George Eliot (69 page)
Authors: Kathryn Hughes
A few weeks later Marian had more to worry about than younger women chatting to her husband. In mid-September she was again suffering from kidney trouble. A trip to Brighton did not produce much improvement and by the third week of October she was in enough pain to justify calling down Dr Andrew Clark from London. By the end of November she had returned to town. But
she did not go to the Priory. Before the marriage it had been arranged that she and Cross would share a new home at 4 Cheyne Walk, on Chelsea Embankment. Ever since their return to Witley in July Cross had been up to town at least once a week to supervise refurbishments and make arrangements for the transfer of furniture and books from the Priory. The fact that the temporary housekeeper installed at Cheyne Walk turned out to have a fondness for gin had not made the whole business any smoother. After four bridging days in a hotel in the Gloucester Road, the Crosses finally moved into their new home on 3 December.
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The next day, a Saturday, they went to a concert at St James’s Hall. It was the first public appearance of George Eliot and her new husband, and doubtless there was some nudging and surreptitious sketching. The following week seems to have been a happy one, although Cross responded to the stress of moving house with that common protest, a cold. The next Saturday the new couple went again to St James and in the evening Marian played some of the music they had heard on the piano. The following day, the 19th, Herbert Spencer and Edith Simcox both called by appointment. Spencer thought Marian looked tired; Edith cut her visit short when her beloved confessed that she had the beginnings of a sore throat.
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Over the next three days Marian’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Fighting off the throat infection put pressure on a system already weakened by kidney disease. By Wednesday lunch-time the situation was grave. Marian spent the afternoon slipping in and out of consciousness: ‘I listened to her breathing, hoping it was curing sleep,’ explained John Cross in a letter the next day to Elma Stuart, ‘but it was death coming on.’ When Dr Clark arrived at 6 p.m. he listened to the patient’s chest with a stethoscope and told Cross that her heart was giving way. Just at that moment Marian confirmed the diagnosis by whispering to Cross that she had a ‘great pain in the left side’. These were the last words she ever spoke. By 10 p.m. George Eliot was dead. Cross, battered by the ‘frightful suddenness’, could only mutter, ‘And I am left alone in this new House we meant to be so happy in.’
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At George Eliot’s funeral on 29 December at Highgate Cemetery there was a face among the chief mourners that no one could
quite place. It belonged to a tall man past sixty, with strong, stem features and a slight stoop. Isaac Evans had come to pay his respects to the sister whom he so physically resembled and had not seen for nearly thirty years. Without any apparent embarrassment he took his place in the coaches that collected at Cheyne Walk, ready to follow the hearse across London to Highgate Cemetery. One wonders what on earth he had to say to his fellow chief mourners John Cross and Charles Lewes. Did he mention or explain his long estrangement from the woman they had come to bury? Or did he confine himself to a few bland, grave remarks? Did he still feel ashamed to be associated with the sister who had brought their shared surname into such disrepute? Or was he flushed with pride as he watched the great, the good and the adoring ordinary surge forward to mourn the little girl with whom he had once fished in the brown canal?
The service was once again conducted by Dr Thomas Sadler along Unitarian lines. ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’ was, inevitably, quoted during the sermon. At the end of it the coffin, covered with white flowers, was carried out to the cemetery and buried in a grave touching upon Lewes’s. The birth date on the coffin was given as 1820, not 1819. Since her thirties and possibly before, Marian had knocked a year off her age. Cross and Charles seem to have been unaware of the little deception and Isaac, presumably, was too gallant to say anything.
The delay between George Eliot’s death and funeral is not explained simply by Christmas intervening. John Cross, elevated now to Chief Worshipper, wanted his wife buried in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. In the general run of things there would have been no problem about her joining Shakespeare, Dr Johnson and Dickens, all of whom are remembered there. But right from the start it was clear that Dean Stanley, although a personal friend of the Leweses, would find it difficult to sanction a place for a woman who for so long had ignored the sanctity of marriage and expressed doubts about the literal truth of Christianity. It was a position which various friends and admirers of the Leweses, including T. H. Huxley, understood. Others like Herbert Spencer, Edward Burne-Jones and Henry Sidgwick felt that George Eliot should take her rightful place among the great men of English letters and wrote to tell the Dean so.
