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I was not a woman completely like those whom some moralists censure and mock; I had in my soul an enthusiasm for the beautiful, a thirst for the true; and yet I was a woman like others—dependent, nervous, prey to my imagination, childishly susceptible to the emotionalism and anxieties of motherhood. But did these traits have to relegate me to secondary standing in artistic and family life? That being society's rule, it was still within my power to submit patiently or cheerfully.

As Sand's biographer Belinda Jack noted, “[H]er modernity lies less in her feminism or her socialism, and more in her acceptance of loose, even freewheeling ideas about the self. . . . She had strong intuitions about the subconscious and the need to be aware of our inner unthinking, but acutely responsive, selves.”

To Sand, this was a natural, normal idea. It was far ahead of her time; she worked tirelessly so that others might embrace it. In her autobiography, Sand expressed a desire to achieve societal acceptance not for herself only, but for other women. “I was going along nourishing a dream of male virtue to which women could aspire,” she wrote, “and was constantly examining my soul with a naïve curiosity to find out whether it had the power of such aspirations, and whether uprightness, unselfishness, discretion, perseverance in work—all the strengths, in short, that man attributes exclusively to himself—were actually unavailable to a heart which accepted the concept of them so ardently. . . . I wondered why Montaigne would not have liked and respected me as much as a brother.”

No less than George Eliot's future partner, the critic George Henry Lewes, declared in 1842 that Sand was the most remarkable writer of the century. Dostoevsky considered her “one of the most brilliant, the most indomitable, and the most perfect champions.”

The last years of her life were often filled with sadness, as by then many of her friends and former lovers were dead. But she was one of the most influential and famous women in France, and possessed remarkable serenity after all that she'd endured. Unfortunately, her reputation did not hold up well after her death. Her prodigious output was eclipsed by the shocking, scandalous details of her life. Compared with her contemporaries, she is hardly read today. “The world will know and understand me someday,” Sand once wrote. “But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.” In that regard, she succeeded beyond measure.

“What a brave man she was,” Turgenev recalled of Sand, “and what a good woman.”

Her old friend Flaubert, a notorious misanthrope and recluse, outlived her by four years. Of her funeral in 1876, he said: “I cried like an ass.”

She had a big nose and the face of a withered cabbage

Chapter 3

George Eliot &
MARIAN EVANS

C
harles Dickens was suspicious. “I have observed what seem to me to be such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now,” he wrote to George Eliot in January 1858. The candid letter was written a year after the publication of
Scenes of Clerical Life
, a collection of three stories first serialized, anonymously, in
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.
Dickens praised their “exquisite truth and delicacy” but was convinced that the writer was a woman. Elizabeth Gaskell, however, insisted that the author was a man named Joseph Liggins of Nuneaton. The
Saturday Review
, meanwhile, harbored its own suspicions, noting that George Eliot was rumored to be “an assumed name, screening that of some studious clergyman . . . who is the father of a family, of High Church tendencies, and exceedingly fond of children, Greek dramatists and dogs.”

Not quite: George Eliot was a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Mary Anne (Marian) Evans, a politically progressive atheist raised in a stern, religious household, unmarried, childless, and living openly with a married man. She was a formidable intellectual who had begun educating herself after her mother's death in 1836 and would publish seven astonishing novels in her lifetime, including
The Mill on the Floss
,
Middlemarch
, and
Daniel Deronda.
How Evans became one of the great Victorian novelists is the story of an eccentric young woman from the Midlands region of England who broke just about every taboo of her time. “She was never content with what was safely known and could be taken for granted,” one critic wrote of her extraordinarily restless life.

Born on November 22, 1819, in Warwickshire, she was her parents' third child, following the birth of a daughter and a son. (Her father, Robert, also had two children from a previous marriage; his first wife died.) The birth of a second daughter was terribly disappointing. Sons were valued and valuable; girls, until married off, were a financial drain and nothing but a burden on the family. Mary Anne was no great prize. Twin boys arrived fourteen months later, but they died soon after birth, and Mary Anne's mother, Christiana, never recovered from the loss. She made no effort to hide that fact from her daughter.

Mary Anne eventually dropped the “e” from “Anne” and later changed her name to Marian, but at the end of her life, she reverted to “Mary Ann.” (That's why, in biographies, you'll find her first name spelled with confusing variation: what to call her?) Since she lived with a mother who never doted on her, her childhood was marked by isolation and sadness. Luckily, her father was kinder, and gave her a copy of her very first book:
The Linnet's Life.
But whatever bond she shared with him, it was never enough to replace the maternal affection she was denied.

