Fragments

Does anyone else feel like researching how biography informs the novel is like piecing together hundreds of little tiny fragments into a larger picture? It seems to me that every time I sit down to do research, I find another sentence here or there about "someone in Eliot's life who could have possibly inspired X/Y/Z" and then a longer explanation about what Middlemarch is as a book (thanks, read it, feel semi-comfortable with the plot). I'm not sure how to put these little snippets together into a more coherent picture. It's kind of maddening.