George Eliot (57 page)

Luckily callers at the Priory were grand enough to justify the magnificent new lavatory. ‘Lords and Ladies, poets and cabinet ministers, artists and men of science, crowd upon us,’ crowed Lewes to Main.
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And these days they were bringing their wives with them. Marian and Lewes had been together for so long now that it was an effort to remember that they were not married. In fact, even they often seemed confused: when writing to Alexander Main in January 1873 Lewes maintained that he had lived with his mother until he had ‘married’ Marian, with absolutely no mention of Agnes and the children.
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Marian continued in her usual and, for those in the know, embarrassing custom of referring to Lewes as ‘my husband’. No wonder, then, that it was often rumoured that there had been a quiet divorce and remarriage on the Continent. When Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, and his wife Lady Augusta met Marian at dinner at the Lockers in
1871 they were blithely unaware that ‘Mrs Lewes’ was still legally ‘Miss Evans’.
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And even though the Stanleys were later upset to learn the true state of affairs, it is unlikely that they dissolved in a froth of righteous indignation. The times were changing and just as a reluctance to believe in God no longer constituted a bar to good society, long-term cohabitation was no longer exactly the scandal it used to be. Even Queen Victoria, writing to her daughter Vicky in Germany in 1870, conceded that in those cases where it was too expensive or difficult to divorce, long-term unmarried partnership must surely be ‘holy and right’.
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There was still the occasional priggish objection, but this usually came from someone with a personal axe to grind, like Charles Norton. The Bostonian and his wife visited the Priory in the early weeks of 1869 having, so he maintained, been begged to attend by Lewes. Just like his friend Henry James, Norton seems to have been engaged in an Oedipal struggle with these representatives of an older intellectual generation. In a letter home, Norton assured his correspondent that no decent woman ever went near the Priory: while Mrs Lewes was generally agreed to be ‘a good woman in her present life’, society still looked askance at the bad example she had set. Indeed, Norton maintained that he knew of one infamous case where a ‘poor weak woman’ went to live with her lover, taking Marian Lewes as her precedent.

More spiteful altogether was Norton’s contempt for the Leweses’ aesthetic taste. He described the Priory as hideously vulgar, stuffed with bad paintings, including the portrait of Marian by Burton. Lewes, in a phrase much repeated down the years, was ‘like an old-fashioned French barber or dancing master’ while Marian was extraordinarily plain, of ‘dull complexion, dull eye, heavy features’. Moreover, she had an unpleasantly self-conscious manner, as if accustomed ‘to the adoring flattery of a coterie of not undistinguished admirers’. This, said Norton, showed up in her theatrical adoption of a ‘very low and eager’ speaking voice, which required her to lean over ‘till her face is close to yours’.
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Although Norton loftily maintained that he and his wife had no intention of extending their friendship with the Leweses, a few weeks later they invited both of them to lunch at the house they had taken in Queen’s Gate Terrace. Shortly afterwards Mrs Norton brought her young children to
the Priory, which suggests that she hardly saw it as the haunt of the demi-monde which her husband’s letter had blusteringly implied.

The question remains why Marian and Lewes went through the strain of hosting a party for twenty or so people every single week. They were both in fragile health and Marian was always fretting about her failure to push ahead with work. For Lewes the reason was simple: socialising with congenial people always had a magically reviving effect. There was hardly any headache or bilious attack which could not be improved by companionable chat over dinner (the food was not important, his tastes were plain). But Marian had always had more ambivalent feelings about the clatter of forced conversation, finding it an emotional and physical drain. What made the Priory At Homes different was that she was rarely subjected to unwanted chat. Lewes picked the lucky ones who were to have an audience and there was a tacit understanding that no one was there to talk about the weather. Conversation was carefully channelled into areas preselected by Marian: religion, painting, literature, her most recent trip abroad. When she grew tired, bored or offended, a hovering Lewes was at hand to whisk the tedious or impertinent guest away.

