George Eliot (13 page)

Nor did they have any in her fiction. George Eliot’s heroes and heroines may struggle against their small-minded communities, but in the course of their lives they learn that true heroism entails giving up the glory of conflict. Reconciliation with what previously seemed petty is the way that leads to moral growth. Romola, fleeing from her unfaithful husband Tito, is turned around in the road by Savonarola and sent back to achieve some kind of reconciliation. Maggie, too, returns to St Ogg’s after she has fled with Stephen and submits to the censure of the prurient townspeople. Dorothea’s fantasies of greatness end up in the low-key usefulness of becoming an MP’s wife.

The holy war cast a long spell not only over the fictions Mary Ann was to write, but over the intimate details of her daily life. None of her relationships would ever be quite the same again. On the surface, her friendship with Maria Lewis continued much as before. The first few letters of 1842 are lighter because more truthful. However, soon the correspondence starts to fail, spluttering on fitfully until Robert Evans’s death in 1849, but with a notable lack of candour on Mary Ann’s part. In a letter of 27 May she politely declares herself ‘anxious’ about whether Maria plans to visit, but prepares herself for the fact that Maria may be too ‘busy’ to reply immediately.
⁵⁸
What Mary Ann had perhaps not fully recognised was that Maria was lonely and reluctant to give up her friendship with a family which had so often provided her with a home during the holidays. In fact, Maria continued to visit Foleshill over the next few years, but there was an increasing sense that she was visiting the whole family (she had, after all, taught Chrissey too) and not just Mary Ann. And there are signs that Mary Ann found these visits an increasing chore. In a letter of 3 January 1847 Cara wrote to her sister Sara, ‘[Mary Ann] is going to have a stupid Miss Lewis visitor for a fortnight, which will keep her at home.’
⁵⁹
The nastiness of the tone is a surprise – Cara was a sweet-natured woman not inclined to hand
out easy snubs. More than likely she was repeating what she had heard Mary Ann say of the squinting, pious, middle-aged schoolmistress who refused to realise that she was no longer wanted.

The exact end of the relationship is not clear. Reminiscing after Eliot’s death, her friend Sara Hennell recalled that the estrangement had been ‘gradual, incompatibility of opinions, etc, that Miss Lewis had been finding fault, governess fashion, with what was imprudent or unusual in Marian’s manners and that Marian always resented this’. Certainly Maria had made a sharp comment about the unsuitability of Mary Ann hanging on to Charles Bray’s arm ‘like lovers’.
⁶⁰
Still, it was Mary Ann who made the decisive break when she demanded that Maria return all the letters she had written her. Understandably hurt, Maria said that ‘she would lend them her, but must have them returned’.
⁶¹
But once she had them in her possession Mary Ann reneged, citing the authority of a friend (probably Charles Bray) who told her that letters belonged to the writer to do with as she pleased. It is not entirely clear why Mary Ann wanted them. It may be that she felt the correspondence with Maria represented a part of her that had not so much been left behind as absorbed into a larger and more tolerant present. Gathering the letters may have been a way of recouping and qualifying the energy of the Evangelical years. Or perhaps Mary Ann still felt guilty about her less than straight dealing with Maria during the year running up to the holy war and wanted to regain control of the evidence of her hypocrisy. Or possibly she had simply outgrown this first important relationship with a person outside her family and wanted to mark its end. Significantly, she did not keep the letters but handed them over to Sara Hennell, the woman who had replaced Maria as her most intimate friend.

Mary Ann had no further contact with Maria Lewis until 1874, when she learned through Cara where she was living (in Leamington) and sent her a warm letter together with ten pounds – a practice she continued regularly until her death. Maria responded to the renewed contact with affection and admiration: ‘As “George Eliot” I have traced you as far as possible and with an interest which few could feel; not many knew you as intimately as I once did, though we have been necessarily separated for so
long. My heart has ever yearned after you, and pleasant it is truly in the evening of life to find the old love still existing.’
⁶²

Maria was quite right about knowing Eliot better than anyone. After the author’s death she found herself eagerly courted by biographers keen for recollections of those early years. Although she was happy to talk to Edith Simcox when she came calling in 1885, she was understandably more cautious about giving away more tangible pieces of the past. Although on the best of terms with John Cross and delighted with his
Life
, still she refused to let him publish the letter which Eliot had sent with that first ten pounds. Having been robbed of the correspondence that had meant so much to her, she was determined to keep this tiny scrap of her star pupil to herself.

