As a 20-year-old in 1986 I spent a year hitchhiking around western Europe, stopping to work in Belgium and Cornwall in order to fund each new leg of travel.  The year was rewarding in many ways, but one of the most enduring benefits was having the time to read 65 books, most of them novels.  In subsequent years I’ve sometimes let my reading slide, but that year of intense absorption in books in early adulthood gave me a reservoir of story which I still draw on as a writer.  

A subtle shift was taking place in my reading at this time.  Previously, I had tended, consciously or otherwise, to read with the aim of better understanding myself; now I was not only becoming more analytical about the craft of fiction but also more emotionally involved in the dilemmas of characters who were unlike myself.  Five more years would pass before I really understood the difference, and the book that clarified it for me was George Eliot’s Middlemarch. 

Middlemarch is a truly great novel (and one peculiarly suited to readers around the age of 25, I suspect).  It is full of interest, but what particularly fascinated me was the novel’s depiction of the marriage of the heroine Dorothea and the emotionally arid, elderly scholar Casaubon, particularly Casaubon’s attempt to extract a promise from Dorothea that after his death she will write the magnum opus he has spent his whole life researching.  The plea is both cruel and pathetic, yet later (at the end of Chapter 42) Casaubon seems briefly to understand that Dorothea deserves freedom: 

•   “Come, my dear, come.  You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.”
•   When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature.  She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together. 

I dislike the idea that fiction is for anything – that it functions as therapy for the writer, for instance, or as edification for the reader.  But while stories may not have a function they do have one powerful effect: the creation of empathy for others.  Eliot shows empathy in action, but by immersing us in the inner lives of her characters she also makes empathy a basic requirement for reading her work.  This has far-reaching effects, not just on individual readers (whose brains, I’d wager, are reconfigured by reading fiction) but also on the societies they’re part of.  Notoriously, many Nazis were connoisseurs of music and art, and yet novels were poison to them.  I’d go so far as to claim that the behind the great liberation movements of the last 200 years – the freeing of slaves, the universal franchise, decolonisation, the civil rights movement, feminism and equal rights for gays and lesbians and co. – there were people whose values were shaped by reading fiction.   

There should be more of it.

George Eliot, aka Mary Anne Evans