The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot by Angus Wilson

First published: 1958

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: London, an Eastern capital, and southern England

Principal Characters:

• Meg Eliot, the protagonist, a forty-three-year-old society woman
• Bill Eliot, her husband, a successful barrister
• David Parker, her older brother, the owner of a nursery business
• Lady Viola Pirie, a friend of Meg
• Tom Pirie, her son
• Poll Robson, a lively friend of Meg
• Jill Stokes, Meg’s bitter widowed friend

The Novel

The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot deals with the difficult adjustment of a popular, elegant English society woman to the loss of a beloved husband and to the subsequent loss of home, income, friends, and even identity. In the first section of the book, appropriately called “Humpty Dumpty,” Meg Eliot is introduced in all of her splendor: managing committees, collecting porcelain, giving parties, and preparing to accompany her successful husband on a business trip to the East. Even her apprehensions about travel, intensified by the solitary expanses of the desert, which is below them for hours, and her husband’s admission that he deeply regrets their having no children do not seriously affect her consciousness of being one of the fortunate. When they stop in a Far Eastern airport restaurant, in an instant her life is shattered. Heroically throwing himself in front of a high government official whom he admires, Bill foils an assassination attempt but loses his life. During her stay with the British consul and his wife, Meg has her first realization of her new isolation, as well as her first experience of powerlessness, when she attempts in vain to interfere in the process by which the conspirators are summarily hanged.

Back in England, Meg must face the fact that her husband, a frequent gambler, has left her little but debts. It is clear that she must sell her house, her furnishings, even her beloved porcelain collection. Although her husband’s best friend and her brother David Parker offer her financial help, Meg is determined to make a life for herself. Confident that her powers of persuasion, the charm which has melted dowagers and businessmen alike, will ensure her a pleasant job, Meg discovers that without her money and prestige, charm is not effective. Realizing that she has nothing in common with her rich and influential friends, she cuts herself off from them, retaining only the three “lame ducks,” women without husbands like herself, to whom she had been patronizingly kind and with whom she now feels comfortable. While she takes a secretarial course, she participates in the lives of her friends. Living with Lady Viola Pirie, she is urged to marry again in order to reclaim her lost status, but after young Tom Pirie interprets her friendliness as a sexual invitation, Meg moves out. Attending Poll Robson’s parties, Meg recoils from Poll’s solution to a widow’s problems: the using of friends and sexual partners for financial survival. At last, Meg turns to her bitter, honest friend Jill Stokes, and for a time they are happy together. When, however, Meg quite naturally attempts to reconcile Jill with her son-in-law, she is attacked by her friend, who clearly is living only for her hatred of him and for her memories of a dead husband. Physically and emotionally exhausted, Meg cannot leave, as she has been requested to do, and Jill summons David to take her away.

Suffering from shock as well as illness and worn out by her plucky self-sufficiency, Meg welcomes the peace of David’s rural home, and David, whose longtime male lover has recently died, finds himself drawing closer to Meg than ever before. In order to map her course for the future, Meg needs a period of reflection, a period in which she can accept herself, meddlesome, charming, courageous, and well-meaning as she is. In the large, complicated business and household of her brother, she must fit into a situation in which she cannot dominate, without losing her own self. Furthermore, during this time, she must go back with her brother into their unstable childhood, which has caused them to feel present loss so much more keenly. At the end of the novel, to David’s keen disappointment, Meg leaves to take a secretarial job, simply because she realizes that he is becoming too dependent upon her. For the first time in her life, she has come to know another human being fully, and for the first time in her life, she has relinquished her own ease for the sake of another.

The Characters

Because the two major characters of the novel are Meg Eliot and her brother, Angus Wilson largely limits his psychological revelations to them, revealing the other characters through dialogue and through the eyes of Meg and David. Although their personalities are very different—Meg effervescent and theatrical, David scholarly and private—they have both responded to a childhood with which they have not yet come to terms. Deserted by their father, herded from town to town by their mother as her little genteel business ventures failed, one after another, conscious of their poverty, both harbor a resentment of their past and a desperate need for security in the future. After her husband’s death, Meg thinks, “Bill was lost to her; and she was lost to loneliness, back where she had started, lying alone in some country hotel room....”

David, on the other hand, has been accustomed to loneliness, which his beloved partner Gordon Paget had insisted was the human condition. While David had for many years been forbidden sexual intimacy with his lover Gordon because of Gordon’s Christian beliefs and therefore had come to accept a hopeless, partial relationship, Meg had assumed that the seeming intimacy of her ideal marriage was the reality. Only after Bill’s death does she realize that Bill was unhappy in his corporate practice, which he undertook in order to make more money for her, and desperately worried about their financial instability and his own health, even gambling in the hope of making enough money to leave her secure. Learning this, Meg must deal with guilt, remembering her extravagance, and with fear, remembering how much she did not know. When her relationships with Tom and with Jill turn sour, she is in danger of accepting their indictments of her, thereby destroying herself. In a sense, then, her task is to understand herself without rejecting herself.

For David, whose life for so long revolved around Gordon, the task is to find new interests. It is ironic that this man, who has never liked women, finds his new love in the sister whom he has never really known. Her zest for life and her impelling curiosity draw David out of himself at a time when it would be easy for him to retreat forever. Yet when he begins to give up his own interests for her, Meg realizes that she must withdraw to a safe distance, so that he can live his own life despite his love for her.

The other characters of the novel, while clearly differentiated, are important primarily in relation to Meg and David. Thus, Meg comes to realize that the seemingly secure and dominant Bill was vulnerable, just as later she sees that Tom Pirie, seemingly so shy, is coarse and aggressive, and that Jill Stokes, who appears truly to love Meg, is selfish and vicious when her emotional world is disturbed. David’s Gordon is less fully realized. Too Christian for intimacy with David, he has instead indulged in casual promiscuity, which is easier to handle within the church structure; devoted to his menagerie of pets, he has them gassed rather than finding them what might be imperfect homes. To David, Gordon has been godlike, saintlike, worthy to be the center of his life. To a less partial observer he is, while certainly brave, a man who uses Christianity to justify his arrogance and his detachment. After Gordon, David needs the joyful warmth of his sister.

Critical Context

The third novel of one of Great Britain’s most distinguished contemporary writers, The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot is more limited in scope and characters than such works as Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and the complex family saga No Laughing Matter (1967). Still, partly because of the tightness of its structure and partly because of the successful characterization of Meg and David, it is one of Wilson’s most admired books.

Although his various novels differ sharply from one another, Wilson is preoccupied with the problem of evil, internal and external, but as an agnostic liberal humanist, he cannot suggest the traditional religious solutions. In some of the later novels, such as The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) and As if by Magic (1973), there is a clear conflict between good and evil, in which sides must be chosen. In The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, on the other hand, the evil is unavoidable and external. After death comes to Gordon and to Bill, the question is what David and Meg are to do with themselves. Certainly they must make moral choices; certainly David must defeat his tendency to withdraw from life and Meg must rise above her smug meddlesomeness. Yet, because neither society nor individuals are possessed by evil in The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, and because in this novel triumph over the evil within can come through the classical combination of will and knowledge, this is one of Wilson’s most optimistic works, with one of the most admirable heroines in twentieth century literature.

Bibliography

Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction, 1977.

Gransden, K. W. Angus Wilson, 1969.

McSweeney, Kerry. Four Contemporary Novelists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, V. S. Naipaul, 1983.

Wilson, Edmund. The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1960, 1965.