Mary Ann’s other friendship from those schoolgirl Evangelical years – with Martha Jackson – also did not survive the change in her religious beliefs. Martha’s mother, noting a change in the tone of Mary Ann’s letters and also hearing rumours of what had happened, ‘expressed a wish that the correspondence should close’, fearing that her daughter might be led into infidelity. In fact, there was little chance of that. Martha remained defiantly orthodox until the end of her life, refusing to let John Cross use extracts from her correspondence with Mary Ann on the strange grounds that, since he was probably not a Christian, he could not be trusted with the material.
⁶³

From the beginning of 1840 Mary Ann’s relationship with her Methodist aunt and uncle had also been cooling. As her Evangelicalism waned her letters to Derbyshire became sporadic and more inclined to talk about family matters – moving houses, marriages, births. A visit to Wirksworth in June 1840 had dragged, partly, she said later, because ‘I was simply less devoted to religious ideas’.
⁶⁴
A final extant letter to Samuel Evans, written by Mary Ann three months before her refusal to attend church, uses echoes of the old language of orthodox faith to hint at her new independence from it. ‘I am often, very often stumbling, but I have been encouraged to believe that the mode of action most acceptable to God, is not to sit still desponding, but to rise and pursue my way.’
⁶⁵

Her growing certainty of her own beliefs and her corresponding tolerance of other people’s meant that in the years that followed
Mary Ann rediscovered her affection for her aunt and uncle. Mary Sibree recalled for John Cross how Mary Ann told her ‘of a visit from one of her uncles in Derbyshire, a Wesleyan, and how much she had enjoyed talking with him, finding she could enter into his feelings so much better than she had done in past times, when her views seemed more in accordance with his own’.
⁶⁶
Certainly by the time she came to write
Adam Bede
her antagonism towards orthodox ways of worship, particularly Methodism, had softened into an intuitive understanding of its value and meaning for people whose culture was now so very different from her own.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth and Samuel Evans never managed to extend that same understanding to their niece. Stories of her infamy became worked into the family inheritance. Their granddaughter remembered as a child being told by her mother that Mary Ann Evans was ‘an example of all that was wicked’. The Staffordshire branch of the family felt the same way. Well into the twentieth century, Mary Ann was still whispered about as a cousin ‘whose delinquency was an aggravated kind’.
⁶⁷

In the immediate aftermath of the holy war, Mary Ann had not yet developed the tolerance which would allow her to appreciate the value of views which were not her own. Nor did she have the social poise that would permit her to express that empathy gracefully. Thus it was awkward to discover on her return from Griff to Foleshill on 30 April 1841 that Elizabeth and Samuel Evans, together with William Evans, were making a visit. The next day was a Sunday and, keen to avoid conflict, Mary Ann took refuge at Rosehill, the Brays’ home. There, much to her delight, Cara let her look at the letters which her brother Charles Hennell had written to her while writing
An Inquiry
. At Rosehill, Mary Ann had found the spiritual and intellectual home that was to sustain her for the next eight years.

F
ROM NOW ON
Mary Ann spent every free moment with the Brays. Although Rosehill was less than a mile from Bird Grove, the contrast could hardly have been greater. While the Evans household was conservative, conventional and nominally devout, the Brays’ was radical, avant-garde and truth-seeking. Here was the perfect atmosphere for Mary Ann to explore her new beliefs and the emotional release that came with them.

At the time Mary Ann first went to Rosehill Charles Bray was at the height of his reforming zeal. Prosperous, young and boundlessly energetic, he pursued a bundle of good and forward-thinking causes in the city and beyond. A passionate advocate of non-sectarian education, he built a school for children from dissenting families who had been excluded from Anglican institutions. He campaigned for sanitary reform and set up a public dispensary. He ran an anti-Corn Law campaign. Other projects were more visionary than feasible. He built a teetotal Working Men’s Club to lure labourers away from pubs, set up an allotment scheme so that they could produce their own food and established a co-operative store to undercut local shop prices. Unfortunately, the working classes of Coventry did not share Bray’s ideas about
how they should live. Both the club and the gardening scheme failed through lack of support, while the store was forced to close by local shopkeepers determined to retain their monopoly.

Bray’s generosity and intellectual open-mindedness – many called it sloppiness – meant that he attracted friends easily. Rosehill had quickly become established as the place where any visiting reformer, philosopher or thinker could be assured of a warm welcome. Indeed, said Bray in the puffed-up autobiography he wrote at the end of his life, anyone who ‘was supposed to be a “little cracked”, was sent up to Rosehill’.
¹
During these years Mary Ann met virtually everyone who was anyone in free-thinking, progressive society. The socialist Robert Owen, the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mental health reformer Dr John Conolly were just a few of the people who took their turn sitting on the bear rug which the Brays spread out in the garden every summer. Here, under a favourite acacia tree, they spent long afternoons in vigorous debate, intellectual gossip and various degrees of flirtation.

