George Eliot (18 page)

But throughout this slow pounding of her spirits Mary Ann’s devotion to her father never wavered. Mr Bury, the surgeon who attended Evans during these last years, declared that ‘he never saw a patient more admirably and thoroughly cared for’.
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Still deeply regretful of the pain she had caused him during the holy war, Mary Ann took her father’s nursing upon her as an absolute charge. And while the limits that her sick-room duties imposed upon her time and freedom often irked, they also satisfied her need for a vocation. Just as giving up two years of her life to the tortuous Strauss had calmed her fears that she was achieving nothing in her life, so the burden of caring for her father left neither time nor energy to agonise over her ultimate lack of direction. While others, especially Cara, marvelled at her sacrifice and patience, Mary Ann understood that it was her devotion to her father which made life possible. Without this ‘poetry of duty’ she feared herself ‘nothing more than miserable agglomerations of atoms’.
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Frightened about relaxing for a second, she had even begun translating Spinoza’s
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
in her spare time: ‘she says it is such a rest to her mind,’ reported Cara Bray wonderingly.
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This makes sense of the puzzle that it was in the final few months of Robert Evans’s life that Mary Ann found her greatest
ease. She was with him all the time now, worrying about the effect of the cold on his health, tying a mustard bag between his shoulders to get him to sleep, sending written bulletins to Fanny and Robert about his worsening condition. There are no surviving letters to Isaac and Chrissey, and no evidence that they shared the load with her. It was Mary Ann’s half-brother Robert who spent the last night of their father’s life with her, a fact she remembered with gratitude all her life. Yet although she declared that her life during these months was ‘a perpetual nightmare – always haunted by something to be done which I have never the time or rather the energy to do’,
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she accepted that she would have it no other way. To Charles Bray she reported that ‘strange to say I feel that these will ever be the happiest days of life to me. The one deep strong love I have ever known has now its highest exercise and fullest reward.’
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To some extent this was because Evans was finally able to unbend a little and say ‘kind things’ to Mary Ann. ‘It shows how rare they are’, said Cara tartly, ‘by the gratitude with which she repeats the commonest expressions of kindness.’
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But it was not just that. As the abyss of life without home, family or purpose loomed, Mary Ann clung to her exhausting duties as a way of keeping terror at bay.

It could not be held off for ever. When the final hours came, on the night of 30–31 May, disintegration threatened once again. In panic, Mary Ann sat down and scribbled an anguished note to Cara and Charles: ‘What shall I be without my Father? It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone. I had a horrid vision of myself last night becoming earthly sensual and devilish for want of that purifying restraining influence.’
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But, of course, it had never been her father who had protected Mary Ann from herself. It was her attachment to him, her elevation of his care into an absolute duty, which had disciplined the warring parts of herself into working together. For this reason Evans’s deliberate snubbing of her in his will may not have hurt her as much as it has outraged her biographers. There was nothing odd about his leaving the valuable Derbyshire and Warwickshire properties to Robert and Isaac respectively, while his three daughters received relatively small amounts of cash. Fanny and Chrissey had both been given a thousand pounds on their marriage and now got another thousand. Mary Ann received two
thousand pounds in trust, the income to be administered by her brother, half-brother and the family solicitor. But it was in the tiny details that Evans’s will stung. The novels of Walter Scott, from which Mary Ann had read so tirelessly during the last few years of his life, were given to Fanny who, as far as we know, had no particular attachment to them. It was a small, cutting gesture, the only way Robert Evans knew to show Mary Ann that he had still not forgiven her for the holy war.

