George Eliot (25 page)

While she clearly loved the fact that literary London had her down as almost married, Marian was careful to feign irritation. The last thing she wanted now was for Spencer to think that she was anything but loftily disinterested in his friendship. Yet as the summer progressed it became clear that no amount of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring and tight-lipped discretion was ever going to bring Herbert Spencer to the altar. By the time he did spend a while with Marian at Rosehill in late October, the possibility of romance had long since passed.

If only Marian had realised that Spencer was never going to marry anyone – he died a bachelor at eighty-three – she would have been spared a summer of humiliation and despair. In order to avoid the painful recognition that he could not be close to anyone, Spencer rationalised his rejection of Marian on the cruel grounds that she was too ugly to marry. Cruel because not only did he give this reason to her, but also circulated it publicly. In his autobiography, published posthumously in 1904, he hinted heavily: ‘Physical beauty is a
sine qua non
with me; as was once unhappily proved where the intellectual traits and the emotional traits were of the highest.’
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But this was clearly rubbish, since he was on record as having rejected two other women who were perfectly pretty but who, naturally, failed in some other respect. In 1854, around the time that Marian eloped with Lewes, Spencer wrote two articles on ‘Personal Beauty’ for the
Leader
in which he cited examples of ugliness that are suspiciously reminiscent of Marian’s physiognomy – heavy jaw, large mouth, big nose.
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Her failure to display conventional female characteristics did not, as one might imagine, delight and liberate him, an effeminate man himself. Rather, it threatened his own precarious sense of masculinity. The timing of these nasty articles is particularly telling, appearing just as Marian was beginning a loving and fulfilling relationship with George Henry Lewes. Hating himself for not being able to respond to her love, Spencer kicked out and punished Marian instead.

The question of George Eliot’s ugliness has always embarrassed her biographers who at times seem almost unable to bear the truth. In this they are no different from many of Marian’s friends at the time whose solution was to rewrite or redraw the heavy, horsy features. Bessie Rayner Parkes, writing in 1894,
typically maintained that ‘In daily life the brow, the blue eyes, and the upper part of the face had a great charm. The lower half was disproportionately long. Abundant brown hair framed a countenance which was certainly not in any sense unpleasing, noble in its general outline, and very sweet and kind in expression. Her height was good, her figure remarkably supple; at moments it had an almost serpentine grace.’
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D’Albert Durade, meanwhile, did the equivalent in paint, his portrait of Marian in 1850 showing her with neat, inoffensive features, which bore no relation to the photograph taken only a few years later. While there can be no doubt that charisma goes a long way to offsetting a big nose, there is a danger that downplaying Marian’s plainness obscures the quality of her relationships with men and other women. To be pretty was not simply a delightful bonus for the middle-class Victorian woman, but an integral part of her social and sexual status. A bewitching face could go a long way towards making a bachelor overlook a lack of fortune or even education in his prospective bride. Of course, in the circles in which Marian moved one might expect that wit, erudition and wisdom would offset the need for regular features. But Charles Hennell, John Chapman and Herbert Spencer were sufficiently men of their time to want their women to be both beautiful and accomplished. By the time she was thirty-five Marian had been obliged to watch on several occasions while pretty women like Rufa Brabant and Elisabeth Tilley claimed the men she wanted for herself.

Spencer’s rejection of Marian on the grounds of ugliness, following so soon after Chapman’s little speech on beauty at Kenilworth Castle, plunged her into a pit of self-loathing. Even at the beginning of the friendship she had been telling the Brays, ‘See what a fine thing it is to pick up people who are short-sighted enough to like one.’
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By the end of April the self-accusations had become vicious: she describes herself as ‘a hideous hag, sad and wizened’, ‘an old witch’ and even a jellyfish.
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At thirty-three she feared that she was a Frederika Bremer in the making, destined to become an ugly old bluestocking seeking intimacy in a commercial boarding-house.

Once Marian had wrapped up the July 1852 issue of the
Westminster
, she fled the sultry heat of London’s summer – one of the
hottest for years – and headed for the seaside town of Broadstairs, where she took a cottage for two months. Her life as an independent yet respectable woman required an intricate negotiation of the social proprieties of a small provincial town. It was highly unusual for a woman to take a holiday on her own and the Chapmans felt it important that they should both escort her down to Broadstairs and see her settled. Perhaps in this way they hoped to make it clear to the landlady of Chandos Cottage that while Miss Evans might be eccentric, she was not immoral. This was the first of many occasions in which worrying about what landladies thought became a major preoccupation.

