George Eliot (62 page)

Another charitable cause close to home was the Brays. By now their financial situation was dire. Marian pressed Cara to accept a series of payments of fifty pounds or so as private advances for various children’s books she planned to write. Well aware that this was charity by another name, Cara had to be bullied into cashing any of the cheques. Charles Bray, once so robust, was now wheezing into old age, as annoying as ever. Naturally he misunderstood the thrust of Lewes’s thesis in the second volume of
Problems of Life and Mind
and was not backward in saying so. Just like his despised sister-in-law Sara Hennell, Bray continued to publish diffuse and lengthy philosophic works, which managed to miss the point:
Illusion and Delusion
(1873) baffled everyone.
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While Marian was generous towards those she considered her own, it has often been hinted that she was mean towards everyone else. This is not fair. Like her father, she kept track of money, once writing a note to Barbara Bodichon to remind her that she had forgotten to repay a shilling borrowed from one of the Priory servants. She was quick to support anyone whom she felt was kith and kin, but suspicious of claims from people she did not know and whose motives she did not exactly understand. For this reason Marian remained conspicuously aloof from her friend Jane Senior’s work in educating pauper girls. Admiring her energy
and commitment, she none the less believed that: ‘Do what one will with a pauper system it remains a huge system of vitiation, introducing the principle of communistic provision instead of provision through individual, personal responsibility and activity.’
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In the same way, while Marian was notoriously cautious about giving money to charitable causes such as Mrs Garrett Anderson’s Hospital for Women, she was happy to donate £200 towards raising an annuity for Octavia Hill, so that she might give up teaching and concentrate on her work in housing the poor. The difference here was that while Marian had only met Mrs Anderson once, Miss Hill and her work were well known to the Leweses through her sister, Charlie’s wife Gertrude.

This way of thinking determined the Leweses’ contributions to charity giving in these last years of their life. There were tiny donations – sometimes for as little as five pounds – to causes like the Positivists or the Working Women’s College, but generous and continued support for family members such as Emily Clarke, who was battling with deafness while continuing to work as a governess in Brighton. On one occasion Marian wrote explaining to Barbara that she could not send the £100 needed for new rooms at Girton because she had just heard that she would now be responsible for Bertie’s widow and children.
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Here was a perfect illustration of George Eliot’s meliorist philosophy in action: unobtrusive good done to those close at hand was more valuable than heroic efforts in the name of an abstract cause.

Priory life was not much disrupted by Bertie’s death. The event itself, and the life which preceded it, quickly took on an air of unreality. Lewes did not bother to announce the passing in the paper, or even tell his friends about it. Marian first mentioned the fact to Blackwood nearly eighteen months later, explaining that Lewes had not said anything at the time because he ‘dreaded letters of condolence’.
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To a few of her own friends, though, she indulged in a little
post hoc
romanticising about the boy whom she had not seen for nearly ten years. Bertie, she explains to correspondents, had been ‘not clever, but diligent and well-judging about the things of daily life’ while his marriage to Eliza was ‘peculiarly united’, their ‘being all in all to each other’.
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In death, Marian had made the most unpromising of her stepsons
into someone of whom she finally found it possible to approve.

Spiritual daughters were altogether easier to love. By 1873 Elma Stuart’s tentative early correspondence had turned into a fulsome flood. She wrote all the time from Dinan now, gradually weaving herself into Lewes family life. Apart from the stream of hand-crafted gifts to Marian, she sent toys to Charlie’s and Gertrude’s girls, as well as enclosing photographs of her son Roland and her two adored dogs, to stand on the Priory side-board. She finally got to meet her idol when she came to lunch at Blackbrook, the house in Kent where the Leweses spent the autumn of 1873. The interview went well, with Marian writing to Elma the very next day, ‘I love you the better for having seen you in the flesh’ and enclosing a lock of hair, while Lewes reassured her, ‘you left behind you a very sweet and lovable image’.
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Elma’s largely epistolary romance with Marian, and with her proxy Lewes, was a tender, intimate one. It did not, like the letters from Mrs Frederick Ponsonby, cover the great issues of belief and unbelief, but concerned itself more often with the question of underwear. Elma was tireless in her search for the perfect pair of drawers and often wrote to both the Leweses with her suggestions, to which they were happy to respond. She also corralled her only child, Roland, into this imaginary family life, getting him to send headache-soothing eau de cologne to his ‘honorary grandmother’. Although an educated, intelligent woman, Elma was less a disciple than the attentive daughter whom Marian never had.

