George Eliot (31 page)

While Huxley was complimentary about Martineau’s treatment of Comte, which was published by Chapman, he dismissed Lewes as having ‘mere book-knowledge’ of science. Here was the same old accusation about Lewes being nothing more than a hack, dressed up in a slightly different way. Still at this point acting as editor of the
Westminster
, Marian did everything she could to make sure that the review was pulled. First she pointed out to Chapman that it would look ridiculous for a book published by him to be so obviously puffed in the
Westminster
. When this tactic failed she wrote him a letter marked ‘Private’ in which she defended Lewes’s right to make a serious contribution to scientific debate. She warns Chapman ‘that the editors of the Review will disgrace themselves by inserting an utterly worthless & unworthy notice of a work by one of their own writers’ and goes on to describe Lewes as Huxley’s superior in intellect and fame.
⁶⁷

But Chapman for once refused to take her advice and the review appeared in the January 1854 edition. Was he punishing Marian because she was about to leave him to run the magazine on his own? Or was he punishing Lewes for taking away a woman whom he had loved and whom he still needed? If Marian was aware that there was something more than editorial impartiality
behind Chapman’s decision to run the review, she did not hold a grudge. As her resolve to go to Germany with Lewes strengthened, she was keen that the Chapmans would not be inconvenienced. Now that they had moved to new accommodation they were making noises about having Miss Evans as their boarder once again, but ‘I could not feel at liberty to leave them after causing them to make arrangements on my account, and it is quite possible that I may wish to go to the continent or twenty other things.’
⁶⁸

Pressure was coming from the Combes, too, who were pushing Marian to spend her summer with them on the Continent. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of Miss Evans. She would not be able to hold them off much longer.

On 11 June Charles Bray came to visit Marian in London and she told him of her intention to live with Lewes. Perhaps it was then that they agreed she would not tell Cara and Sara of her plans when she came to visit them at Rosehill a week later. She had always taken pains to keep the nature of her relationship with Lewes secret from Cara – on one occasion putting her off coming to visit her at her lodgings in Cambridge Street in case there might be some sign of Lewes’s habitual presence.

With her London friends Barbara and Bessie she may have been more confiding. According to Bessie’s daughter, Marian ‘asked my mother to walk round Hyde Park with her, and in the course of that walk she told her what she meant to do. My mother reminded her that she, Marian, had not liked Lewes at all when she first met him, and she told her the infinitely more serious fact that Mrs Gaskell knew a girl whom he had seduced, but that made no difference. She had quite made up her mind.’
⁶⁹

She had indeed. During her mid-June holiday in Coventry Marian spent three weeks sitting on the bear rug under the acacia tree and keeping her counsel. The next the Brays heard of her was when they received a breathless note dated 19 July:

Dear Friends – all three

I have only time to say good bye and God bless you. Poste Restante, Weimar for the next six weeks, and afterwards Berlin.

Ever your loving and grateful

Marian.
⁷⁰

O
N 20
J
ULY
1854 Marian Evans left her lodgings in Cambridge Street and set off on a journey from which there could be no return. She got to St Katharine’s Dock, in the shadow of the Tower of London, at about eleven o’clock and ‘found myself on board the Ravensbourne, bound for Antwerp’. The way Marian records this momentous sequence in her journal – only the second entry to have survived John Cross’s censorship – is revealing. She describes herself involuntarily drifting on to the
Ravensbourne
, as if her conscious mind is unable to cope with the implications of what she is doing. It is exactly the state in which Maggie Tulliver in
The Mill on the Floss
allows Stephen Guest to lead her on to the boat that will carry her away to a new and irreversible phase of her life.

Nerves had made Marian arrive early ‘and in consequence I had 20 minutes of terrible fear lest something should have delayed G’. Underneath her anxieties about missed cabs and botched arrangements was the terror that her well-meaning friends had been right after all and that Lewes would abandon her just at the point when she had given up everything to be with him. But she need not have worried: ‘before long I saw his
welcome face looking for me over the porter’s shoulder and all was well’.
¹

Too excited to sleep, Lewes and Marian sat up on deck all night, watching the red-black sky gradually lift over the Belgian coast. Over the following weeks their decision to come away together would attract the kind of quivering disgust that greeted Maggie Tulliver on her return to St Ogg’s. But while Maggie was away for just a few days, it would be eight months before Marian returned to London to face the chorus of disapproval. For now she could sit on deck with the man she loved and watch the far-away streaks of lightning show up the outlines of passing fishing boats. No one who glanced at the shabby middle-aged couple talking over their travel plans could have guessed they had stumbled on a scandal that would soon have the best and brightest of British tongues wagging in fascinated dismay.

