George Eliot (52 page)

Bertie was a bigger problem. When the unpromising boy arrived home for good in July 1863 Marian admitted that she felt ‘up to the ears in Boydom and imperious parental duties’.
⁸³
Once it was decided that he should be a farmer, he was dispatched as a pupil to Scotland, where he stayed for two years before being brought down to a farm in, of all places, Warwickshire. Marian must have found it hard to imagine how this childish, spoiled young man would succeed in a way of life which had stretched her canny, hard-working father to the limit, especially now that farming needed ‘great skill to render it otherwise than hazardous’.
⁸⁴

But the roots of Marian’s depression and physical ill-health went deeper than noisy teenagers and smoky skies. Although the relationship with Lewes brought joy to both sides, it also locked the two protagonists into a strange romance of sickness. Caring for each other’s aching heads, numb feet, agitated livers, weight loss and dizzy spells bound them together in a way that even literature never could. Perhaps this was because at some level they knew that these endless symptoms – which did not bring death for another fifteen years – were the price of their felicity. ‘We have so much happiness in our love and uninterrupted companionship’, wrote Marian, ‘that we must accept our miserable bodies as our share of mortal ill.’
⁸⁵

That it was psychological conflict which lay behind Lewes’s alarming fainting spells and loss of weight is suggested by two separate incidents. When Anthony Trollope announced that Charlie was not doing well at the Post Office the anxious father had an immediate bilious attack. John Blackwood’s first visit to Blandford Square after the defection to George Smith disturbed Lewes so much that he had to go upstairs and lie down.
⁸⁶
Yet during those endless night journeys and bad hotel rooms, which had been a part of Lewes’s hectic travelling schedule over so many years, we seldom hear of him being less than perfectly fit.

Lewes, the pioneering writer on psychology, had some insight into the effect of his mental state on his physical well-being. In particular, he recognised the appalling strain which came with constantly having to appear cheerful and encouraging in the face
of Marian’s black moods. As he confided to Blackwood on 6 March 1861, ‘I cannot help
occasionally
being made anxious by her persistent depreciation of what she writes.’
⁸⁷
Unable to express his true feelings about Marian’s work except to his private journal, Lewes was left with no option but to get sick. And at times he got very sick indeed. Weight loss, dyspepsia and headaches meant that he could on occasion write for only a few hours a day, although within those constraints he remained prolific. He became almost a professional invalid, canvassing friends for the best or latest cures. Riding was tried and rejected because it shook up his liver. Walking tours with Spencer went better. Spa towns in Britain and abroad were sampled for their bracingly cold and salty regimes.

The dynamic which allowed the Leweses to catch their unhappiness and ill-health from one another had been forged in the dual solitude they had enjoyed for so many years. Yet intriguingly it was just as that solitude began to break down that these symptoms became most severe. Arriving in central London in November 1863, among the writers, artists and politicians who made up their natural social circle, meant renegotiating Marian’s situation and status. Tucked away in the suburbs, there had been no problem. Marian stayed
persona non grata
in Wandsworth, while Lewes popped to London. The situation had been painful, but it was stable. But now, installed in an elegant house in central London where anyone might make a call, the whole issue of Mrs Lewes’s position in society was once again under review. While Marian had to face the old problem of dodging snubs, Lewes was obliged to confront his responsibility for ruining the life of the woman he loved. It was no wonder they both got headaches.

Moving to central London meant Marian seeing much less of her passionate Wandsworth friend Maria Congreve, who could manage only occasional overnight visits up in town. The Coventry trio were now so preoccupied with their own house moves, the result of dwindling fortunes, that they did not often have the time or the money to venture to town. Barbara Bodichon had a house in the same square, but for half the year she was in Algeria with her new, odd husband. One possible new friend was Mrs Clementia Taylor, wife of the Liberal MP Peter Taylor, a feminist who had been one of the few people to write to Marian expressing
her support during the early days with Lewes. On 4 April 1861 Mrs Taylor had called at Blandford Square and invited the Leweses to her home. A couple of days later Marian wrote explaining to her new friend that ‘I have found it a necessity of my London life to make the rule of
never
paying visits’: instead she preferred people to come to her.
⁸⁸
She gave her reasons as bad health and lack of time, but this was simply to protect herself from situations where she might be humiliated by a freezing glance from a fellow guest.