But there was someone whose feelings for George Eliot exceeded even Elma’s steady devotion. Edith Simcox, a tiny, clever twenty-eight-year-old, had first visited the Priory late in 1872. Although she came on the strength of reviewing
Middlemarch
for the
Academy
, literature was only one of her many interests. Combining a first-rate mind with a strong, reforming zeal, she crammed a dizzying amount into her days. Not only did she produce a stream of articles and three books on everything from folklore to suffrage, she also set up a shirt-making business in Soho, which guaranteed its female employees reasonable working conditions and good wages. A committed trade unionist, she represented the movement abroad and was elected, too, to the
London School Board, which oversaw the provision of compulsory elementary schooling following the 1870 Education Act.
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Tramping round London in all weathers, the bird-like Edith often called in at the Priory on her way to somewhere else. With Elma in France, Emilia in Oxford and Alexander Main in Aberdeen, Lewes was on the look-out for a morale-boosting fan who might be wheeled in whenever Polly’s spirits were low. Edith fitted the bill exactly. There could be no doubting her devotion, which was suffused with both sexual and religious ardour. Marian was ‘the Madonna’ in all seriousness now, a female Deity who was to be worshipped with a full range of hem-kissing and feet-hugging. At night, home alone, Edith poured out her devotion to her journal, the only surviving record of this one-sided love affair: ‘Day by day let me begin and end by looking to Her for guidance and rebuke, … every night what has been done ill or left undone shall be confessed on my knees to my Darling and my God.’
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While Lewes thought Edith’s ardour was funny, Marian could find it off-putting. Sometimes she shuffled her legs round, to get them out of feet-kissing range. When Edith gave her a copy of her book,
Natural Law
, inscribed ‘with idolatrous love’, Marian maintained a pointed silence.
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Edith, arriving unasked at the door of the Leweses’ 1875 summer hideaway in Rickmansworth, was greeted with cold astonishment.

All this only inflamed Edith’s passion, which continued to feed morbidly upon itself. As long as Lewes was there to act as a buffer Marian was able to tolerate and even draw strength from Edith’s engagement with her work, which was as thoughtful as it was passionate. But in 1878, with Lewes gone, Marian became edgy about the implications of what was clearly a sexual crush. On Boxing Day 1879 Edith arrived at the Priory to find Marian cool and distracted. Unwilling to return her kiss, Marian then asked her to give up calling her ‘Mother’ since ‘her feeling for me was
not
at all of a mother’s’.
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A couple of months later Marian went further. After an intense afternoon during which the conversation touched on Edith’s reluctance to marry, Marian emphasised to her young admirer that ‘the love of men and women for each other must always be more and better than
any other’. Edith responded with anguished strokes and pats, whereupon Marian told her sharply that ‘she had never all her life cared very much for women’. This was then hastily qualified by the statement that while ‘she cared for the womanly ideal, sympathised with women and liked them to come to her in their troubles … the friendship and intimacy of men was more to her’. Naturally this only stirred Edith’s passion further. Before she left the Priory that afternoon, ‘I asked her to kiss me – let a trembling lover tell of the intense consciousness of the first deliberate touch of the dear one’s lips. I returned the kiss to the lips that gave it and started to go – she waved me farewell.’
³⁶

Whether there was competition between George Eliot’s spiritual daughters for her love and attention is hard to say. Edith certainly kept a weather-eye out for who had received most letters from Madonna. However, she was happy to co-operate with Elma over the design and making-up of shirts for both the Leweses. And by the time Marian was dead Edith and Maria Congreve seem to have gained strength from meeting and becoming friends, happy to fill the void by sharing memories. Any feelings of jealousy were offset by the relief of discovering that there were other women who, in Edith’s words, had ‘loved my Darling lover-wise too’.
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After years of constant but vague ill-health, it now seemed as if there might actually be something wrong with Lewes and Marian. The fact that three out of four of the Lewes boys had died before reaching thirty, while Agnes’s second family by Hunt continued to flourish, suggests that Lewes’s system was inherently weak. Scurrilous rumours put this down to venereal disease, picked up in early life. But the fact that both Lewes’s brothers had died young points to a family pathology which had a more respectable, or at least more enduring, origin.