But the single most important reason why the Leweses continued their weekly entertainment of the great and the good was to show that they could. After years of Marian dining at home alone, it was sweet to watch while the most famous names in the country and on the Continent – Turgenev was a new guest – hovered in the hope of a few minutes’ conversation with Mrs Lewes.

While the Leweses’ contradictory feelings about other people were contained by the strict format of Priory Sundays, once they stepped outside the door their ambivalence led to some baffling behaviour. In April 1869 they were visiting Florence when they were asked to dine by the American ambassador and his wife. They accepted on condition that no one except Isa Blagdon, an old friend of Robert Browning’s, should be asked as well. So when the American poet Longfellow heard that they were in town and begged for an invitation he was turned down. Confusingly, when the Leweses heard about this they announced themselves disappointed, whereupon their hostess sent a note to the
poet’s lodgings asking him to present himself immediately. But he was out.
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The fact was that although they insisted that they despised celebrity friendships, whenever a famous face hove into view the Leweses could not resist adding it to their collection. In the summer of 1871 when they were staying for a few months at the little village of Shottermill in Surrey, they were clearly intrigued by the fact that the Tennysons lived at nearby Aldworth. On 14 July Lewes bumped into the Laureate on the train from London and lost no time in bringing him home to meet Marian. Formal visits were duly exchanged and by the end of August the two households were on sufficiently familiar terms for Tennyson to round off a neighbourly evening by reading from his work. Both sides, however, indulged in a little
post hoc
tweaking to make it seem as though the other household had made all the running. Marian affected a world-weary tone when she mentioned to John Blackwood that it was Tennyson who had hunted her down, rather than the other way round.
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Meanwhile Mrs, later Lady, Tennyson was careful to make sure that posterity did not know just how hard she had pushed to meet the notorious George Eliot. Although a few copies of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s memoir contain an entry from his wife’s diary which makes it clear that she had received and called on Mrs Lewes, in most copies the incriminating passage has been reworked to imply that the poet visited Shottermill alone.
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In the ancient cities of Oxford and Cambridge there was no such suburban squeamishness. Lewes had long been building links with the scientific men at the universities and Marian had taken great interest in the many young men she knew who had been obliged to give up their fellowships when they lost their faith. In May 1870 the Leweses spent three days with Mark Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln College, and his wife Emilia. For two entirely self-taught people, it was gratifying to be treated as honoured guests by the most obviously educated people in Britain. Distinguished scientists opened their laboratories and Benjamin Jowett, the next Master of Balliol, came to dinner. The Leweses also went to hear Emanuel Deutsch deliver his fearsomely learned paper on the Moabite Stone at the Sheldonian.
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On their first evening in Oxford the Leweses dined at Lincoln College, where among the guests was the eighteen-year-old Mary Arnold, niece of Matthew Arnold. The young girl was naturally agog to meet George Eliot, especially since she had literary aspirations, in later life becoming the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward. Mary’s first reaction was one of disappointment at Mrs Lewes’s quietness, which amounted almost to silence. But with her usual perception Marian spotted the girl’s hunger and sought her out for special attention. Knowing that Mary was interested in Spain, Marian started to talk about her recent stay there, ‘with perfect ease and finish, without misplacing a word or dropping a sentence,’ remembered Mrs Ward much later, ‘and I realised at last that I was in the presence of a great writer’.
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Cambridge was equally welcoming. In February 1868 Oscar Browning and William Clark, fellows of King’s and Trinity respectively, invited the Leweses to see round the place. There was something about the aura of moral seriousness combined with the pedagogic tradition which always brought out the prig in Marian. Browning recalled how during dinner at Trinity ‘she talked to me solemnly about the duties of life, about the shallow immorality of believing that all things would turn out for the best, and the danger of fixing our attention too much on the life to come, as likely to distract us from doing our duty in this world’.
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On another visit to Cambridge, by now revelling in her status as sage, Marian returned to her favourite subjects as she walked round the Fellows’ Garden at Trinity with Frederic Myers: ‘she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiriting trumpet-calls of men, – the words,
God, Immortality, Duty
, – pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the
first
, how unbelievable the
second
, and yet how peremptory and absolute the
third
.
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The staginess of this often repeated anecdote is partly explained by the fact that Myers was writing years later and well after Marian’s death. Elsewhere in his essay he refers to her as a ‘Sibyl’, a tag which unfortunately caught on and contributed to the doomy image of a massive, mythic figurehead, given to spouting riddles. But Marian also contributed to this impression herself when, in 1878, she published a ponderous poem called ‘The College Breakfast-Party’, probably based on
an actual conversation at Trinity, which discusses the conflict between duty to others and the desire for self-fulfilment.
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During these years Marian had increasingly engineered her life so that she was always speaking to a rapt and sympathetic audience. Spontaneous utterance in front of neutral and unknown people was to be avoided at all costs. In 1871 she was invited to Edinburgh to take part in the celebration of the centenary of Scott’s birth.
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Although she was destined to sit on the top table alongside other worthies, including John Blackwood, the prospect of unscripted conversation and public scrutiny terrified her. After initially agreeing to attend out of gratitude for the comfort which Scott had brought to her dying father, Marian panicked and got Lewes to write and withdraw her name using her usual excuse of ill-health.

