George Eliot (12 page)

She ends the letter with a resounding fanfare of self-justification. If Robert had any doubts about the fundamental shift in Mary
Ann’s beliefs, he had only to notice the absence of the usual Evangelical references – to God, to heaven, to the Scriptures – and the substitution of language borrowing from (though not necessarily endorsing) Charles Bray’s Necessitarianism and Cara Bray’s Unitarianism. ‘As a last vindication of herself from one who has no one to speak for her I may be permitted to say that if ever I loved you I do so now, if ever I sought to obey the laws of my Creator and to follow duty wherever it may lead me I have that determination now and the consciousness of this will support me though every being on earth were to frown upon me.’
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Robert Evans was unmoved. A few days later he told Lord Aylesford that he would soon be going back to the cottage at Packington and a week after that he put the lease of Bird Grove with an agent. In response, Mary Ann decided to go into lodgings in Leamington and look for a job as a governess. Mrs Pears promised to go with her to help her settle in. With Mary Ann’s obvious erudition it might seem as though any family would be delighted to employ her. But her unorthodox religious views were not obvious recommendations for a post in a provincial middle-class home. And even if she did manage to find one, the unhappy example of Maria Lewis meant that she was under no illusions about the hardship of a governess’s life, with its ‘doleful lodgings, scanty meals’. Still, anything was better than the current ‘wretched suspense’.
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In the end Mary Ann never got to Leamington. By the middle of March Isaac had given up ‘schooling’ and started mediating and the situation looked as though it might be resolved. Cara Bray reported the whole sequence of events in a letter written to her sister Mary. She tells how she had met Mary Ann in the street and had noticed ‘a face very different from the long dismal one she has lately worn’.
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The reason for the change of mood was that Isaac had sent a conciliatory reply to the letter she had written to her father explaining her motives. In this, Isaac accepted that Mary Ann had no wish to upset the family and acknowledged that she had been treated ‘very harshly’ simply for wanting to act according to her principles. He stressed that ‘the sending her away’ was entirely Robert’s idea and had nothing to do with money, but arose simply because ‘he could not bear the place after what had happened’. Isaac then finished the letter by
‘begging’ Mary Ann not to go into lodgings, but to come to stay at Griff instead, ‘not doubting but that Mr Evans would send for her back again very soon’. In the meanwhile, explains Cara, Mr Evans has taken Bird Grove off the market and will stay there until Michaelmas, ‘and before that time we quite expect that his daughter will be reinstated and all right again’.
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But Cara was jumping ahead, perhaps because, despite what she publicly protested, she felt responsible for Mary Ann’s religious rebellion and wanted to reassure herself that no great harm had been done. Certainly Griff provided a welcome and welcoming interlude for Mary Ann, who was delighted not only with Isaac’s new friendliness towards her, but also with the way in which old acquaintances greeted her cheerfully, despite knowing all about her unfortunate position. However, according to a letter she wrote from there on 31 March, nothing had really changed: Robert Evans was pushing ahead with improvements on the Packington cottage, where he presumably intended to live alone. Agonised by the lack of clarity about her own future, Mary Ann swung between defiant assertion and indirect pleading, declaring vehemently to Mrs Pears that she did ‘not intend to remain here longer than three weeks, or at the very farthest, a month, and if I am not then recalled, I shall write for definite directions. I must have a
home
, not a visiting place. I wish you would learn something from my Father, and send me word how he seems disposed.’
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With the three weeks up, there was a small amount of progress to report. After an unexpected intervention from Isaac’s wife Sarah, Mr Evans had agreed that Mary Ann should return to live with him. The young Mrs Evans had explained to the old man that making Mary Ann’s material comfort dependent on a change of heart was the best way of ensuring she would never compromise. Doubtless Sarah had no intention of sharing or giving up Griff now that she was happily settled, and was keen to argue for reconciliation and a continuation of the
status quo
. But although Mr Evans had softened sufficiently to agree to take his daughter back, he still could not decide where they were to make their home. In Coventry she had become ‘the town gazing-stock’ and Evans was not certain whether he could bear the embarrassment of continuing to live there. His latest idea
was to move to what Mary Ann described gloomily as ‘a most lugubrious looking’ house in the parish of Fillongley, where Lord Aylesford was one of the chief landowners. This constant change of plan was sending Mary Ann to the brink: ‘I must have a settled home if my mind is to become healthy and composed, and I shall therefore write to my Father in a week and request his decision. It is important, I know, for him as well as myself that I should return to him without delay, and unless I draw a circle round him and require an answer within it, he will go on hesitating and hoping for weeks and weeks.’
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Presumably Mary Ann drew that circle and got a satisfactory reply. By 30 April she was back at Foleshill with her father. A bargain had been struck: she would accompany him to church while he would let her think whatever she liked during the services.

While the Evanses were sulking, conferring and writing letters to one another about money, Mary Ann’s Evangelical and dissenting friends stood by, ready to do what they could. Elizabeth Pears, Rebecca Franklin and the Sibree family displayed tact and sensitivity in their dealings with both Mary Ann and her father. Although disappointed that their clever young friend had turned her back on the faith which personally sustained them, they did not rush to condemn her. As people who set great store by the authority of individual conscience in deciding outward behaviour, they would never have urged her towards hypocrisy. At the same time, they were aware that much of the crisis was due to the inability of either Mary Ann, Robert or Isaac Evans to inhabit a world of uncertainty, tolerance and compromise. Their duty, as they saw it, was to hold the family together long enough for a workable solution to emerge.