From 1875 Lewes was never well. The problem for us is knowing why. He was often diagnosed as having ‘a relaxed mucous membrane’, which means little in the late twentieth century. Sometimes the severest of his symptoms turned out to have the most innocent causes: shooting pains and deafness were on one occasion relieved simply by having his ear wax cleaned out. But underlying the constant headaches, dizzy turns and nausea there
was clearly something seriously wrong. On 14 December 1875, for instance, he recorded a frightening incident in which ‘After dinner while dozing in my chair [T] felt a strange pressure inside the ears accompanied by inability to move or speak. Thought paralysis had come on or Death. But it passed away, leaving only a sense of Indigestion behind.’
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There were other, more humiliating, infirmities. For several weeks in 1877 the usually nimble man was reduced to shuffling along on two sticks as a result of a bad attack of ‘rheumatic gout’.
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Marian was not well either. Writing
Daniel Deronda
brought the inevitable headachy depression – ‘I had hardly a day of good health while it was in progress’ – although she had the insight to admit to Elma that this might be caused less by ‘bodily feebleness’ than ‘mental anxiety’.
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But by the summer of 1876 she was passing blood in her urine, a symptom of the kidney disease which had killed her father and was to kill her. The following February she was diagnosed as having a stone, following a terrifying incident which Lewes recorded in his journal for 23 February. He had been about to take an after-dinner nap, when: ‘I was alarmed by [Polly’s] … violent screams in the drawing room and rushing in found her hysterically screaming and sobbing –
not
from pain but strange and excessive irritation in the kidneys.’
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Marian’s other recurring problem was her mouth. Her teeth had never been good and they got worse as she grew older. Throughout the seventies she had several removed, latterly under gas, and tried to calm her gums by rubbing them with a lotion supplied by Elma. Both Marian’s and Lewes’s correspondence with Dinan now concentrated on ill-health, theirs and hers. Elma, in turn, sent a stream of gadgets and potions designed to ease their discomfort, from a writing board to help the strain on Marian’s back to a design for drawers intended to take the weight off her hips.

This growing ricketiness meant that travel was increasingly brief. The Leweses had long promised themselves a trip to the East when Mrs Willim died and there was even talk of going to America. But in the end they stayed put, hiring a series of houses in a ring around London, from Rickmansworth in the north to Redhill in the south. To modern ears these places sound an odd choice, suburban and dull. But in the 1870s they still passed
as the countryside, albeit within a convenient hour’s journey of London. There was enough green for Marian to ramble through in the afternoons and a train station nearby to whisk Lewes up to London for any unmissable parties. Most important of all, they were too far away for casual callers. The only people who found their way to this series of secluded country cottages were those who had been issued with an invitation.

That it took the Leweses so long to buy a country house of their own is testament to their fussiness as to what would and wouldn’t do. They wanted a perfect little house with ‘the cabstand before and the desert behind’, close to every amenity but far away from other people.
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Friends recommended properties in Weybridge, Reigate, Dorking, Croydon, but none was quite right. Instead, the Leweses muddled through with a series of short-term lets which caused more bother than many would have thought worth it. Thus in June 1873 they signed a twelve-month lease on a house called Blackbrook near Bickley, Kent. Since it was let until September, they filled the intervening weeks with a tour of French and German spas. But when the time came to take possession on 5 September, Marian and Lewes found that the furniture, which they thought came with the house, actually belonged to the previous tenants. All that remained was a few broken bits and pieces.
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They lasted seven weeks before breaking their contract, leaving on the last day of October.