an equally-obscure thesis. In other words, he has been wasting his life toiling endlessly on a project of little merit and less interest to the rest of the world. Rather than being married to a brilliant scholar, Dorothea finds herself tied to a first-rate “ditherer.”
What Dorothea does with her life after this realization is much of the story of Middlemarch. In Rebecca Mead’s reading of the book, the theme is that life—rather than being the stuff of great deeds and great accomplishments and great love affairs—is instead quiet, routine, even dreary for many people. Unlike Jane Austen’s books in which the “best” people are rewarded with happy endings--usually marriage to someone both wealthy and exciting--Eliot’s characters, good and bad, have lives that feel more real. The people she writes about carry on and do the best they can, despite life’s disappointments or setbacks or unfulfilled dreams. In fact, Mead argues, what Eliot is celebrating is the heroism of living a life that doesn't fulfill all of your dreams.
Thus, as Mead says in her article, it seems unlikely that George Eliot would ever have written that “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” Instead, Eliot would more likely have argued that it is always too late to be what you might have been. She gives us characters whose heroism is defined not by the successes in their lives, but by their courageous and persistent efforts to live and to thrive within the realities of daily life, ordinary expectations and small happinesses.