It was now, when Marian was about to re-enter London literary life, that Lewes made serious enquiries as to whether it would be possible to divorce Agnes in Europe. Changes to English divorce law in 1857 had still not brought the Leweses’ strange case – where the man had condoned his wife’s adultery – within its scope. The fact that Charlie was living under their roof was another reason for trying to regularise the relationship: no one wanted the boy to face sniggers, stares or snubs every time he left the house. But the legal situation remained intractable and Marian’s attitude one of studied indifference: ‘I am not sorry. I think the boys will not suffer, and for myself I prefer excommunication.’
⁸⁹
Turning the situation on its head, she used her status as stepmother to buttress her claim to be considered a proper wife. As she explained to Mrs Taylor, who had followed her other feminist friends in referring to her by her maiden name:

At first the Leweses’ new social life revolved around men. By that curious Victorian double standard, there was no impropriety in a respectable man spending time with a ‘fallen woman’, although for his wife it was a very different matter. In June 1861
when Blackwood arranged a whitebait dinner in Greenwich in Marian’s honour, she had been the only woman present.
⁹¹
At Blandford Square, too, the atmosphere was heavily masculine. At the first dinner party held there, on 20 November 1860, Arthur Helps, now Clerk to the Privy Council, arrived with the news that Queen Victoria had told him how much she admired George Eliot’s books. But Helps did not bring his wife to dine, nor did fellow guest Anthony Trollope, despite the fact that Marian had stayed in the Florentine house of his brother Tom.

The arrival in October 1861 of a grand piano – always a symbol of luxury in the mid-Victorian household – meant that social life in Blandford Square increasingly revolved around music. Charles was taken to all the concerts he could possibly want. Musical ‘at homes’ on Saturday evenings became a fixture, with Herbert Spencer’s and Edward Pigott’s singing accompanied by Charles or Marian on the piano. Other less tuneful guests included the poet Robert Browning and the painter Frederic Burton. A new kind of expansiveness, previously only seen on holiday, gradually settled over the Leweses’ living arrangements. A dinner on 27 May 1862 in honour of Tom Trollope had Marian as well as Lewes bustling out to buy some new claret glasses for the occasion.

With women it remained trickier. Bessie Rayner Parkes, who was now absorbed in running the feminist
English Woman’s Journal
, was obliged to duck invitations to Blandford Square because, even though she was over thirty, she worried about upsetting her parents. In this case it was not so much her beloved Marian she felt she could not visit as Lewes, whom she persisted in seeing as a libertine. In a letter to Barbara in which she explained her difficulty she finished with the key question: ‘Anthony Trollope goes there next week; but will he take his wife?’
⁹²

The answer was no. The occasion to which both Bessie and Trollope had been invited was a combined house-warming and twenty-first birthday party. In November 1863 the Leweses had moved into the Priory, on the edge of Regent’s Park. This was the first house they had bought and it cost £2000. Aware of the significance of such a step, they decided to have it renovated and redecorated by their friend Owen Jones, the country’s foremost designer who had been responsible for parts of the Crystal Palace.
Owen Jones looked after every detail, from the drawing-room chairs to the hanging of their engravings. The result was a ‘very exquisite thing’, the kind of place where Britain’s most successful author might hold court. Despite a few local difficulties, including the piano tuner being sick on the specially commissioned wallpaper and Marian getting her purse stolen by the removal men, the move went well.
⁹³
Owen Jones stayed until 2 a.m. on two nights to check that everything was ready for the party.

But there was one thing which was not quite right, apart from the conspicuous absence of Mrs Anthony Trollope, Mrs Owen Jones and a great many other ladies. Marian’s dowdy looks did not match her splendid setting. While Lewes had a dandyish touch, Marian still lacked elegance. Determined that his aesthetic vision should not be spoiled, Owen Jones gave her a stern sermon on ‘her general neglect of personal adornment’ and insisted that she should at least try to look pretty for the evening. He bossed her into a silver-grey dress, bought specially for the occasion, creating an image which appalled and secretly delighted her.
⁹⁴
She had just turned forty-four and although several men had told her that she was plain, none had ever suggested what she might do about it. It was extraordinary what a difference success made.

D
URING HER MIDDLE
forties Marian achieved something approaching peace of mind. The self-criticism, despair and morbid sensitivity which had continued to haunt even the commercial success of
The Mill
and the critical buzz of
Romola
now began to melt. The letters she wrote to friends during the mid-1860s have lost their characteristic defensive, combative tone. There are not so many swipes at ‘frivolous women’, fewer proud references to her lack of friends, less posing as an intellectual Olympian, unconcerned with what the masses think about her work. For the first time in Marian’s correspondence, there is something like an unguarded heart. A week after her forty-third birthday, in November 1862, she had written to M. D’Albert Durade: ‘I think this year’s end finds me enjoying existence more than I ever did before, in spite of the loss of youth. Study is a keener delight to me than ever, and I think the affections, instead of being dulled by age, have acquired a stronger activity – or at least their activity seems stronger for being less perturbed by the egoism of young cravings.’
¹
Viewed from outside there was no obvious reason for this softening. The two pieces of work which she produced during these years,
Felix Holt, The Radical
and
The
Spanish Gypsy
, hardly marked a return to the glory days of
Adam Bede
and
The Mill
. Profits were down and praise muted, especially in the case of
The Spanish Gypsy
, a dramatic poem woefully lacking in drama. Thornton and Bertie continued to be a worry, especially as the time drew near when they would have to stand alone. And Lewes’s health seemed to get, if anything, more precarious.

