George Eliot (46 page)

Barbara Bodichon, as always, was the only person to get it exactly right. She had not prodded and probed Marian during those eighteen months when the fiction was still a secret. Yet nor had she expressed unflattering disbelief when the authorship became clear. Gratifyingly, she claimed to have guessed Marian’s identity when she came across an extract from
Adam Bede
in an Algerian newspaper, which made her exclaim, ‘that is written by Marian Evans, there is her great big head and heart and her wise wide views’.
⁸³
This was exactly the thing which both Marian and Lewes liked to hear. Except, of course, for the fact that Barbara had made the blunder of calling Marian by her ‘maiden’ name. In a postscript to the letter of thanks which Marian wrote on 5 May 1859 Lewes added, ‘dear Barbara, you must not call her Marian Evans again: that individual is extinct, rolled up, mashed, absorbed in the Lewesian magnificence!’
⁸⁴

Barbara kept her secret even once she was back in London, becoming the Leweses’ eyes and ears in the city’s literary drawing-rooms. Her revelation in June that everyone assumed that Marian Lewes was too ashamed to admit to being George Eliot proved to be the spur that ended the incognito. On the 30th of that month Lewes wrote to tell Barbara that they had decided to break the secret. ‘You may tell it openly to all who care to hear it that the object of anonymity was to get the book judged on its own merits, and not prejudged as the work of a woman, or of a particular woman.’
⁸⁵

It would be odd if this atmosphere of paranoia had not seeped into Marian’s writing. At the height of the Liggins scandal, and before she had properly started on
The Mill
, she had sent what she called a ‘
jeu de melancolie
’ to Blackwood.
⁸⁶
‘The Lifted Veil’ was part-way between short story and novella, and pleased no one. The tone was indeed melancholy, recalling the gothic doom of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, and resembling the kind of thing which Mary Braddon was soon to do so well at. Written in the first person, it recounts the experience of a weak, wealthy young man called Latimer, who has the ability both to see into the future and to read others’ minds. These odd gifts bring him to the edge of despair, as he finds himself assaulted by the rush of hostile, envious, degrading thoughts which proceed from the people around him. Latimer is also able to foresee the moment and method of his death, which he knows will be contrived by his wife Bertha, an evil woman whose attraction lies in the fact that she is the only person whose mind he cannot read.

Despite the weirdness of the piece, there are ingredients in the story which mark it as Marian’s. The Continental settings of Geneva, Vienna and Prague clearly come from her memories stored up from the 1858 trip. The scientific details, which culminate in a ghoulish blood tranfusion in which Bertha’s maid is temporarily raised from the dead, must have been inspired by Lewes’s experiments on live frogs. But, more specifically, it is Latimer’s experience of being assaulted by the unspoken envy, spite and hate of his immediate circle which echoes Marian’s own situation. When she wrote to Blackwood to thank him for Pug, she had said, melodramatically, ‘I see already that he is
without envy, hatred, or malice – that he will betray no secrets, and feel neither pain at my success nor pleasure in my chagrin.’
⁸⁷
In her isolated brooding, the hoo-ha over Liggins had turned from a bit of unpleasant gossip into a concerted effort by enemies to strip her of every happiness.

Blackwood was sufficiently acute to see where the darkness in ‘The Lifted Veil’ came from. He hated the story, but managed merely to say soothingly to Marian that he wished ‘the author in a happier frame of mind and not thinking of unsympathising untrustworthy keepers of secrets’.
⁸⁸
Still, he was too much the businessman to let sympathy interfere with profit. While he was prepared to publish the story in
Maga
and give her £37 10s for it, he was not going to fall in with Lewes’s suggestion that he break his practice of anonymous publication and use George Eliot’s name as a way of stopping the Liggins rumour, on the grounds that the Warwickshire homebody was hardly likely to produce a tale of pseudo-science set on the Continent.

