34 pages • 1 hour read
David BrooksThe Road to Character
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Love”
George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in rural Warwickshire, England to an upper middle-class family. While doted upon by her father and older brother, her mother, whose health was perpetually frail, insisted on sending the children to boarding school. At the time of her mother’s death, Mary Ann and her siblings were sent home; she seems to have loved fiercely from a young age, as she followed her father and brother, Isaac, around as constantly as she could. By her teenage years, feeling neglected by the men in her immediate family, the well-read and intelligent Mary Ann formed a series of friendships with intellectual couples, most of whom would invite her to live with them for a time, only to dismiss her once the scandal became unbearable. Mary Ann’s tempestuous romances with married men continued well into her twenties, which is when she began writing and editing.
Her desire to love and be loved finally met its match in George Lewes—a well-educated and eloquent society man who, although married, openly lived apart from the woman to whom he was legally married. Mary Ann and Lewes made the decision to be together in 1854, traveling abroad together in Europe as they began their life as, effectively, a married couple. As her first reader and devoted champion, Lewes encouraged Mary Ann’s talent for fiction, ensuring that her novels found publication under the name George Eliot. Even once the scandal that had plagued Mary Ann when her friends and family learned of her taking up with Lewes eventually became attached to her writing identity as well, Lewes remained by her side. The couple remained so devoted until death that each of Eliot’s six novels bore a dedication to Lewes. Once Eliot gave up casting about for love and committed to Lewes, she was able to attain her potential as a celebrated writer and thinker.
Chapter 7 Analysis
Until this point in the book, Brooks has not closely examined love as a theme. Because Eliot’s chief ambition from an early age was to find a partner who would be her match not just emotionally, but also intellectually, it drove her to make a series of increasingly desperate decisions as far as who she lived and associated with. Estranged from her father and brother, she eventually came to realize that a more tempered approach to seeking love and being loved was the key to happiness. This epiphany is reflected in both her partnership with Lewes and in her socially incisive, emotionally mature works of fiction, epitomized in her much-lauded Middlemarch: “When people behave on the basis of uncompromising individual desire, [Eliot] came to believe, they might set off a selfish contagion in those around them” (160). Eliot wrote about love, marriage, and both the joys and vagaries of human relationships with a nuanced insight unparalleled in the works of other Victorian writers.
Eliot and Lewes make for a fitting set of protagonists in a chapter devoted to the subject of love. Their commitment to one another throughout times of both hardship and celebration was as beneficial to them individually as it was to them as a couple. Without Lewes’ tireless encouragement and support, Eliot might never have found the confidence or the resolve to start writing novels. In turn, Lewes might never have found his soulmate; he was known for outward flippancy and shallowness, but Eliot brought out the best in him, revealing his depth of emotion and extraordinary character. Lewes, in turn, set Eliot’s restless heart at ease.
Few locations loom as large in the Western literary imagination as England, and Eliot spent her life between there and the European Continent. She and Lewes spent their time abroad socializing and exchanging ideas with some of Europe’s premier 19th-century writers. Their devotion and commitment to one another played out against one of the most romantic backdrops in history; their story as related by Brooks poignantly demonstrates that committed, complementary, selfless love is good for the soul.
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