"Father's birthday. He would have been 96, yes, today; & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable."
The man about whom that was written was Leslie Stephen, an eminent-in-his-own-mind Victorian. (Was there any Victorian male who was not eminent in his own mind?) His daughter, who wrote those words in her diary, was Virginia Woolf.
I say this because it was also Virginia Woolf who famously called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." This seems plain and straight-forward, until one adds the knowledge that her father had himself written a book on George Eliot, a patronizing study of a famous novelist read not for her talents as a writer but because people felt they "should" read her.
Woolf is saying, "My father was not a grownup." She also writes in her essay "George Eliot" about "the late Victorian version of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than herself," again a veiled reference to the patronizing view of Eliot [and perhaps all women of talent, imagination, and intellect] as exemplified by her father's book.
"His life would have entirely ended mine," Woolf could admit in her diary. In her public writing, she all but called her father a child. It is a bittersweet revenge, but something that I think of often as I read American and British literature in the light of how that literature was received in its time and how it has withstood the tests of time.
In Middlemarch, George Eliot returns to the subject of pity, and how nothing kills love faster. Even Leslie Stephen picked up on this, when he wrote of Causabon, "No doubt there is a pathos in devotion to an entirely mistaken ideal." Little did Leslie Stephen realize he was writing his own epitaph.
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