Blackwood’s refusal to ‘fritter away the prestige’ of George Eliot on a duff story prompted a new spasm of suspicion in Marian. She was less offended by his lukewarm response to her work than by the realisation that the Blackwood brothers must often have discussed her ‘unfortunate position’ between themselves. This feeling that she was being watched and whispered about seeped even into her feelings about her new home, Holly Lodge, in suburban Wandsworth, where she began to feel that she was constantly overlooked by ‘houses full of eyes’.
⁸⁹

The Leweses had moved into the house at a propitious time, five days after the publication of
Adam Bede
. Holly Lodge, in Wimbledon Park Road, was bigger than anywhere they had lived before, and the expansion reflected their increased wealth and growing certainty in one another. Only a few weeks earlier Marian had written in her year’s end journal entry: ‘Our double life is more and more blessed, more and more complete’, while Lewes told his journal that he felt ‘a deepening of domestic happiness’.
⁹⁰
The new house was intended as a family home, where the Lewes boys could base themselves when they had finished their schooling in Switzerland. Significantly, this was also the first time that Lewes would move all his books and belongings out of the marital home in Kensington and into the home he shared with Marian.

Convenience rather than lingering attachment to the marriage was the reason why he had taken so long to make a complete break. Dealings with the first Mrs Lewes continued to be reasonably warm, as long as the discussions steered clear of money. Agnes adored Pug when Lewes brought him for a visit, and Nursie dog-sat at Holly Lodge when the couple went on holiday to Wales in the September of 1859. Agnes had been an early reader of ‘Amos Barton’ in manuscript and loved it, although she did not know the identity of the author. The Leweses’ increased affluence meant that the £250 which they gave Agnes each year was less of a strain to find. Only occasionally did Marian allow herself to criticise Agnes to others – probably the second wife’s habitual complaint about her predecessor’s extravagance – and she always sent out written retractions immediately afterwards.
⁹¹

Marian’s earnings from
Adam Bede
allowed the Leweses to house-hunt in the prosperous south-west London suburbs of Mortlake and Putney before settling on Wandsworth. After years of using landladies’ sheets and plates, now was the time to invest in their own and they went up to town on several bulk-buying shopping trips. It was this sudden acquisition of the paraphernalia of middle-class prosperity after years of penny-pinching which alerted some sharp-eyed observers to the possibility that Marian Lewes might indeed be the author of this year’s most successful new novel,
Adam Bede
.

Letters which Marian wrote during the early weeks at Holly Lodge remind one of the years she had spent running a working farmhouse. The perennial problem of finding a good servant has her putting adverts in
The Times
, making enquiries locally and even consulting Cara Bray about the possibility of importing various reliable Coventry girls down to London. But it was a measure of the unusually flexible way in which the Leweses divided their responsibilities that Lewes took over much of this routine domestic correspondence so that Marian could concentrate on her new novel.

Nor did moving into a suburban villa mean that the Leweses suddenly adopted the conventional life of a prosperous middle-aged couple. People still refused to come and see ‘Mrs Lewes’, regardless of whether they knew she was George Eliot. Barbara Bodichon had recently reported her failure to badger Mrs Owen
Jones, wife of the designer, into visiting with the rather tactless declamation, ‘Oh Marian, Marian, what cowards people are!’
⁹²
In fact, Marian was probably relieved: with the Liggins gossip at its height she did not have the slightest desire to expose herself to the small-minded disapproval of ‘respectable society’.

Despite having put the word around that they did not wish to get caught up in the tiresome business of social calling, shortly after their arrival the Leweses received a visit from their near neighbours the Congreves. Marian vaguely recalled Maria Congreve from Warwickshire. Her father, Dr Bury, had attended Robert Evans during his last illness and sung Miss Evans’s praises as a devoted sick-nurse. Richard Congreve was a clergyman who had given up Orders so as to pursue and publicise the work of Auguste Comte. Maria was keen to know Marian: she claimed that the older woman had made such an impression on her during their one brief meeting at Foleshill that she had often continued to think about her during the intervening years.
⁹³
In the meantime she had heard all the Coventry gossip about Marian going to live with Lewes and was struck by ‘the unfairness with which a connection like theirs was visited by society – the man cut off from scarcely anything, the woman from all she most values’.
⁹⁴

The men were less predisposed to get on. Although Lewes had been an enthusiastic pioneer of Comte’s early work, he had parted company with the philosopher over his attempts to turn Positivism into a religion, complete with saints, temples and a sort of pseudo-Madonna. Congreve, the one-time clergyman, remained enthusiastic about this development and had just translated Comte’s
Catechisme Positive
(1852). He also retained an Oxford man’s disdain for the garrulous little Lewes, who could never quite throw off the tag of journalist, despite his best endeavours. Privately, Congreve wished it were possible to see Marian without her jaunty Siamese twin.