Robert Evans was buried next to his second wife in Chilvers Coton churchyard on 6 June 1849. Only six days later the Brays and Mary Ann set off for the Continent. Even in the midst of this double upheaval, Mary Ann’s old, impulsive ways reasserted themselves. Three months earlier she had reviewed James Anthony Froude’s novel
The Nemesis of Faith
for the
Coventry Herald
. The book was a particularly shocking example of ‘the crisis of faith’ novel and instantly became a
cause célèbre
. The tale of a clergyman who loses his faith and falls in love with a friend’s wife was sufficiently scandalous to get the book burned at Exeter College, Oxford, where Froude was, though not for much longer, a Fellow. Its publisher, John Chapman, who had also brought out the Strauss translation, sent a copy of
The Nemesis of Faith
to Mary Ann, who reviewed it rapturously in the
Herald
. Writing anonymously, as was usual at that time, she thrilled that ‘the books which carry this magic in them are the true products of genius’.
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She also wrote a complimentary note to Froude, coyly signing it ‘the translator of Strauss’. In an uncharacteristic burst of discretion, Chapman refused to divulge Mary Ann’s identity, so Froude was obliged to respond via the publisher. Guessing that the translator of Strauss had also written the
Herald
review in which he was described as a ‘fallen star’, Froude suggested flirtatiously that ‘she might help him to rise’. Receiving the letter in ‘high glee’, Mary Ann ran to Rosehill to show it to Cara, who reported herself ‘so pleased she should have this little episode in her dull life’.
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Mary Ann was in love again. It was now that she wrote to Sara teasingly representing herself as an unfaithful and aloof husband, giving her intoxication with Froude as the reason for her distraction. By this time she had read his previous book,
Shadows of the Clouds
, and declared herself in the grip of ‘a sort
of palpitation that one hardly knows whether to call wretched or delightful’.
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The fallen star and the translator of Strauss finally met when Froude came to visit Rosehill in early June. The timing could not have been worse. Robert Evans had been buried the day before and Mary Ann was beside herself with grief. The burden of the past months and years had left her thin and pale. Still, when Bray suggested that Froude might like to join them on the Continental trip, he enthusiastically agreed. But then a strange thing happened. Four days later Charles, Cara and Mary Ann were in London, about to board the train to Folkestone, when John Chapman dashed up at the last minute with the decidedly odd message that Froude could not accompany them after all because he was about to be married.
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The most likely explanation behind this clumsy little drama is that Froude, despite finding Mary Ann less appealing in person than print, had decided that he would like to go abroad with the Brays. At this stage it looked as though the party would be larger, perhaps including Edward Noel and another old friend called Dawson. Over the next few days, when all the extra travellers had dropped out, Froude realised that he was being matchmade with Mary Ann.

Cara Bray might be in an unconventional marriage herself, but she was as keen as any of the Evanses to find Mary Ann a partner, especially now she was released from daughterly duties. Apart from anything, it would absolve the Brays from having her to live with them. It was one thing to have Mary Ann as a stimulating neighbour, quite another to live with her as a depressed and demanding member of the household. The only hitch in Cara’s scheme was that Froude did not have the slightest desire to marry Mary Ann. Panicked by the thought of spending the next few weeks pushed together with an over-ardent ageing spinster, he took the coward’s way out and sent his friend Chapman with the last-minute message. The fact that he chose to emphasise his engagement as the reason he could not travel is tellingly strange. Presumably he had been aware of it – he married Charlotte Grenfell only four months later – when he agreed to the trip. We do not know what passed between Mary Ann and Froude at their meeting a few days earlier, but it is clear that she had spent the
previous dreary months building him up in her imagination. Did her pent-up need push her into reckless declarations of affection, just as it had with Dr Brabant? Did Froude find himself repelled by a clingy, ugly woman when he had been expecting a pretty girl with whom he might flirt for a few weeks on the way to the altar? Whatever the exact reason, the party which left for Folkestone consisted of only three.

