The Kite and the String by Alice Mattison

Author:Alice Mattison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-27T09:44:38+00:00

Research and reading may be invaluable in writing a novel, not only because they keep us from making mistakes, but because they may suggest story. An actual quarry has plenty of rock in it that will never be cut up and made into anything, and George Eliot, as she read about medicine—preparing herself to write about a young doctor practicing forty years earlier—read widely and wrote down what interested her, not knowing whether she’d use it or not. Sometimes she didn’t. In the quarry she noted controversies about such issues as how much doctors could charge and whether they might dispense drugs. Lydgate, a reformer, advocates new medical practices and refuses to dispense drugs, and the local doctors think he’s an incompetent snob.

Eliot also noted the changing understanding of typhus and typhoid fever, which had been considered one disease. Research took place in Paris, and we learn that Lydgate studied there.

Early in the book a young man, Fred Vincy, comes down with typhoid fever. Another Middlemarch doctor sees Fred but doesn’t take his illness seriously. Lydgate is called in, realizes what’s wrong, and treats it—and in the course of his many visits, he confers with Fred’s sister Rosamond, and they fall in love; she is the woman he marries. The facts about typhoid fever that Eliot had written down enable her not just to write accurately about the disease, but also to advance the story. We don’t know whether an idea for the plot came first and the information about typhoid second, or whether information she found suggested what might happen. But since she didn’t use everything she found, and since she read whole issues of medical journals, not just articles on subjects she’d already decided to write about, at least sometimes the information available seems to have helped her make up story. The more you learn about ways of life that are unfamiliar, the easier it will be to imagine the kind of trouble and fun your characters might get into.

The editor of the quarry doesn’t discuss when in the process of writing Middlemarch George Eliot wrote the quarry. It seems clear to me that she began writing the book before she wrote at least the second part of the quarry, which consists of list after list, like the ones I saw at the Houghton Library—plans for scene after scene. The lists refer to Dorothea from the first, and we know that Eliot wrote some of the Lydgate chapters before deciding to make her a character. So the second part of the quarry must have been written when she was no longer stuck. When she writes in her journal, “I have achieved little during the last week except reading on Medical subjects,” maybe she’s referring to the notes she took that make up the first part of the quarry—which would mean she began the entire quarry after she’d begun the book. She didn’t write about Dorothea in her journal for more than a year after that. Perhaps she turned

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