For just as the Brays challenged conventional thinking in every area of life, so their attitudes to marriage and sexual love were markedly unorthodox. Nor was this openness confined to daring chat. As people who thought deep and hard about how to live, they had come to the conclusion that the monogamy demanded by the marriage vows did not suit human nature, or at least did not suit theirs. Although enduringly attached to one another, both had taken long-term lovers.

Just how this arrangement had come about, and how openly it was acknowledged by others, is obscured by the reticence which the couple were obliged to observe in order to remain active in Coventry public life. Indeed, the main account of their irregular marriage was written down in code and not untangled until the 1970s. The stenographer was the phrenologist George Combe, who examined Bray’s head for lumps and bumps in 1851 and concluded that his ‘animal’ qualities were impressively predominant. Probing further, Combe extracted the following confession from his friend: ‘At twelve years of age he was seduced by his father’s Cook and indulged extensively in illicit intercourse with women. He abstained from 18 to 22 but suffered in health. He married and his wife has no children. He consoled himself with
another woman by whom he had a daughter. He adopted his child with his wife’s consent and she now lives with him. He still keeps the mother of the child and has another by her.’
²

This makes sense of some odd references in Mary Ann’s letters to Cara Bray during May 1845. Writing from Coventry to her friend on holiday in Hastings, Mary Ann says reassuringly, ‘Of Baby you shall hear to-morrow, but do not be alarmed.’
³
A couple of days later she writes, ‘The Baby is quite well and not at all triste on account of the absence of Papa and Mamma.’
⁴
Whoever this baby was, it did not last long at Rosehill. A month later an entry in Cara’s diary suggests that the baby was removed from the household. Clearly this first attempt at adoption had not worked out. Baby’s real mother may have wanted her back or perhaps Cara, while dedicated to young children through her teaching and writing, did not take to this particular infant. An attempt the following year with another baby, sister of the first, was successful and this time the Brays adopted Elinor, known as Nelly. Over the years Mary Ann became attached to the girl and when news of her early death came in 1865 it touched her deeply.

The fact that the first baby had been returned to its mother suggests that the Brays’ family life did not run as rationally or smoothly as Charles liked to believe. Although the details are sketchy, it appears that for a time he tried to get the children’s mother, Hannah Steane, to live at Rosehill as nursemaid. One version has Cara accepting this, but changing her mind when Hannah produced an illegitimate son, named Charles after his father. Henceforth Hannah, now reincarnated as Mrs Charles Gray, wife of a conveniently absent travelling salesman, was established in a nearby house – into which Bray could slip discreetly – with her growing family, five excluding Nelly.
⁵

Cara’s answering love affair was more circumspect. According to a gossipy report from her sister-in-law in 1851, ‘Mrs Bray is and has been for years decidedly in love with Mr Noel, and … Mr Bray promotes her wish that Mr Noel should visit Rosehill as much as possible.’ Edward Noel was an illegitimate cousin of Byron’s wife, a poet, translator and owner of an estate on a Greek island. He was also married with a family. Whether he and Cara became physically intimate is not clear: one version maintains this was an unreciprocated passion. All the same, once Noel’s
wife died from consumption in 1845, the way was clear for him to become a familiar fixture on the edge of Rosehill life.
⁶

The Brays’ was the first of three sexually unconventional households which had a great impact on the young Mary Ann, whose romantic experience at this point was confined to a crush on her language teacher. Later she would find herself in a curious
ménage à quatre
with John Chapman, the publisher with whom she boarded in London during the early 1850s. And her subsequent dilemma over whether to live with George Henry Lewes was the result of his inability to divorce on the grounds that he had condoned his wife’s affair with another man.