The secret of Marian’s growing happiness lay in her new ability to absorb and transform these unsought factors in her life. The death of friends and family, the coolish response to her work, even Lewes’s gaunt face, no longer had the power to plunge her into headachy despair from which it took days to emerge. Her new serenity may have followed the menopause, leaving her free from monthly swings of mood and vitality. Then again, her successful re-integration into London literary society may have given her the confidence to brush off the kind of imagined slight which had once filled her mind for days. Whatever the reason, it was during these years that Marian began to acquire her reputation for an emotional serenity to sit alongside her undisputed intellectual and creative powers. The intense young men and women who wrote adoring letters from around the world, together with the lucky few who were invited to the Priory, were drawn not by Mrs Poyser’s country sayings or Maggie Tulliver’s stubborn curls, but by the voice of George Eliot herself. It was this voice – wise, tolerant, all-seeing – which seemed to understand their greatest joys and deepest fears. In an age of increasing unbelief George Eliot’s ability to point the way to a meaningful life bestowed on Marian Lewes the status of secular saint.

Reactions to a new portrait reflect this shift in the way Marian was perceived. Frederic Burton’s painting, which was finished in 1865, was no more flattering than the one by Laurence five years earlier, yet this time Lewes was delighted and gave permission for it to be shown at the Royal Academy. Where once commentators stressed Marian’s plainness, sniggeringly implying that she was most unlikely mistress material, these days they rushed to see nobility in her heavy features. The general and often-repeated impression that she looked like a horse was now fleshed out by more careful and kindly detail. A young Henry James agreed on
meeting Marian that her face was ‘equine’, but added that it had ‘a delightful expression’.
²
Others preferred to make comparisons with Dante, Savonarola and Locke who, while men, were at least wise ones. From this point the myth grew that there was something magically transformative about Marian Lewes’s face. Visitors who arrived at the Priory expecting long, lumpy features reported that they were introduced to a woman whose inner light recast her face so that she looked ‘both good and loving and gentle’.
³
Appropriately for a woman named Marian, it was like hearing that a stony-faced Virgin had produced real tears.

Death was everywhere now. In November 1861 it came to the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who had been born the same year as Marian. It was not the passing of a youngish man she pondered so much as the effect on his poor widow.
⁴
Queen Victoria’s intense and protracted mourning following the death of the Consort the following month was likewise to draw her sympathy on the grounds that ‘I am a woman of about the same age, and also have my personal happiness bound up in a dear husband whose loss would render my life simply a series of social duties and private memories’.
⁵
The idea that she might one day have to live without Lewes pressed heavily. He was now in his late forties, and his face had grown thin and shockingly old. Even on holiday, where he had always rallied, he was now sometimes sick and faint. One doctor advised giving up naturalising because it entailed too much hanging of the head over rock pools and microscope. Mostly, though, it was a question of paying another visit to one more foul-tasting spa where, sociable as ever, the little man usually managed to bump into some equally frail literary friend. Although Marian was herself enjoying better health during these post-menopausal years, she was reluctant to leave Lewes behind in the land of invalids. She liked the idea that they were a ‘rickety old couple’, perhaps because its image of mutual dependence and old age suggested that they were long-time married.
⁶
‘We hardly know now what it is to be free from bodily malaise,’ she regularly intoned to her correspondents.
⁷

Other deaths came nearer. In May 1866 the appalling Dr Brabant finally succumbed at the age of eighty-five. Marian must still have felt embarrassed at the memory of their awkward affair
twenty years before, because her letter of condolence to his daughter Rufa Call skilfully avoids mentioning the old man’s name or, indeed, a single thing about him.
⁸

News of another loss stirred up more positive attachments to the past. In early 1864 Robert Evans, the eldest son of her father by his first wife, had died. The news came in a courteous letter from Evans’s son, also Robert Evans. Apart from a little contact with her schoolgirl niece Emily, it was the first time Marian had heard from her family in seven years. She replied promptly to ‘My dear Nephew’, thanking Evans for his ‘kind attention’ towards her and recalling the ‘unbroken kindness and generous brotherliness’ of his father.
⁹
In a fuller letter of condolence to her sister-in-law Marian expanded on her memories of Robert’s kindness – so different from Isaac’s coldness – and repeated her hope that if ever Mrs Evans were in town, she might pay a visit to the Priory. It was the kind of message which routinely closed letters between female relatives who lived at a distance, but in this case the meaning was momentous. By saying ‘To see you again or to hear from you … would be a very sweet renewal of the past’,
¹⁰
Marian was asking Jane to break Isaac Evans’s boycott.

