Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (27 page)

The narrative was quickly identified as a squalid sham, a confection put together from Gothic anti-conventual tales, pornography and doctrinal hatred. It was, in short, a novel – and not a very wonderful one (although the same could be said of another bestseller with a not dissimilar anti-Catholic animus,
The Da Vinci Code
). What was wonderful was its perennial appeal. For much of the nineteenth century
The Awful Disclosures
were circulated, hand to hand, as religious pornography, among the sectarian faithful. Like the similarly faked
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, it was indestructible. Where there was anti-Catholicism, there – sure as night follows day – would be Maria Monk. Where there was anti-Semitism, there would be the
Protocols
.

Monk’s later years were short and wretched. In summer 1837, she disappeared
from public view, surfacing, momentarily, in Philadelphia where she claimed, preposterously, that she had been kidnapped by Catholic priests and had again escaped.
Further disclosures by Maria Monk
were published, but by now her credibility was fatally eroded. In 1838 she had another illegitimate child – father unknown, but certainly no priest. Now habitually drunken, she married, drifted back to prostitution (her husband having abandoned her) and was, finally, arrested in a brothel charged with stealing from a client. She died, raving, in a New York prison in summer 1849 – an institution which was as evil, one imagines, as that which she had invented in Montreal.

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them – the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.
George Eliot, on the kind of novelist Eliot is not

In 1934, Lord David Cecil, in his belletrist monograph
Early Victorian Novelists,
observed, with a donnish sigh, that the dust lay heavier on George Eliot than on her great contemporaries: Dickens and Thackeray. That dust has been blown off (though quite a lot has landed on the luckless author of
Vanity Fair
) in the last eighty years. Two mighty winds are responsible for the de-dusting of George Eliot: 1. feminism, and its energetic search for female Shakespeares; 2. the rise of Ph.D.-sponsored ‘research’. What once looked like ‘dull’ is now Arnoldian ‘high seriousness’.

Mary Anne (the name is spelt various ways) Evans was born the daughter of a land agent in the service of a member of the Warwickshire aristocracy. Mary Anne’s mother was her father’s second wife and, like him, of respectable working-class stock (Mary Garth’s father, Caleb, in
Middlemarch
is a fond representation of Robert Evans). She grew up devoted to her brother Isaac (unfondly recalled as Tom Tulliver in
The Mill on the Floss
). Her upbringing was evangelical, dutiful, rural and allowed ample access to books. Scott, whom she first read aged eight, would be a major influence. On her mother’s death in 1836, she left school to take over running the house for her father and brother. A critical moment in her late adolescence was her principled refusal to accompany her father to church – an act of doctrinal, not filial, rebellion.

She was already steeping herself in works of theology and in Wordsworth, with whom she had a lifelong congeniality. In Coventry, a city intellectually fizzing with literary coteries, she had what was, effectively, the best higher education a woman could get in 1840s England. She was invited, aged twenty-three, to translate D. F. Strauss’s work of biblical ‘Higher Criticism’,
Das Leben Jesu
, into English. The translation, for which she received £20, came out in 1846. In 1848, she met Emerson, which left a profound impression on her already formidable mind. On her father’s death in 1849, she received a small legacy of some £90 p.a., which allowed her to travel abroad. She had, at this point, renamed herself ‘Marian’, a name unassociated with the motherhood of Jesus.

On the strength of her private income, she took up what was virtually unpaid work on John Chapman’s
Westminster Review
, the leading journal of ideas of the day (with, inevitably, a tiny circulation – most of us, Eliot once pungently observed, ‘walk about well wadded with stupidity’). She was probably romantically involved with Chapman and certainly was so with the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who at the last moment, was supposedly put off by Marian’s superficial lack of physical beauty. The third man in her life, George Henry Lewes – himself spectacularly ugly – was a philosopher, scientist, journalist and occasional novelist. He would become her lifelong consort, but never her husband. A practising free-thinker, Lewes had surrendered his wife to a journalist colleague. Having condoned adultery, legal separation was, at the time, impossible. Nevertheless, Marian defiantly called herself ‘Mrs Lewes’. The couple suffered ostracism, and much mockery behind their backs. There were no children: rationalists that they were, contraception is the likely explanation.