One of this latter group, John Tyndall, informed Stanley in a letter written on Christmas Day that he had been told – by Cross, presumably – that it was ‘the expressed wish of George Eliot to be buried in Westminster Abbey’.
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If this is true, then it is yet another twist in the tale of the oddly principled yet pragmatic life of Marian Lewes. Ever since she had been cast off for going to live with Lewes, she had proudly rejected any attempts to re-integrate her back into the heart of society. Princesses had been made to wait their turn; peeresses had their invitations to dinner rejected; foreigners heavy with decorations were told that a meeting was impossible. But now, after death, Marian Lewes was hinting that she was not immune to the pleasures of celebrity after all.
But society turned her down. A few days after Christmas it was clear that permission was not going to be granted for burial at the Abbey and Cross quietly dropped the campaign. This was Marian’s worst nightmare come to life. She had dared, as she had never done before, to reach out to the Establishment and ask to be given her rightful place. And the Establishment had snubbed her, just as she had always been terrified that a fellow dinner guest or knowing shopkeeper might turn his or her back and walk away.
In the end, it seems fitting that Marian Evans Lewes should have been buried next to George Henry Lewes, the man who had made her life possible. The great and the good might not have wanted her in their midst, but there was one man, a little ridiculous but totally loving, who contrived to reach out to her in death as he had always done in life.
W
ITHIN TEN YEARS
of her death no one was reading George Eliot. Or no one who mattered. Sales of her work continued steadily in the cheaper editions, but the intellectual élite, the opinion formers, had already moved on. As the nineteenth century spun to a close, new and more apt chroniclers stepped forward to capture the particular combination of despair, ennui and hectic pleasure which marked the 1890s. Hardy and Wilde between them – there was no one whose vision could arc the whole – charted a society that was already dancing on the grave of Victorianism.
The 1919 centenary of Eliot’s birth failed to reverse the decline in her reputation. Now that all her oldest and staunchest friends had died – Cara in 1905, Sara in 1899, Edith in 1901, Elma in 1903 – there was no one to agitate for a proper memorial. An attempt to raise money for a commemorative corner in Coventry library failed, despite the Newdigates stepping in with the gift – appropriate for the daughter of their one-time forester – of some oak panels. But the truth was that by now Joseph Conrad and Henry James had used their un-English eyes and ears to produce a new kind of novel, which expressed doubts about the ability of language to represent the social world that had stood at the heart of Eliot’s work. Before long, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would take the novel even further away from the certain world of
Middlemarch
.
John Cross could have done something about the centenary. He did not die until 1924 and there was no new marriage to distract him from his job as Chief Worshipper. Ironically, though,
it had been his attempt in 1885 to honour his wife in the three-volume
Life
which had led to her falling so spectacularly out of favour. The version of George Eliot that Cross presents in his well-meaning work is heavy with Victorian righteousness.
His
Eliot is the Sibyl, the Sage, the earnest talking head who urges the world to try harder. Cross’s method of presentation was to quote extensively from his late wife’s letters, linking them with small contextualising comments from himself. The rationale, he boasted, was to let Eliot tell her story in her own words. But these are not her words. Or rather they are only some of them. Cross pruned everything from Eliot’s letters that might sit badly with his authorised version. Anything catty, sexy or funny has disappeared completely. ‘It is not a Life at all,’ exclaimed Gladstone when he read it. ‘It is a Reticence in three volumes.’
1
People who had known Eliot felt cheated. William Hale White, the novelist who had worked with her during the early Strand days, felt obliged to write to the
Athenaeum
and say: ‘I do hope that in some future edition, or in some future work, the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot’s entirely unconventional life. As the matter now stands she has not had full justice done to her, and she has been removed from the class – the great and noble church, if I may so call it – of the Insurgents, to one more genteel, but certainly not so interesting.’
