As she proceeded on to Oxford and then to New York and The New Yorker, marriage, and motherhood, she kept rereading it. She first read Middlemarch nearly three decades ago, when she was an “anxiously ambitious girl from a backwater town” in southwest England. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.“There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.” George Eliot could have written that. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve.

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