Over the early 1850s Marian worked at her translation of Spinoza’s
Ethics
while Lewes worked on his life of Goethe: high minds in harness. On the side, Marian had begun dabbling in fiction, with the short stories which eventually became
Scenes of Clerical Life
in 1858. They were published under the pen-name ‘George Eliot’. This second identity was devised so as not to contaminate Marian’s serious writing, not to advertise her questionable (non-)marital status, and – most importantly – to draw a line between herself and ‘silly lady novelists’, about whose effusions she was scathing. The
Scenes
, which drew on her early life in Warwickshire, were well received, despite their unremitting realism (one, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, is the first study of female alcoholism in literature). Eliot was persuaded by Lewes, and by their sympathetic publisher, John Blackwood, to progress to a full-sized, three-decker novel,
Adam Bede
(1859). Set in the rural Midlands at the period of the Methodist revival, the novel was sensationally popular with library readers. It was no longer possible to keep her identity secret (more so with impostors – all male – pretending to be her). But she retained the masculine pen-name for her fiction.

At the same period, Eliot took charge of Lewes’s three sons. The Leweses were now secure financially. In 1860, Blackwood published
The Mill on the Floss
, the most autobiographical of Eliot’s novels. Despite some objection to the near seduction of Maggie Tulliver in the third volume, the work confirmed Eliot’s standing as one of the leading novelists of the day – and, without question, the leading woman novelist. After some shorter efforts, including the crystalline moral fable,
Silas Marner
(1861), Eliot’s next novel – her great work as she projected it – was a tale of fifteenth-century Florence,
Romola
(1862–3). She was offered the highest-ever payment for a novel until then, £10,000. Her historical research was exhaustive: she went into the novel, she said, a young woman and emerged the other end an old woman. But despite the fortune it earned her, and the labour she put into it,
Romola
remains her least read work.

In the early 1860s the Leweses were rich enough to move into a luxurious house, the Priory, in St John’s Wood. George Eliot was now a ‘Victorian Sage’, and in the furious debate over the second Reform Bill she intervened (on the Conservative side) with her ‘social problem’ novel,
Felix Holt, The Radical
(1866). Reform stuck in her mind, and she returned to the earlier 1832 Bill in the novel that is regarded as her masterpiece,
Middlemarch
. In it, she wove into one design two originally separate stories: that of an idealistic young woman, Dorothea Brooke and that of a scientifically adventurous doctor, Tertius Lydgate. The completed novel ponders many of the issues that had preoccupied Eliot throughout her life: above all, what constitutes the life well lived? Our final view of Dorothea Brooke (as of Dinah Morris, in
Adam Bede
) is ambiguous.

In 1876 Eliot published her last novel,
Daniel Deronda
. Despite its preoccupation with Judaism (typically, Eliot learned Hebrew by way of preparation), the work was immensely successful. In the same year the Leweses purchased a large country house, the Heights, near Haslemere. But Lewes, whose health was chronically poor, died in November 1878. An inconsolable Eliot devoted the remainder of her shattered intellectual energies to editing his
Problems of Life and Mind
– a book which posterity would gladly exchange for another ten pages of
Middlemarch
, describing in clearer detail Dorothea’s later life after marrying Ladislaw. Finally, in 1880, she married John Walter Cross, twenty years her junior. In unclear circumstances, Cross appears to have attempted suicide by jumping into a canal in Venice during the wedding trip. A few months later, on 22 December 1880, Marian died of a kidney disorder. She left a little under £43,000.