The first letter Marian wrote to Spencer from Broadstairs, on 8 July, is tentative with desire and doubt. She wants him to come and visit her, but is ruefully aware that her need does not match his.

So she was thrilled when Spencer booked into a local hotel on 10 July, boasting coyly in a letter to Charles Bray, ‘I am obliged to write very hurriedly, as I am not alone.’
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In between sea-shore walks and shared meals she pressed for a resolution to their ambiguous situation. Miserably cornered, Spencer had no choice but to make it clear for a second and definitive time that he was not in love. In that painful moment Marian was forced to give up the fantasy that his aloofness was a nervous prelude to deeper commitment. In the anguished hours which followed his departure she panicked at the possibility that her boldness had lost Spencer not only as a husband, but also as a friend. The thought of resuming the drudgery of life at The Strand unleavened by
his companionship was bleak beyond belief. In despair she sat down and wrote, pleading to be allowed to claw back some of what she believed she had lost.

This was the last and most desperate time in her life that Marian would beg for affection. The longing of the past ten years, of loving men who loved other women, climaxed in the agony of these few paragraphs. She was prepared to settle, as she had settled before, for a love which was partial, conditional, shared. What she had not fully realised, nor would for many years, was that Spencer needed her as much as she needed him. Far from
wanting to break off contact, nothing suited him more than continuing to enjoy the companionship of the cleverest woman in London without the burden of commitment. He responded to her desperate letter with a cautious offer of friendship, to which she immediately and gratefully agreed, writing this time more formally to ‘Mr Spencer’:

It is not clear whether Spencer did come down again to Broad-stairs towards the end of August. Certainly he and Marian spent some time together at Rosehill in October. But from this low point of summer 1852 their lives took different paths. For while at this point it was Marian who was racked with psychosomatic headaches and the agonies of opportunities lost, it was Spencer whose life was to be taken over and destroyed by them. In January 1853 the Revd Spencer died, leaving his nephew a legacy of £500. Spencer immediately gave up
The Economist
and set out on his first trip to Europe. What should have been an exquisite experience turned into a flat, debilitating one. The landscape of the Rhine and the Alps failed to impress, and at Frankfurt he was laid low with toothache. When he returned to London in the autumn his general malaise combined with odd panicky pains was diagnosed as a weak heart. Whether this weakness was a literal or metaphorical one is not clear. Spencer’s symptoms seem
to have been more nervous than physical. He wandered around town unable to sleep, getting progressively seedier. A few months recuperating at home in Derby set him up for a trip to Wales, where he intended to finish the book he was writing called
Psychology
. Symbolically, he had just completed the chapter on Feelings and was on to Reason when he suffered an emotional and physical collapse, which took the form of a ‘sensation in the head – not pain nor heat nor fulness nor tension, but simply a sensation, bearable enough but abnormal’.
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He never fully recovered, becoming a semi-invalid and a permanent hypochondriac. For the rest of his life he fussed over his pulse rate, plugged his ears when the outside world got too exciting, and dealt with insomnia by wrapping his head in a towel soaked in salt water and topping it with a ludicrous rubber cap.

It is no coincidence that around the time of this nervous collapse, Marian was becoming intimate with George Henry Lewes who was, ironically, Spencer’s best friend. As he watched Marian strike out into a sexually and emotionally fulfilling relationship, Spencer was obliged to confront the fact that there would be no similar happy ending for him. He became even more obsessed with his failure to marry, constantly initiating conversations on the subject with friends and then rejecting the proposed solutions. When one female acquaintance suggested acutely that getting married might relieve some of his neurotic symptoms, he argued: ‘I labour under the double difficulty that my choice is very limited and that I am not easy to please. Moral and intellectual beauties do not by themselves suffice to attract me; and owing to the stupidity of our educational system it is rare to find them united to a good physique. Moreover there is the pecuniary difficulty.’
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It is hard to believe that there were no beautiful, clever and good women available to marry (although perhaps there were none who wanted to marry him). Likewise, the old excuse about money no longer applied, thanks to his uncle’s legacy. Later on, as he moved into middle age, Spencer used the excuse of his work as the reason why he could not sustain a relationship. ‘Habitually before I have yet finished rejoicing over my emancipation from a work which has long played the tyrant over me, I make myself the slave of another. The truth is, I suppose, that in the absence of wife and children to care for, the carrying out of my under
takings is the one thing that makes life worth living – even though, by it, life is continually perturbed.’
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