Beneath the public image of sage and sibyl there remained a woman intensely involved with the details of domestic life. Gertrude Lewes’s delivery of a baby girl in 1872 after two miscarriages was greeted with delight. When two more girls followed in 1874 and 1877, Marian allowed herself the luxury of joining in with Lewes’s moan that they had wanted a grandson. She remained as interested as she ever had been in Bertie, who had stayed on in Africa after Thornie’s death. In August 1870 Lewes and Marian had received a letter from the twenty-three-year-old in Natal announcing that he had become engaged to a ‘well-educated young lady, Eliza Stevenson Harrison’, the daughter of a long-time settler.
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But there was a hitch: the girl’s father objected to the match, on the grounds that the boy’s father did not have a penny. Luckily, a substantial injection of cash into the equation seems to have made the difference, for the couple were married in August 1871. In gratitude for the help they had received from the Leweses, Bertie and Eliza named their first child Marian and the second George.

Nor, despite her wealth and status, did Marian lose her grasp on the daily details of housekeeping. Moving into rented accommodation at Shottermill in the summer of 1871 prompted her to write detailed letters to the landlady about blinds, keys and the failure of the butcher to deliver meat. The experience of running Griff, particularly the hiring and managing of the servants, had
never left her. As mistress of the Priory she drew up an exact schedule of the housemaid’s daily and weekly duties, including the when and where of carpet-beating and brass-polishing.
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On 11 November 1872 she wrote to Frederic Harrison’s new young wife recommending the daughter of the Priory’s cook as a housemaid. She assures Mrs Harrison that Mary Dowling left her last post only because she was not quick enough at some of the fancier aspects of the job. Marian also believes that the rest of the servants took against the girl because ‘her underclothing was thought arrogantly good’ and her attitude towards the male staff ‘had a little too much dignity’. It is hard to imagine Dickens, Thackeray or Trollope taking such a detailed interest in their footmen’s underpants.
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Marian was aware that her need to watch over others sometimes gushed out of control. On 10 August 1869 she wrote to Emilia Pattison apologising for her effusiveness during the latter’s visit to the Priory, which was not ‘warranted by the short time we had known each other’. Touchingly, she put this down to the fact that she had never given birth and was therefore ‘conscious of having an unused stock of motherly tenderness, which sometimes overflows’.
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Perhaps watching her stepson’s life slip away had also added to Marian’s need to reach out to young people. Between now and the end of her life all the new relationships she formed were with people of an age to be her children. She adopted the Greek model of friendship for her own purposes, talking often of how much she valued the idea that ‘the most satisfactory of all ties is this effective invisible intercourse of an elder mind with a younger’.
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But beneath the rationalisation there was something far more powerful at work. Until she was thirty Marian had spent her time falling in love with teachers of either sex. Now that she was of an age to inhabit that role herself, she found it natural to draw adoring acolytes towards her.