Cross’s pious
George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals
(1885) is a prime example of the Victorian whitewash biography. It did not, however, whiten the reputation of the adulteress novelist in unforgiving eyes. It was not until 1880
that Westminster Abbey finally relented and allowed a commemorative stone to be laid alongside such exemplars of moral virtue as Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Mr Eliot.

George Eliot lived the years of her great creativity under the shadow of her consort (she called him ‘husband’), G. H. Lewes. Posterity has cast Lewes, with ever-deepening obscurity, in her shadow. But their lives, and achievements, are intertwined. And, little read as he is nowadays, he deserves an honoured niche in the history of fiction – not merely as a helper of genius, but an innovator.

Lewes was born into a theatrical family and went to school haphazardly, leaving at sixteen. Like many Victorians, he was a heroic autodidact and intellectual ‘amateur’. It was an exciting century to be curious and none was more so than Lewes. He enrolled as a student of medicine in his teens but gave up the profession because of his sensitivity to others’ suffering – not even a mission to mend it could overcome his sensitivity. This was not entirely a moral failing. Like Eliot he believed ‘sympathy’ to be a mark of civilisation and its extension a gauge of progress; for her, the novel was a principal instrument for the instilling of sympathy – awareness of other people’s ‘equivalent centre of self’. From his medical training Lewes took ‘physiology’ – the organic relation of parts – as a prime element of his thought. Other elements were the philosophy of Spinoza and, pre-eminently, the developmental ‘sociology’ (‘positivism’) of Auguste Comte, whose ‘third state’ foresaw a utopia brought about by growing human enlightenment.

Lewes spent two
Lehrjahre
(1838–40) in Germany, at a period of European ferment, and returned, with Carlyle, Britain’s main disciple of Goethe, whom he met in Weimar. On his return in 1841, he married Agnes Jervis, whose tutor he was. At the time he was supporting himself as an all-purpose journalist, expounding his sternly free-thinking views. In line with his rational, increasingly bohemian, philosophy he did not resent his wife forming a liaison with Thornton Hunt, the son
of Keats’s patron, Leigh Hunt, and in 1850 Hunt and Lewes set up the journal
The Leader
, one of the most powerful higher journalistic ventures of the period, though never remunerative.

Lewes separated amicably from Agnes when she bore his co-editor a son (she had borne Lewes three). He complicated his personal life further after Herbert Spencer introduced him to Mary Anne Evans, the young bluestocking whom he would help form into George Eliot. The two lived together in their unconsecrated ‘marriage’ after 1854. Their life was increasingly comfortable on Eliot’s large earnings from the fiction he encouraged her to write, and whose marketing (via Blackwoods principally) he managed. In the stability offered by the union with Eliot, Lewes embarked on his massive
Problems of Life and Mind
. It was published posthumously and was, on delivery, as dead as its author.

In an astonishingly wide-ranging career, the more remarkable given the frailty of his own physiology, Lewes wrote two novels. Neither reveals any great gift for the form, but
Ranthorpe
, published in 1847, opened the way for novelists of greater talent than himself. It ranks as the first
Bildungsroman
– or autobiographical – novel in English. It was a genre of fiction which examined particularly the formative years of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. The tree was shaped, the
Bildungsroman
asserted, as the twig was bent. Alternative names for the form were
Erziehungsroman
and
Entwicklungsroman
. It was, as those words suggest, not English and Lewes was cosmopolitan enough to import it into his native literature.

The
Bildungsroman
genre drew, originally, on Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Ranthorpe
chronicles, with fictional gloss, Lewes’s own rackety upbringing. The key moment – vividly done – finds the hero, disappointed in love life and work. In the depths of despair he is about to throw himself to his death off a London bridge when he is rescued by a sage, who introduces him to the life-saving philosophy of Goethe. A successful career for Ranthorpe as a man of letters follows. Such things are speculative, but without
Ranthorpe
casting the mould, British fiction might not have had such mid-century masterworks of the mid-Victorian
Bildungsroman
as
Pendennis, David Copperfield
, or, most directly in Lewes’s life,
The Mill on the Floss
.