George Eliot (64 page)

That very evening at half past eight Blackwood sat down and devoured the manuscript at one sitting, staying up until three o’clock in the morning. He loved what he read and dashed off a note to say so. Five days later he wrote a fuller response and, at Lewes’s prompting, made it even more appreciative than usual. Gwendolen was ‘a fascinating witch’, Grandcourt ‘a most original
character’, the Meyricks’ domestic virtue delightful. All in all, said Blackwood, ‘I beg to congratulate you on this most auspicious opening of another immortal work.’
⁶¹

Despite being primed by Lewes, Blackwood was genuinely delighted with the first part of
Daniel Deronda
and probably believed he was speaking the truth when he told Marian on 10 November that she was ‘fairly outdoing
Middlemarch
’.
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The English country setting, the affable but lax clergyman, the minxy heroine, the hopeless boy, were all familiar ingredients. At first he was happy with the Jewish part too, probably assuming that the effect would be the same as with the Methodists in
Adam Bede
– a revelation of their common humanity. But as he read subsequent parts of the book and observed the narrative concentrating increasingly on Mordecai, Blackwood found it hard to see how ordinary readers would stay engaged. On 24 February 1876, having finished Book Six, Blackwood backed off from making any comment, maintaining that ‘it would be presumptuous to speak until one has read more’.
⁶³
Marian was quick to pick up on his ambivalence about the Jewish part of the book, having already anticipated that it would not be popular. Called to his senses, and with who-knows-what prompting, Blackwood wrote another letter on 2 March, ostensibly to Lewes, in which he sang his ‘unbounded congratulations’ to Mrs Lewes. ‘She is
A Magician
. It is a Poem, a Drama, and a Grand Novel.’ Touching specifically on her fears about the Jewish plot, he continued, ‘There is no doubt about the marvellous Mordecai and oh that Cohen family! The whole tribe of Israel should fall down and worship her.’
⁶⁴

Although in truth Blackwood remained doubtful about the Jewish strand of the book, he set about doing the best he could for
Daniel Deronda
. It was decided to publish in eight monthly instalments, starting in February 1876. The financial deal was the same as with
Middlemarch
: a two-shilling payment on every part sold. Blackwood was as careful as ever not to make any mention of the reviews in front of Marian, although for the first time ever he privately questioned just how consistent and useful this policy was: ‘I think Lewes fidgets her in his anxiety both about her and her work and himself,’ he confided in William. ‘She says she never reads any review, but she certainly hears
plentifully all that is said or written in London on the subject of Deronda.’
⁶⁵

Blackwood’s consistently kind treatment of Marian continued to be tested by annoying twitches of bad behaviour. From time to time she would get picky about advertising, convinced that George Simpson was not doing enough to publicise her books. In early 1876 when Blackwoods was slow to send proofs of
Deronda
to the book’s American publisher, the Leweses panicked that they were going to lose the contract (and the money) and snapped nastily at Blackwood himself.
⁶⁶
Despite these pettish interludes, Marian remained at some level aware that she had been exceedingly lucky in falling in with what she called ‘the best of publishers’. In October 1876 she was rereading some of Blackwood’s old letters when she felt compelled to write and tell him how grateful she was for his nearly twenty years of support. Although her letter has been lost, the depth of Blackwood’s response suggests that it was touchingly frank. He tells her that ‘Tears came into my eyes, and I read the passage at once to my wife’ and promises to keep her letter for his children ‘as a memorial that their father was good for something in his day’.
⁶⁷

A week later Blackwood wrote again to say that the copyright on George Eliot’s books was almost up and that he was anxious to renegotiate, ‘as I am bent upon continuing your publisher as well as friend through life’. He then goes on: ‘We have a long career of successive triumphs to look back upon and I hope there is much yet before us.’
⁶⁸
Although his offer was generous – £4000 for another ten years – the Leweses decided to go for a royalty instead. It wasn’t that £4000 was not enough, but they would rather carry the risk themselves, as well as retaining a say over editions and prices. It was, as Gordon Haight points out, a wise decision: the next edition of Eliot’s work, the Cabinet Edition, brought £4330 in royalties over the following eight years.
⁶⁹