It would be good to think that these open marriages were founded on a principled rejection of the ownership of one person by another, and in particular of women by men, of the kind which John Stuart Mill would set out in
The Subjection of Women
in 1869. But in fact there was more than a whiff of male sexual opportunism and hypocrisy about the various set-ups. Charles Bray, after all, maintained in public that ‘Matrimony is the law of our being, and it is in that state that Amativeness comes into its proper use and action, and is the least likely to be indulged in excess’,
⁷
yet he did not confine himself to adultery with Hannah. There were rumours that ‘the Don Juan of Coventry’ had previously enjoyed an affair with Mary Hennell, one of Cara’s elder sisters. And there was even a suggestion that he and Mary Ann became lovers at some point. Certainly Maria Lewis objected to the way the two clung together and Sara Hennell admitted after Mary Ann’s death that she had always disapproved of the girl depending too much on male affection – perhaps specifically on the affection of her brother-in-law.
⁸
Bessie Rayner Parkes, who was later to become one of Mary Ann’s best friends in London, certainly always believed that Mary Ann and Charles Bray had been lovers.
⁹

Cara Bray, too, was inconsistent on the question of marital fidelity. Although she allowed her husband to have affairs and was herself at least emotionally intimate with Edward Noel, she reacted with Mrs Grundy-ish horror when Mary Ann went to live with George Henry Lewes in 1854. For five years she refused to communicate properly with her friend, let alone to see her. That a woman as progressive and principled as Cara should
display such embarrassed confusion over sex outside marriage is a reminder of how deeply entrenched were codes of respectable behaviour – especially female behaviour – in even the most liberal Victorian circles.

Although the Brays’ attitude could seem contradictory, in other lights it was subtle and realistic. Just as Mary Ann had learned during the holy war that spectacular rebellion is often the result of wilful egotism, so the Brays realised that there was little to be gained by publicly embracing the open relationships advocated by their friend the socialist Utopian Robert Owen. They preferred to remain within society and work for its improvement, rather than withdraw to an isolated and principled position on its margins. Whether the world thought them scandalous or hypocritical did not concern them. It was this example of adherence to a complex inner necessity, regardless of how one’s behaviour might be interpreted, which Mary Ann now absorbed. It would stand her in good stead in the years to come when she lived with Lewes and, on his death, went through an Anglican marriage service with John Cross. Her apparent inconsistency bewildered family and friends. Isaac Evans was scandalised by the union with Lewes, but appeased by the marriage to Cross. Her old friend Maria Congreve, on the other hand, was serene about Lewes, but disappointed by what she perceived to be the hypocrisy of the 1880 wedding service. In these apparent switches of principle Mary Ann demonstrated her determination to live flexibly according to the fluctuations of her own inner life rather than in observance of other people’s needs and rules.

Whether Mary Ann actually had a physical relationship with Charles Bray remains frustratingly unclear. The fact that all her letters to him prior to 1848 have disappeared suggests that they were at least emotionally intimate and that someone wanted the evidence destroyed. But even if they were lovers, it was more than a sexual affair that was responsible for the blossoming of Mary Ann’s personality during these Rosehill years. The loving acceptance of Cara Bray and the intellectual companionship of Sara Hennell gave her a sense of being wanted – the first she had experienced since those early days with Isaac. Her young neighbour, Mary Sibree, recalled that ‘Mr and Mrs Bray and Miss Hennell, with their friends, were
her
world, and on my
saying to her once, as we closed the garden door [at Rosehill] together, that we seemed to be entering a Paradise, she said, “I do indeed feel that I shut the world out when I shut that door.”’
¹⁰

This new happiness permeated every part of Mary Ann’s being. Now she played the piano and sang in front of other people without bursting into tears. Instead of refusing to read novels, she argued for them on the grounds that ‘they perform an office for the mind which nothing else can’.
¹¹
She relaxed sufficiently about her appearance to allow Cara to paint her portrait – a sweet, flattering water-colour which fooled no one and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
¹²
She accompanied the Brays on holidays to other parts of the country and became a favourite with the friends and family they visited on the way.

With Mary Ann soaking up every new subject which the Brays pushed her way, it was inevitable that she should become interested in phrenology. The practice of bump-reading might seem like so much mumbo-jumbo now, but during the mid-nineteenth century it held considerable appeal for those who were trying to make connections between man’s physical constitution and his psychological processes. During a trip to London in July 1844 Charles Bray persuaded Mary Ann to have a cast made of her head – luckily it was no longer necessary to have one’s hair shaved off – and set about analysing its shape. Writing at the end of his life, and after hers, Bray naturally relied on
post hoc
knowledge to give his findings extra bite. In the following extract from his autobiography he creeps from phrenological ‘fact’ to interpretations of Mary Ann’s subsequent behaviour.

As Mary Ann’s willingness to contemplate phrenology suggests, her intellectual relationship with others softened during this
period. During the high drama of the holy war, the competitive Evangelical had given way to the combative free-thinker. Now, during the 1840s, Mary Ann began the long journey towards empathy and tolerance which was to mark the mature narrative voice of George Eliot. A passage from Bray’s autobiography describes her at the very beginning of this bumpy process.