The first person to spot them, still on board ship, was Robert Noel, brother of Cara’s lover Edward.
²
Noel conducted his marriage to a German baroness on ‘Continental’ lines and was rumoured to have had many lovers. He lived, appropriately enough, in Bohemia, where he was heading after a fortnight’s visit to Rosehill. The encounter passed without embarrassment. Robert Noel was the last man to raise a disapproving finger at the unmarried couple, although he may have found it impossible not to gossip about them when he wrote to his large circle of friends in Britain.

The next old friend to pop up was Dr Brabant. After arriving in Belgium, Marian and Lewes had spent a few days sightseeing in Antwerp, Brussels and Liège, before catching a train to Germany. The good doctor materialised on the platform, invited himself into their carriage and talked solidly all the way to Cologne. On arrival he bustled around, setting up the stilted meeting between Marian and Strauss.
³
Was it coincidence that Brabant reappeared in Marian’s life just as she was making an irrevocable commitment to another man? And did his insistence on producing Strauss like a rabbit out of a hat constitute a competitive and aggressive act towards Lewes? Marian’s letters and journal do not speculate.

Another familiar face was Arthur Helps, Lewes’s old friend, who made a detour to Weimar on his way home from Spain. He had known about Lewes’s plan to live with Marian in Germany
and the fact that he had gone out of his way to visit was mentioned pointedly by Marian in her letters.
⁴
Helps was a courtier and favourite of Queen Victoria, and his acceptance of the situation seemed significant. But this was Labassecour, not London. Back in Britain, Lewes continued to spend his Christmas holidays at Vernon Hill, Helps’s country house, to which Marian was pointedly not invited.

Meeting with the occasional kind face could not have prepared Marian and Lewes for the storm which was blowing up at home. Indeed, it sometimes seemed as if literary Britain put its pen down in the late summer of 1854 and spent the next few weeks gossiping about the liaison between its crown princess and court jester. Those who knew Marian and Lewes well, and others who thought they did, exchanged angry, eager judgements on the runaway couple. Letters flew between London, Coventry and Edinburgh. Speculation turned into rumour and rumour hardened into ‘fact’ in a process which Marian would describe in her accounts of parish pump chatter at both St Ogg’s and Middle-march. And as summer gave way to autumn, word trickled back to Weimar that some of those people closest to Marian and Lewes considered themselves irrevocably betrayed.

Marian’s first letter to Rosehill was written on 16 August, a good month after she had arrived on the Continent. The tone is guarded, as if she is not sure what response she will receive. Addressed pointedly to Charles Bray alone, the closing ‘much love to all’ avoids mentioning Sara and Cara by name.
⁵
The sisters wrote back separately and Sara subsequently maintained that these letters (now lost) were ‘full of affection’, despite the fact that she and her sister ‘strongly disapproved’ of Marian’s decision to live with Lewes.
⁶
So it was tactless of Marian to continue to address her next letter, of 23 October, to Charles Bray alone. A clue to her insensitivity lies in its content, which is a spirited defence of Lewes’s behaviour towards his family, a subject to which she would return obsessively. As far as Marian was concerned, these were matters she had always discussed with Charles – a point she made to defend herself against Sara’s accusations that she had deliberately excluded her closest women friends from her correspondence. But it was the concluding paragraph of Marian’s letter which caused most offence:

‘Not to
obtrude
yourself,’ stormed Sara in reply, ‘when if you ever thought our friendship good for any thing, you must know how anxious we have been to hear from you!’
⁸
For ten years Sara and Cara had been surrogate mothers to Marian. At a time when their own lives had not always been easy the Hennell sisters had guided their awkward young neighbour from morbid late adolescence, through the traumas of the holy war and the pain of various bad love affairs, to the watershed of her father’s death and something approaching maturity. They had presided over Marian’s transformation from a priggish schoolgirl into the cleverest woman in the land. The bear rug under Rosehill’s acacia tree had been the setting for one of the greatest intellectual and social educations of the century. And now she was telling them that they had probably never been very interested in her anyway.

Just as the holy war was the result of nearly a year of simmering family tension about power, precedence and accommodation, so the split from Rosehill, which never really healed, had been brewing for a couple of years. Soon after Marian arrived at the
Westminster
, Charles Bray had taken it upon himself to tell Sara that Marian’s feelings towards her had changed. Sara, deeply hurt, wrote demanding to know whether it was true, which in turn prompted a strangely ambiguous response from Marian. The letter starts, reassuringly enough, by declaring that, as far as Mary Ann is concerned, Charles Bray ‘was never more completely in error. If there is any change in my affection for you, it is that I love you more than ever, not less.’ Then the tone becomes heavy with hints. ‘I have admitted to Mr Bray that I perceived what it was in you that frequently repelled him and chilled his affection for you.’ Having planted seeds of doubt, Mary Ann then scampers back into declarations of continued affection along the lines of ‘I do believe in my love for you and that it will remain as long
as I have my senses’.
⁹
This crazy swing between snub and sugar exactly recalled Mary Ann’s letters to Maria Lewis, just at the point when she was suffocating under the older woman’s plea for reassurance. Now the newly named Marian, busy making friends and lovers in London, no longer felt that Sara understood her life or had any real place in it.