In the lost letter to Blackwood of October 1876, Marian had touched on her fear that after her death she would become the subject of gossipy biography. Obliquely she was telling him not to co-operate with anyone who came asking for access to their correspondence. Blackwood wrote back reassuring Marian that he considered the public’s desire for this kind of information ‘depraved’ and, paraphrasing something which she had said
repeatedly during the Liggins scandal, asked, ‘why are great authors not to enjoy the privacy of common life?’
⁷⁰

It was an issue which had been worrying Marian as far back as 1861, when she told Sara Hennell, ‘I have destroyed almost all my friends’ letters to me, simply … because they were only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into the hands of persons who knew little of the writers, if I allowed them to remain till after my death.’
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And only a month before that death, she was writing to Cara Bray, ‘I think you are quite right to look over your old letters and papers and decide for yourself what should be burned. Burning is the most reverential destination one can give to relics which will not interest any one after we are gone. I hate the thought that what we have looked at with eyes full of living memory should be tossed about and made lumber of, or (if it be writing) read with hard curiosity.’
⁷²

Although Blackwood and the Hennell sisters proved staunch, Marian had reason to be worried. As her celebrity travelled around the world, there was growing opportunity for inaccuracies to get grafted on to her reputation. One American correspondent casually referred to her having sat at the feet of Herbert Spencer, while the biographical dictionary
Men of the Time
spun a fanciful line about her being born the daughter of a poor clergyman who was subsequently adopted by a rich one.
⁷³
In other places a long-time myth about her being born into nonconformity was constantly rehashed. But if inaccuracy was annoying, revelation was mortifying. Marian had hated the third volume of John Forster’s
Life of Dickens
because it revealed a loud, flashy character quite unlike the thoughtful dinner guest she had known.
⁷⁴
In a frenzy of righteous anger, she asked Blackwood whether he did not think that it was ‘odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk is raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public, is printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to re-read his books?’
⁷⁵
As Marian moved towards her own death she worried about the versions of her life which might soon be released into general circulation.

Other people’s autobiographies also brought a threat of exposure. Herbert Spencer had for some time been working away on his odd, self-justifying autobiography and made sure that Marian knew it was in progress. Would he be revealing the details
of their one-sided love affair? In 1877 the example of Harriet Martineau’s autobiography, which had nothing nice to say about anyone, had set a worrying precedent. Marian, for her part, had long made up her mind that she would not be adding to the genre. On her fifty-first birthday, Lewes had given her ‘a Lock-up book for her Autobiog[raphy]’. It has never been found.
⁷⁶

Daniel Deronda
is, in Henry James’s famous comment, ‘full of the world’. It has a geographical and social stretch unseen in any other George Eliot novel. Instead of the Casaubons’ single epoch-making stay in Rome, the characters in
Daniel Deronda
whisk from Wessex to the Midlands to Germany to Genoa, pausing only for an occasionally tricky train connection. They plan trips to the East and take sailing holidays in the Mediterranean. The small-town merchants of
Middlemarch
have been replaced by second-generation business people whose large estates and ambitious marriages make them indistinguishable from the gentry. Sir James Chettam and Mr Brooke look like local squires compared with the grandees who own Wessex. Instead of sitting as a JP or worrying about a tenant’s broken gates, a wealthy landowner like Henleigh Grandcourt flits around the Continent, occasionally coming to roost at one of his several magnificent homes.