In the middle of March Robert Evans called on the Franklin sisters and, bewildered and exasperated, complained that Cara Bray had badgered his daughter into becoming a Unitarian. Miss Rebecca quickly responded that ‘she did not think Mrs. B. had shown any disposition to proselytize’. Along with Elizabeth Pears she impressed upon the old man that disowning Mary Ann was wrong and that ‘the world would condemn him’.
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In the meantime the energetic Miss Franklin tried everything she could to reconvert her star pupil. She asked a clever, well-read Baptist minister friend to talk to the girl. He returned from their
encounter insisting, ‘That young lady must have had the devil at her elbow to suggest her doubts, for there was not a book that I recommended to her in support of Christian evidences that she had not read.’
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Next the Sibrees tried. In the small space of time she had known them Mary Ann had become attached to these pious, educated people who represented a family culture so different from her own. Mrs Sibree, an Evangelical Anglican, believed that ‘argument and expostulation might do much’ to bring Mary Ann back into the fold. For this reason she was careful to maintain a friendly welcome to the young neighbour. Mary Ann, for her part, was pathetically keen not to be rejected. ‘Now, Mrs Sibree, you won’t care to have anything more to do with me,’ she teased anxiously. ‘On the contrary,’ replied the older woman, ‘I shall feel more interested in you than ever.’
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First Mr Sibree himself tried to convince Mary Ann of the literal truth of the Gospels in a series of encounters so intense that Mary Ann was left shaking.
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Next Mrs Sibree asked the Revd Francis Watts, a professor of theology from Birmingham, to try. Watts was a highly educated man with a formidable grounding in the German biblical criticism that had done so much to cast doubt on the divine authority of the Scriptures. But he too confessed himself beaten, murmuring only, ‘
She
has gone into the question.’
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Despite the fact that the most subtle and clever men in the Midlands could not persuade Mary Ann to change her mind, on 15 May 1842 Robert Evans was able to record the end of the holy war: ‘Went to Trinity Church. Mary Ann went with me to day.’
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On the surface it seemed as if Mary Ann had done the very thing she had declared she would not – compromised her convictions for the sake of social respectability. But it was, as she began to see for the first time in her life, more complicated than that. Agreeing to attend church while keeping her own counsel involved giving up the glamour and notoriety of the past few months. At the height of the holy war she had written a letter to Maria Lewis in which she spoke of her realisation that the martyr is motivated by the same egotistical impulse as the court sycophant.
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It was gradually dawning on her that her high-minded rebellion had been fuelled by her old enemy, Ambition.

A month or so later there was another suggestion, this time in a letter written to Mrs Pears from Griff, that Mary Ann no longer believed herself fully justified in the actions she had taken: ‘on a retrospection of the past month, I regret nothing so much as my own impetuosity both of feeling and judging’.
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It was a conclusion which was to stay with her for the rest of her life, for decades later she told John Cross that ‘although she did not think she had been to blame, few things had occasioned her more regret than this temporary collision with her father, which might, she thought, have been avoided by a little management’.
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It was not that she believed her commitment to seek God outside a formal structure was mistaken, simply that she began to realise that she had other obligations no less important. Her needs as an individual had to be balanced against her duties as a daughter. Ultimately, what sustained humanity was not adhering blindly to a theory, political belief or religious practice, but the ties of feeling which bound one imperfect person to another. She would not give up her new beliefs for the sake of respectability, but she would forgo the glamour of shouting them from the roof-tops. She would endure people thinking that she had fudged her integrity if it meant that she could stay with the beloved father whom she had so deeply hurt. Far from giving up the authority of private conscience, she was stripping it of all its worldly rewards, including the glamour of being thought a martyr.

Eighteen months later, in October 1843, Mary Ann wrote out her fullest statement on the matter in the form of a letter to Sara Hennell, Cara’s elder sister, who had since become her best friend. By now she had had time to absorb and reflect upon the turbulence and pain of the holy war. Her personal feelings of regret had been broadened into the kind of generalised observation on human nature which would come to typify the wise, tolerant narrative voice of her novels. ‘The first impulse of a young and ingenuous mind is to withhold the slightest sanction from all that contains even a mixture of supposed error. When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.’ This soul, continues Mary Ann, believes that its new state of spiritual awareness more than compensates for the old world of error and con
fusion left behind. What’s more, it is determined to spread the good news by proselytising to all and sundry. A year or two on, however, and the situation appears quite different. ‘Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the
truth of feeling
as the only universal bond of union. We find that the intellectual errors which we once fancied were a mere incrustation have grown into the living body and that we cannot in the majority of causes, wrench them away without destroying vitality.’ Finally she broadens her argument, linking her own experience within the Evans family to a model of the world at large.

The conclusions Mary Ann drew from the holy war prepared the way for her response to the difficult situation, fifteen years later, of being the unmarried ‘wife’ of George Henry Lewes. Living outside the law, she was socially ostracised in the same way Robert Evans feared would result from her non-attendance at church. However, much to the chagrin of her feminist friends, she refused to be known by her single name and insisted on being called ‘Mrs Lewes’. She steered clear of giving support to a whole cluster of causes, including female suffrage, which might be supposed to be dear to the heart of a woman who had shocked convention by living with a man outside wedlock. This fundamental separation of private conscience from public behaviour was the founding point of Eliot’s social conservatism. The fact that she loved a married man might authorise her own decision to live with him, but it could never justify a wider reorganisation
of public morality. Family and community remained the best place for nurturing the individual moral self. Social change must come gradually and only after a thousand individuals had slightly widened their perceptions of how to live, bending the shape of public life to suit its new will. Revolution, liberation and upheaval were to have no place in Mary Ann’s moral world.