After another exchange of proud, clumsy letters between Weimar and Coventry in the autumn of 1854, Cara stopped writing. Sara, however, continued to try to make sense of their changed relationship. ‘I have a strange sort of feeling that I am writing to some one in a book and not the Marian that we have known and loved so many years’, she wrote in the ‘birthday’ letter of 15 November which she always sent around the time of their joint anniversaries. ‘Do not mistake me, I mean nothing unkind.’
¹⁰
As a symbol of what had been lost, she stitched a small Ax into the letter, a tiny reminder that for so many years Marian had delighted to call her ‘Achates’, after the best friend of Virgil’s hero Aeneas.

While the Rosehill women quietly tried to come to terms with Marian’s changed allegiances, Charles Bray was busy attempting to defend her reputation at large. As one of the two men to whom Marian had confided her plans – Chapman was the other – he was left explaining her behaviour to a spluttering George Combe. Bray’s first tactic was to suggest that Marian and Lewes were merely platonic travelling companions, and when this started to look thin he hastened to reassure Combe that ‘my wife and Miss Hennell are sadly troubled about all this and wish me to say that Miss E’s going had not their sanction, because they knew nothing at all about it’.
¹¹
Self-involved as ever, Combe was mortified to think that the woman whose skull he had pronounced perfect turned out to have a character which made a monkey out of phrenology, not to mention his own reputation. Desperate to reclaim the high ground for the practice of bump reading he asked Bray in an anguished letter whether there was ‘insanity in Miss Evans’s family; for her conduct, with
her
brain, seems to me to be like … morbid mental aberration’. Complacently sweeping aside Bray’s own irregular sexual life, which he knew included an illegitimate second family, Combe proceeded to quiz him about what would happen if Marian tried to return to Rosehill.
‘If you receive her into your family circle, while present appearances are unexplained,’ he wheedled, ‘pray consider whether you will do justice to your own female domestic circle, and how other ladies may feel about going into a circle which makes no distinction between those who act thus, and those who preserve their honour unspotted.’
¹²

Bray’s response was a carefully judged attempt to distance himself from Marian’s behaviour, while preserving the integrity of phrenology as an accurate tool for predicting behaviour. ‘Mind I have no wish to defend the part she is taking – only I do not judge her,’ he told Combe hypocritically. ‘I don’t think she is
mad
. She had organically, all the intellectual strength of a man and … in feeling all the peculiar weaknesses of woman.’
¹³

At the same time as she was writing to Charles Bray defending Lewes’s character and her decision to be with him, Marian was conducting a parallel correspondence with John Chapman. Her letter of 15 October starts with a rejection of the rumour that Lewes has abandoned his family before launching into the kind of martyrish set piece which had so offended the Coventry women: ‘I have counted the cost of the step that I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation by all my friends. I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself. He is worthy of the sacrifice I have incurred, and my only anxiety is that he should be rightly judged.’
¹⁴

Luckily, Chapman was unoffendable. In any case, he was thoroughly enjoying being at the heart of the biggest scandal to hit London for years. Although, with the
Westminster
under so much pressure from the high-minded Unitarian lobby, it would have made sense to put distance between himself and Marian, he could not resist drawing attention to their earlier love affair. He frantically boasted to Robert Chambers that, far from being an innocent, Miss Evans had once thrown herself sexually at him. When this rumour spread too quickly and too fast, Chapman was left trying to backtrack, panicking to Chambers: ‘A word about Miss E[vans]. – I am very anxious that what I
said
to you about
her especially
, should be regarded as strictly confidential … I should be sorry … to be thought disposed to disparage her. I only dropped the word I did because I felt that
Lewes was not as you imagined almost alone to blame.’ Then he continued with extraordinary hypocrisy, ‘Now I can only pray, against hope, that … [Lewes] may prove constant to her; otherwise she is
utterly
lost.’
¹⁵

Those who spluttered loudest at Marian’s and Lewes’s departure for the Continent were defending their own personal and professional interests. Combe, for instance, had long disliked Lewes because of his rejection of phrenology as so much bunk. And he was as twitchy as ever about the bad publicity which would stick to the progressive cause in general. ‘T. Hunt, Lewes, and Miss Evans have, in my opinion, by their practical conduct, inflicted a great injury on the cause of religious freedom,’ he thundered to Charles Bray.
¹⁶
And to make his point he gave up his subscription to the
Leader
. Joseph Parkes, too, received the news ‘in a white rage, as if on the verge of a paralytic stroke’, believing that the behaviour of his one-time favourite had put back the progressive cause by a hundred years.
¹⁷
The fact that Parkes ran a mistress in tandem with a wife was apparently not the same thing at all.