Daniel Deronda
is George Eliot’s only novel to be set in the near-present, around 1875. There is no galloping coachman or historian-narrator taking us back to the England of the 1820s or beyond. This landscape is not caught in the moment of transition between the old agricultural ways and the new mechanised age. That process has already been completed, and life is self-consciously modern, fast and hard. Any change still to come is of an unambiguously bad kind. In February 1874 Marian Lewes had spoken of the contemporary ‘eager scrambling after wealth and show’ and in
Daniel Deronda
she shows this process at work.
⁷⁷
An enervated ruling class, detached from its historic ties and duties, spends its days in pointless ritual and empty display. In the endless round of country balls and London dinners the main topic of conversation is money – who has it, might have it or could get it. Matches are plotted between heiresses and penniless aristocrats; fortunes are lost in the city and gained at the roulette
table. In this febrile world, men profit from their neighbours’ debts.

Henleigh Grandcourt stands at the exhausted heart of this busy world. Although he is wealthy, landed, heir to a baronetcy and perhaps one day to a peerage, his inner life has atrophied to the point where nothing can rouse him from a despairing cynicism. His pulse is slow, his blood cold, his skin drained of colour. Flooded with ennui, he can barely bother to acknowledge the people who stumble across his world. If a conversation bores him, he simply walks away. If his surroundings grow stale, he moves to another estate, city or country. His sole excitement comes from the slow breaking and taming of spirited creatures. Once women and men, but chiefly women, have submitted to his power, he feels only a spasm of pleasure at their broken-backed subjection.

When the book opens Grandcourt’s chief victims are Lush, his secretary, and Lydia Glasher, his mistress. Fifteen years ago Lush gave up a college fellowship and the possibility of ordination in order to work for the young Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt. The intervening time has been spent looking after Grandcourt’s business interests, organising his social life and sorting out his women. Lush’s ‘departed learning’ has been put to pragmatic use and his reward is a life of magnificent luxury, hovering on the edge of the best circles. But Grandcourt treats this ‘half-caste among gentlemen’ like one of the many pet dogs which swarm around him, alternately claiming Lush’s attention before dismissing him with a well-aimed kick.
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The scenes between Grandcourt and Lush are heavy with a disgusted sexual attraction. It is Lush’s job to pimp for Grand-court, to manage his erotic life. He makes sure that Lydia Glasher, mistress and mother of Grandcourt’s children, does not make trouble, and looks out for likely marriage prospects for his thirty-five-year-old master. Now that Grandcourt has taken up residence at Diplow, his Wessex estate, there is a new group of young women for Lush to trawl. One bridal candidate is Catherine Arrowpoint, the intelligent, straightforward heiress to a million-pound fortune. Wessex gossip has, in its mercenary way, speculated on a match between Miss Arrowpoint’s promised cash and Mr Grandcourt’s prospective land and title. However, after only
a brief introduction to the local marriage pool, Grandcourt perversely decides that it is not Miss Arrowpoint but the beautiful, comparatively poor Gwendolen Harleth whom he will have as his wife.

In the character of Gwendolen, Eliot combines two strands of her writing about women. Gwendolen starts the book with all the heedless narcissism of Hetty Sorrel or Rosamond Vincy. While Hetty and Rosamond pat their hair in front of the mirror, Gwendolen literally kisses her own reflection. While Hetty has been transplanted from her own birthplace, Gwendolen has spent her youth rattling round the country, never spending long in any one place. Emotionally rootless, she is incapable of acting on anything beyond her own desire. She believes that her beauty, wit and refinement ‘well equipped [her] for the mastery of life’.
⁷⁹
Her four clumsy half-sisters flutter round, their governess scurries to do her errands and her mother lives in terror of her daughter’s rage if she does not get her way. Gwendolen is ‘the princess in exile’, waiting for the world to shape itself according to her wish.
⁸⁰

All Gwendolen’s dreams of love are actually about power. With no spontaneous interest in men or sex, she sees marriage as a kind of game in which she can gain the upper hand. She will ‘manage’ her husband, using his protection to carve herself an expanded circle of influence, gathering more admirers as she goes. Gwendolen pays little attention to the infatuated courtship of either her cousin or her uncle’s curate, for neither can offer the enlarged court of which she dreams. Her eye is on the highest prize, the newly arrived bachelor, Henleigh Mallinger Grand-court. Even before they meet she knows the outcome: ‘He will declare himself my slave.’
⁸¹