2
It was an extraordinary paradox. The woman whose private life had been too scandalous – and too sexually scandalous at that – for the High Victorian age now seemed too staid and dreary for the naughty nineties. George Eliot had become like an old aunt at a youngsters’ party whose current reputation for a rebellious youth was confined to the occasional daring cigarette.
And so Eliot languished until the 1940s. It was then that F. R. Leavis picked her off the back shelf, dusted her down and gave her a place in his Canon, that oddly authorised version of literary history. Now she sat alongside Dickens and Shakespeare as a maker of the English essence. But just as had been the case with Cross, Leavis’s attempt to rehabilitate Eliot led to her being buried even deeper. By the 1970s a new generation of critics had arrived to do battle with Leavis’s phallic pretensions. Women writers who had been excluded from the feast, such as the Brontës, were reread with attention and claims made for their
absolute significance. Others who were all but unknown were brought back into print by the new feminist printing presses. And even classic texts which had stood proudly down the central spine of English literature were given a new, unfamiliar look. Armed with the sharp bright tools of psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, critics now worked to find unauthorised meanings in novels which had previously seemed as closed as a cobwebby chest.
Eliot did not suit this new intellectual mood. Critics favour texts that serve their purpose. Post-structuralists found Dickens very much to their taste. The loose tags in his writing offered them an easy entry point from where they could start their meticulous burrowing: feminists liked the Brontes, Emily Dickinson and even Jane Austen, all of whom could be made to talk thrillingly of psychic and social rebellion. But George Eliot, who clung to a male pseudonym, was invited to dine at Oxford and wrote from the centre of high culture, seemed to be exactly the kind of dead white male in whom seventies people could have no interest.
The snub was unfair. Critics accused Eliot of dogmatism when it was they who wrote out of totalitarianising systems. For instance, Eliot had never rejected feminism, but she shied away from a single reading of it, always insisting that the issues were more complex than her friends like Bessie and Barbara, with their arguments grounded in economic liberalism, liked to believe. She knew from her own, often painful, experiences that it was possible to be deeply dependent on male attention and yet enjoy a career which involved beating the best of them. To combine a belief in marriage with an approval of divorce. To want the best for women, yet insist that ‘the best’ did not necessarily mean qualifying as a doctor. And despite what her critics said, George Eliot had never clung, Canute-like, to the literary programme of High Victorianism. Her last published book,
Theophrastus Such
, was a dazzling calling-card for Modernism. Here was a narrator who fibbed, a text made up of allusions to other kinds of writing, the whole thing wrapped up with a bitter glee.
Yet all the signs point to the fact that, had she lived and written longer, Eliot’s next book would have represented a turning away from the worldly exhaustion of
Theophrastus Such
. Some time in
1877 she had written a fragment for a new work, which suggests a return to the time and landscape of her first novel,
Adam Bede
. The book was to be set among a group of families living in the Midlands at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One of the main characters is the suggestively named Richard Forrest, yet another version of her father, who is described as being ‘not an ordinary tenant farmer’ but ‘a man of weight in his district’.
3
From the time of beginning
The Mill on the Floss
in 1859 it had been Eliot’s habit to plan a book, then put it aside for another piece of work. Thus ‘The Lifted Veil’ had cut across
The Mill, Silas Marner
across
Romola, Felix Holt
across
The Spanish Gypsy
. Assuming this pattern continued, it seems likely that George Eliot would have turned back from the precipice represented by
Theophrastus Such
and moved once again to the middle ground, ‘the rich Central plain’ of Richard Forrest. This was not a retreat, but a reclaiming of the social and moral centre as the only place from where the future could properly be grasped. She had done it during the holy war, giving up her early refusal to go to church in favour of the other less glamorous calls on her integrity. She had done it again during her relationship with Lewes when, to the embarrassment of feminist friends, she insisted on claiming the identity of a conventionally married woman. It was not cowardice, although it could sometimes look like that. Eliot was showing in her private life, as she demanded in her fiction, that our relationship to the future is like that of medieval stonemasons working on a great cathedral. While we may work painfully and hard, we are always working blind. The results of our labour will not be seen until many years after our death.
