Acknowledging George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Book Eight
The Real Beginning
A Lady Lost
Worse
A Lady Scorned
How it entered her mind is of little consequence. That it did, is.
As she neared completion of his work, The Key to All Mythologies, she left the quaint country house. If she married and had a son, he would inherit. But there was the dreadful Catholic question and she believed so much less.
Answers could not be dictated by dogma for if they could, everyone would be the same. Men and women would answer the same at every occasion.
Walking the country lane, she noticed the trees, some tall, stately, some short, round, each different leafed. In her mind, she sought to reconcile what she saw with what she was taught.
By chance, later in the day, the sun setting, she entered the library in Middletown. Seeking retreat, she spurned the public reading area and after wandering through the upper stacks, asked, without knowing why, if she could be admitted to the basement where the unwanted books were kept.
And that is where life came to her. In those deep recesses, she discovered the hidden histories, the pre-ancient texts, the cobbled scrolls, the earliest writings. Reading through the night, she discovered Hypatia murdered by the Christians, the teachings of the Gnostics lost in the destruction at Alexandria, the Great Library, and the absolute loss of the predecessor myth, the history, the story of the goddess who left the center of the galaxy to become the earth.
The key, she realized, to all mythologies, were the fact that they were doctored and stolen to hide the goddess whose story was the all story and when that great thought dawned upon her, she knew she would not marry the author of The Key to All Mythologies.
No, she would not return to his quaint country house nor would she become Catholic. She would not live to die. She would die to live.
~ Stephen J. Bergstrom
The Literary Fiction of Stephen J. Bergstrom 
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