As it turned out, it was probably just as well that Froude decided not to catch the train. Over the following weeks, as the party made its way through Calais, Paris, Avignon, Marseilles, Genoa and finally on to Geneva, Mary Ann emerged as a weepy and demanding travelling companion. Still laid low by grief, on several occasions during a fraught horseback journey through the Alps she was seized by hysterics, convinced that a broken side-saddle was about to pitch her into oblivion. Over a decade later, remembering with mortification just how tiresome she had been, she thanked Cara for her patience. ‘How wretched I was then – how peevish, how utterly morbid! And how kind and forbearing you were under the oppression of my company!’
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The year before, John Sibree’s decision to spend a year in Geneva after giving up the ministry had prompted Mary Ann into envious raptures: ‘O the bliss of having a very high attic in a romantic continental town, such as Geneva.’
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Now she decided to follow his example. For the first time in her life she had the time and just enough money to live how and where she pleased. Her father was dead and her siblings did not need her. She had been left £100 cash in her father’s will in lieu of some household items given to Chrissey and Fanny. If she was careful, she had enough to last the year. On 23 July she wrote to tell her half-sister Fanny of her plans: ‘The day after tomorrow I part from my friends and take up my abode at Geneva where I hope that rest and regular occupation will do more for my health and spirits than travelling has proved able to do.’
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Two days later, and quite probably breathing a sigh of relief, the Brays returned to Coventry, Mary Ann having been installed in a respectable pension in the centre of the town.

It is too easy to write up these Geneva months as a kind of heroic turning point in Mary Ann’s life, a breaking out of provincial spinsterhood into something brave and independent. John
Cross certainly saw it like this, declaring that Geneva represented ‘a delightful, soothing change after … the monotonous dullness … of an English provincial town like Coventry, where there is little beauty of any sort to gladden the soul’.
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It would be good to imagine Mary Ann expanding in the bracing atmosphere of this most liberal of cities, transforming herself from provincial bluestocking into European intellectual. But much of the time she spent in Geneva was marked by loneliness, disappointment and the familiar frustrated longing for intimacy. She spent a lot of time holed up in her pension. And although she had French and German, this was not a passport to Swiss culture, which anyway turned out to be more stodgily bourgeois than anything she had experienced among the avant-garde of Coventry. Friendships formed with other tourists were fleeting and shallow, something which always unsettled her. Unable to stick it out for a year, she returned home after only eight months.

None the less, Geneva did represent a particular stage in Mary Ann’s creative development. It was now that her potential as a novelist emerged. Previously her published work consisted of erudite translation, workmanlike reviews and heavy-handed attempts at humorous essays. The letters she had written in Coventry had been lively and acute, but it was in the ones she sent from Geneva that the scope of her observant eye became clear. It was now, too, that she first started to write a journal, though unfortunately the first part of it, covering 1849–54, was destroyed by John Cross, anxious to eliminate evidence of her bumpy emotional life before she settled into unwedded commitment with G. H. Lewes. But if there is no journal account of her time in Geneva, we do still have a clutch of long, vivid letters describing the shabby genteel atmosphere of life in a Swiss boarding-house.

The recent revolutions in France and Italy had resulted in a flow of well-heeled refugees into tolerant Geneva. Not yet permanently exiled, they hovered within striking distance of their homes, waiting to see how the political dust would settle. The Campagne Plongeon, where Mary Ann was staying, contained some of these stateless gentlefolk, including the Marquis de St Germain and his extended family, who were temporarily unable to return to their native Piedmont because of their association with the discredited regime.

It was not just the politically dispossessed who found refuge at Campagne Plongeon. There were two sad Englishwomen in residence, both cut off from their family and cultural roots. The Baronne de Ludwigsdorf was a refined woman who spoke perfect French and German, and reminded Mary Ann of Cara. She also had minimal self-esteem, declaring that, while she would like to be Mary Ann’s friend, ‘she does not mean to attach herself to me, because I shall never like her long’.
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The reasons for the other Englishwoman’s dislocation were more straightforward. Mrs Lock ‘has had very bitter trials which seem to be driving her more and more aloof from society,’
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reported Mary Ann. In the gossipy atmosphere of the pension, the details soon emerged. Apparently Mrs Lock’s daughter had married a French aristocrat by whom she had two daughters. But the previous year the young woman had run off with her husband’s cousin. Mrs Lock was so ashamed that she felt obliged to stay away from her old life in England. ‘No one likes her here,’ explained Mary Ann bluntly, ‘simply because her manners are brusque and her French incomprehensible.’
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