Once her grief had settled, Jane would probably have made the gesture Marian was hoping for: in her reply of 18 March she told her sister-in-law that the last book Robert Evans held in his hand had been
Adam Bede
.
¹¹
But death intervened again, this time making things more difficult. Six weeks later another letter came from Robert Evans announcing that Henry Houghton, Fanny’s husband, had died.
¹²
Marian was in Scotland when it arrived, a point she emphasised to her nephew to explain a slight delay in responding. Now that a precious link had been made to her family, she was determined to protect it from misunderstanding: ‘my silence was not a neglectful one,’ she assured Robert Evans and, to make certain the letter reached him, she gave it ‘a double address’.
¹³

Having sent her condolences to ‘my affectionately remembered Sister’ via Robert, Marian does not seem to have written directly to Fanny. Perhaps she was waiting for a sign that her half-sister was ready to break the ban on communication imposed by Isaac. If so, none was forthcoming. Fanny had moved from a sceptical youth into an orthodox middle age. Since complying with the
boycott she had spent her time stalking Marian through the pages of her novels. She was sharp enough to note that the ‘marvellously clever’
Felix Holt
was likely to be ‘much more to the taste of the ordinary novel reader than
Romola
was’ and even spotted that Marian had written a couple of articles in the first issue of a new periodical, the
Fortnightly
. None the less, when it came to the vexed question of her half-sister’s domestic arrangements, Fanny was as bigoted as any provincial farmer’s wife. On tracking down a photograph of Lewes in a Leamington bookstore she wrote with delighted disgust to Isaac that there was something positively inhuman about the face of the man who had ruined their sister’s life.
¹⁴

Fanny’s bereavement stopped any further bridge-building between Marian and the Evanses. On the death of Henry Houghton Fanny moved to Nottingham to live with Robert’s widow Jane. Now any overtures made by Jane towards Marian would have to take place under the disapproving eye of Fanny. With this new pressure, the pace of reconciliation slowed. There seems to have been no communication between the Priory and Nottingham until two years later in August 1866, when Marian received a letter from her nephew inviting herself and Lewes to visit. This put her in a difficult position. While she was assured of a warm welcome from Robert, his wife and his mother, would she be forced to endure Fanny’s pointed absence? Rather than risk that painful possibility, she used the strategy she always adopted when faced with invitations to homes where she could not be sure she would not meet some snub from a fellow guest. She wrote back warmly to Robert thanking him and his wife for their ‘attention’ but excusing herself on the grounds that she had only just returned from two months on the Continent.
¹⁵

But it was the death of twenty-year-old Nelly Bray which hit hardest. On 1 March 1865 the Brays’ adopted daughter finally succumbed to the consumption she had been fighting for several years.
¹⁶
In her letter of condolence to Cara Marian’s thoughts turned inevitably to the subject she had discussed so many times with the Hennell sisters: the possibility of a future life.

The problem of what happened to the soul after death tormented the mid-century agnostic mind. If there was no God, did that mean there was no heaven? The new and growing craze for drawing-room seances sprang directly from the powerful hope that, even if God had gone, something of the human spirit remained after death. The Leweses were sceptical. During their second visit to the Villino Trollope in Florence in 1861 Lewes had argued vigorously against the whole nonsense of table tapping. Much later, in 1874, he and Marian were to storm out of a seance at Erasmus Darwin’s house ‘in disgust’ because the medium insisted on complete darkness.
¹⁸
In an article which Marian wrote for the first issue of the
Fortnightly
in 1865 she pointed out that the human need for an afterlife was so strong that intelligent men and women swore blind that they had seen the fashionable medium Daniel Home float through the air.
¹⁹

Unlike Lewes, Marian did not characterise this credulity as craven weakness. Again and again she returned to the sharedness of all human yearning, regardless of the doctrine in which it came clothed. Cardinal Newman’s
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
, in which he charts his journey from Oxford High Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, drew her ‘as the revelation of a life – how different in form from one’s own, yet with how close a fellowship in its [spiritual] needs and burthens’.
²⁰
But she did not take refuge in a hazy theism made up of the most appealing bits of other people’s religions. Ever the natural historian, she understood that each way of worship was the product of a particular moment in man’s historic and social development. It would always be her native Church of England which spoke directly to her ‘as a portion of
my earliest associations and most poetic memories’, rather than the dissenting traditions about which she had written so convincingly, and was to do so again in
Felix Holt
.
²¹

But if Marian understood the human attachment to religious forms, she still believed that the best and highest thing was to live without them. The driving force behind her writing, she told Dr Clifford Allbutt, one of the earnest young men who became a friend and correspondent in the late 1860s, was to show readers ‘those vital elements which bind men together and give a higher worthiness to their existence’, while trying to wean them off their dependency on ‘an outworn teaching’ based on ‘transient forms’.
²²