Still, Lewes and Congreve were careful enough to make sure that their intellectual differences did not spoil the intense friendship which was developing between their women. Maria Congreve would be the first of a series of younger women – in this case there was a seventeen-year gap – who would offer Marian uncritical devotion until the end of her life. Marian, who was in a particularly fragile mood at the time, was highly susceptible to
Maria’s offer of undying loyalty. The Congreves had no sooner set off on a five-month trip to Europe in May than Maria was writing letters to Holly Lodge, promising that Marian was never out of her thoughts. Marian in turn walked Maria’s dog and kept an eye on her garden. Already regretting the decision to move to claustrophobic Wandsworth, she none the less maintained extravagantly to her new friend that ‘you are worth paying a price for’.
⁹⁵

Lewes had been due to make his annual visit to Hofwyl just when the storm over the
Athenaeum
piece and the decision to drop the incognito had blown up. He could hardly leave Marian in Wandsworth, surrounded by the houses with their unblinking eyes. Since the Congreves had by now reached Lucerne on their tour, it made sense for Marian to travel out with Lewes on 9 July and stay with their new friends while he went on to Hofwyl to see the boys. During these soft, golden days Marian revealed to Maria that she was George Eliot. Away from Lewes’s sceptical presence, she may also have discussed the possibility of an afterlife. With Chrissey gone, the question of what survives of the soul after death pressed upon her. Although she could not allow herself the easy consolation of an orthodox view of heaven, the Positivists’ idea that the essence of the departed person remains in the memories of those left behind became an increasing comfort to Marian. It was to form the main theme of her best-known poem ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’, which the Positivists adopted as their anthem.

This visit to Hofwyl was a special one, for it was now that Lewes told his sons about the full extent of his relationship with the woman whom they had previously known only as the mysterious ‘Miss Evans’ who sent good wishes and excellent presents. During a walk in the woods Lewes ‘unburthened myself about Agnes to them. They were less distressed than I had anticipated and were delighted to hear about Marian.’
⁹⁶
The emotional blow was softened by the discovery that their new stepmother was the author of
Adam Bede
, a book whose celebrity had reached even their isolated boarding-school community.

Lewes was not the only one with family responsibilities now. Later that summer, at the end of August, Marian and he broke their journey back from a few days’ holiday in Wales at Lichfield,
where Chrissey’s two surviving daughters had been placed at school by their father’s brother.
⁹⁷
Just like the Lewes boys, the Clarke girls seem to have been delighted to learn about their new nearness to fame.
⁹⁸
Marian stayed in touch, making sure there was enough money for clothes and books. Emily, the eldest, wrote regularly and it would be interesting to know if the teenage girl ever let slip to her Uncle Isaac any details about her glamorous, generous ‘Aunt Pollie’.

After Lichfield the Leweses had headed for Dorset where Marian was keen to find a mill in which she could set her new novel. At the beginning of the year she had gone into town to the London Library to research ‘cases of inundation’ and found useful examples of widespread destruction in the north-east of England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
⁹⁹
She knew that the climax of the book would involve a huge, destructive flood and it was important that she get the details straight in her own mind. There had been a mill at Arbury, but she needed to find something on a bigger scale. Although an obliging miller in Weymouth showed her over his property, it was not quite right, so in late September the Leweses tried Newark and Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. This time Marian found what she was looking for. The Trent and its tributary the Idle would do nicely for her fictional Floss and Ripple. By the time she returned to her writing that October she had a clear picture of the landscape which was to play such a major part in
The Mill on the Floss
.