Unexpected events had brought me graveside: when I was thirty-two, my fifty-seven-year-old mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t genetic; no one knew why she got it. We would, the doctors said, have three to nine more years with her. Everything wobbled. This knowledge raised questions against every part of my life: was this worth it? And this? And this? I was heading for children in the suburbs with the husband I’d met at nineteen, but this life, the one that so many people want, I doubted was right for me. I was trying to find my way as a writer, but jumping from genre to genre, not working out what I most wanted to say, and not taking myself seriously enough to discover it, even. Who do you tell when you start to feel these things? Everything seemed immovable. Everything seemed impossible. And yet I knew I had to change my life.

At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild. I was thirty-four and I wanted so much out of this new phase of my life: intense sexual attraction; soulmate-feeling love that would force my life into new shapes; work that felt joyous like play but meaningful like religion; friendships with women that were fusional and sisterly; talk with everyone and anyone about what was worth living for; books that felt like mountains to climb; attempts at writing fiction and poetry and memoir. I wanted to create a life I would be proud of, that I could stand behind. I didn’t want to be ten years down the wrong path before I discovered once more that it was wrong.

It’s hard to see her prostrating herself like this, in the sort of letter that you can—I have—want to write directly after a breakup. But even with the humiliation there are flashes of insight into the sort of person she is and of her very own brand of bravery, the one that lured Spencer to the coast in the first place. “Those who have known me best have always said, that if ever I loved any one thoroughly my whole life must turn upon that feeling, and I find they said truly,” she writes, not knowing yet how true that will turn out to be. “I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this,” she concludes, “but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious that in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar-minded women might think of me.” This sort of imperviousness to soi-disant correctness made her suffer in Victorian society, but it is also the quality that makes Eliot’s life attractive to us now. So many of the characters in her fiction maintain, and what’s more, cherish, their own point of view against the dumb groupthink of their communities. Even as Evans loses herself for love at the age of thirty-three, a corner of her mind holds on to the idea that she is worthy, always was, and always will be. “I suppose no woman ever before,” she writes, with a glint.

They had told almost no one in England, and fifteen years later, the “strong woman of the Westminster Review” going off with a “gallant” was still being gossiped about. When not seen as a fool she was thought a homewrecker: her brother Isaac broke with her, and many of her friends would too. Chapman wondered what he was supposed to say when people asked. “I have nothing to deny or conceal,” Evans wrote from Weimar. “I have counted the cost of the step that I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation by all my friends. I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself.” And they would be happy for more than twenty years, happier than most marriages, and happier perhaps because they weren’t yoked together by law—it was as if the choice they made every day to be together, despite the gossip, the excommunication, the cost (as Lewes still supported Agnes financially), made their not-marriage more than a marriage. She told her new London friend Barbara Bodichon—who herself was born out of wedlock—that she and Lewes had a satisfying sex life and used contraception so as not to have more children. She saw Lewes’s sons with Agnes as “our boys,” and over time all three young men became deeply attached to Evans.

Maggie is only made up but she helps her readers see something, change something. In 2001, Joan Didion defended her friend Elizabeth Hardwick’s book of essays about women writers and women characters, Seduction and Betrayal, from the New York Times reviewer’s objection that Hardwick had muddled up real and imaginary women. “That the women we invent have changed the course of our lives as surely as the women we are,” Didion snapped back in her introduction to the essay collection, “is in many ways the point of this passionate book.” This isn’t just a psychoanalytic point, but also a practical one. Women’s lives in particular have been curtailed by law, by custom, by inhibition too, and it takes the effort of imagining another sort of life before anyone can believe in it and live it. It is almost a political point: it was said that slavery was natural, even though it was clearly unjust, until it changed. It is said now that addressing the climate crisis is too costly, in all the different ways costs are calculated. It feels to me that the groundwork for those bigger shifts happens in tinier ways, in the attempt to imagine, say, a girl who acts according to her own feelings, even if she risks being misunderstood by those who love her.

Returning home and confessing is the path that costs her most. Elopement with Stephen would eventually have conferred respectability; marriage to Philip would have had a Romeo-and-Juliet-like poetic justice to it. As it is, the village places the blame on Maggie. She is a “designing bold girl” who stole her cousin’s fiancé, and it is to be hoped that she leaves—goes to America, or anywhere—and not “taint” their air any longer. “Life stretched before her as one act of penitence, and all she craved, as she dwelt on her future lot, was something to guarantee her from more falling: her own weakness haunted her like a vision of hideous possibilities, that made no peace conceivable except such as lay in the sense of a sure refuge.” There are moments in life where you shock yourself by what you want and what you’ve done, and they stop you from being able to trust yourself. You may not even be on the wrong path, but your ease in your own reactions has gone. You feel tired, crouched, mistrustful. That’s where Maggie gets to, but it’s not an entirely unhopeful place after all.

When Eliot first began to write fiction, she wrote that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” The best thing an artist achieves is “the extension of our sympathies.” And even if she doubted that at times, Middlemarch is proof that she didn’t give up on it: if her books were only a sandgrain, they were nevertheless a sandgrain. On rereading Middlemarch now, no longer a young woman hoping to get into Oxford but someone who’s been married and divorced, I can see more clearly that Dorothea is confusing a wish to better herself with marriage. “What a lake” Casaubon is, she thinks, “compared with my little pool!” I notice the signs of someone who doesn’t know herself yet, wanting something that could never suit her. In the opening scene of the novel, Dorothea and her younger sister Celia are splitting their dead mother’s jewels between them. Dorothea refuses to take anything, shuddering at what wearing a cross made of pearls “as a trinket” would do to her principles. But on opening a ring box they discover an emerald surrounded by diamonds, then notice a matching bracelet, and Dorothea conveniently remembers that “gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John,” and holds her hand up to the window so that the stones catch the light. “Yes! I will keep these.” She is not so immune to beauty as she thought; she is not so able to renounce luxury as she imagined. (She is deeply likable in this.) Along with other glimpses of Dorothea as she is, rather than how she claims to be, Eliot extends the reader’s sympathies further by giving us access to Casaubon’s feelings. He had dismissed love in favor of work, but as he got older he began to see marriage differently, as a solace: “Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was.” So much for the lake Dorothea saw in him! Before this, he could tell himself that true love would sweep him away when he found it, but now he can only suspect he’s not capable of it. I can imagine his disappointment now in a way I couldn’t when I was seventeen.

I used to want desperately to be a “proper” critic, to be taken seriously, to have a full command of history and theory, but I don’t want that anymore. I don’t want to “admire” writing for its erudition, I want to be changed by it. I want to know what it’s like to be someone else. I want to have that moment of recognition, finding something on the page I’ve felt but haven’t put into words. I don’t want just to accumulate knowledge but to be transformed by it, even if that transformation is tiny. Reading like this is at first about the possibility of changing your mind, but it can also be about changing the way you live, moving beyond what you already know, and letting that expansion affect how you live. Even at the size of a sandgrain, the shift is enough. You might speak up at the dinner table like Mary, or take up drinking wine and crying like Simone, or get up early to write like the character of Lenù in Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. You might try an open marriage or decide to have a child with a lover or determine to lie to get ahead. It is not about self-improvement but about freedom. And one of the ways you put on your freedom is by changing: becoming less of a feminist or more of one, writing more or something different or giving up altogether, gaining the courage to act according to your beliefs or condemning society from seclusion.

When I told my old boss I was getting divorced, she said: “Well, you did get married in a very desultory way.” I puzzled over the comment for a long time, but she had hit on something. I was missing joy, excitement, fun. It’s good to be sensible when you are investing your pension, but if desultory becomes your permanent mood? It seems obvious now, and I don’t blame my husband for it. In the years since my divorce, I have lighted on that blossomy, foamy feeling more often. I have found it more easily outside the sort of relationship where you share a bank account, thrash out Christmas plans, and discuss what’s for dinner. (That daily discussion about dinner was one of the things I hated most about being married, as I hadn’t yet found my own way of enjoying cooking and planning meals, let alone doing it jointly. It had been a question my mother asked me, and I was often stumped for an answer as a child: I knew we couldn’t have pizza every night.) With men who aren’t my husband, or who don’t want to be, I can stay up all night talking and drinking and listening to music and having sex. I can kiss on manicured lawns, drink prosecco in bed, read poetry at dawn, dance naked in heels, paint my lips red. And the question soon comes: can you make a life from this? Early intoxicating love is one thing, but what about dinner on a Tuesday in March? I was worried about replicating the things I found confining about being married. I had a beautiful home now, but did I know how to live in it with someone else? I was scared of getting trapped again, and I couldn’t see what possibilities there might be in a joint life.

But I was learning. I held a party for my summer birthday: I warmed pizza and chilled rosé and turned the patio into a jungly dance floor, going so late that the neighbors behind started yelling. We had Easter Sunday lunch around my dining table, my little brother cooking lamb, my father sneaking around the corner for potted daffodils, my mother quite ill but accepting the dinner spoon by spoon. I held brunch for Melanie and our university girlfriends, warming croissants and brewing coffee while their babies sprawled over the carpet, clutching my wooden spoons in their little fat hands. I made overnighting friends “divorce pasta”: a lemon and Parmesan spaghetti I’d made for myself so many times that I could give my full attention to what they were saying as I cooked. I rolled out my yoga mat in the mornings—it was Melanie, I think, with the wisdom earned from her own single years, who reminded me of what I could do with a yoga mat of my own—and I read on the sofa while dal bubbled on the stove. I cried in the bath, on the sofa, in the garden. I watched formulaic rom-coms. I danced in front of the bathroom mirror when I got back drunk. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to make a life, I discovered, it just wasn’t easy. I had to be patient, and I had to try new things, and have them fail sometimes. I had to work out what was right for me.