Unkempt, frequently melancholy, and extremely sensitive, she was an unsightly irritant to Christiana, who may have blamed her own poor health and depression on having given birth to Mary Anne. The Evanses' youngest child was obstinate, fearful, and given to emotional outbursts. At the age of five, in 1824, she was sent to a boarding school. A few years later, her parents would move her to another boarding school, where Mary Anne became close to a teacher named Maria Lewis. Even for the Victorian era, five was quite young to be shipped away for one's education, though she did come home on weekends. A timid and socially awkward student, Mary Anne would eventually find academic success and earn the admiration of her peers, but her insecurity lingered and she was always harshly critical of her own achievements.

At seven, Mary Anne began reading Sir Walter Scott's
Waverley.
This event marked the first hint of her future vocation: when the book was returned to a neighbor before she'd had a chance to finish reading it, she was terribly upset. She did the next best thing by writing out an ending herself.

When she was twelve, Mary Anne attended a girls' school in the Midlands run by evangelical sisters. She excelled there, impressing her teachers with her mastery of every subject, especially literature. She received a novel in the mail from her beloved former teacher Maria Lewis, and sent a thank-you letter back, describing the sustaining role that books had played in her life. “When I was quite a little child I could not be satisfied with the things around me,” she wrote. “I was constantly living in a world of my own creation, and was quite contented to have no companions that I might be left to my own musings and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress.” It was Lewis, in 1839, who encouraged Mary Anne to submit her work for publication. The poem, her print debut, was signed “M.A.E.” and appeared in the
Christian Observer.
It began:

As o'er the fields by evening's light I stray,

I hear a still small whisper—come away;

Thou must to this bright, lovely world soon say

Farewell!

The effects of her feeling of estrangement from those around her—and dealing with her mother's death, when she was seventeen years old—would lead her to be perpetually in search of mother figures and to form fierce attachments to the people she loved—including her brother Isaac. (Their close yet complex bond informed the sibling relationship of Maggie and Tom Tulliver in
The Mill on the Floss.
) She was desperate for intimacy, a longing that never left her. “Before I had your kind letter,” she wrote to a friend in 1842, “one of the ravens that hovered over me in my Saul-like visitations was the idea that you did not love me well enough to bestow any time on me more than what I had already robbed you of, but that same letter was a David's harp that quite charmed away this naughty imagination.” (By this time, too, she had begun spelling her name Mary Ann.)

After her mother died, she became more withdrawn. While caring for her widowed sixty-three-year-old father, she dutifully—though not happily—took over running the household, and felt like little more than a maid. But she used the seclusion to further her education. In what spare time she had, she read (and reread) widely: history, literature, poetry, philosophy, science, and music (she became an accomplished pianist), and studied Latin, Greek, German, French, and Italian. With her capacity for deeply felt emotion, she could not ignore the fact that daily life was constricting and pallid. Still, her emotional deprivation was offset by the riches of learning, of cultivating a powerful and capacious intellect. The hunger of the heart was sublimated into the hunger of the mind.

Always a thoughtful, contemplative girl, Mary Ann grew increasingly analytical and developed a keen interest in ideas concerning morality, modesty, and character. She was also intrigued by the conflict between individual will and the stifling demands of convention. “Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful,” Evans, as Eliot, would write in
Middlemarch
, widely regarded as her greatest work. “They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.” As a novelist, Eliot would prove to be an astute social observer, a historian, and a philosopher. Yet she also captured the despair of insatiable yearning, a condition she understood all too well.

The fervent desire to love and be loved, which had driven her back upon herself throughout her childhood, stayed constant even after it had been fulfilled. Despite her reputation as an author whose novels reflected her vast intellect, she was very much invested in matters of the heart.

The English poet William Ernest Henley, best known for his 1875 poem “Invictus,” once dismissed Eliot as “George Sand plus Science minus Sex.” Yet the heart, if not sex, was more present in Eliot's work than is generally recognized. In
Middlemarch
she wrote (in the voice of her heroine, Dorothea Brooke) that “surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him—which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work, the life and death struggles of separate human beings.”

Even in her personal correspondence, such matters weighed on her mind, as in a letter to Lady Mary Elizabeth Ponsonby, the wife of Queen Victoria's Private Secretary, with whom Mary Ann corresponded until Ponsonby's death: “Consider what the human mind
en masse
would have been if there had been no such combination of elements in it as has produced poets. All the philosophers and
savants
would not have sufficed to supply that deficiency. And how can the life of nations be understood without the inward life of poetry—that is, of emotion blending with thought?”

That Mary Ann had such a propensity stemmed from the extreme loneliness of her growing-up years. “I have of late felt a depression that has disordered my mind's eye and made me
alive
to what is certainly a fact (though my imagination when I am in health is an adept at concealing it), that I am
alone
in the world,” she wrote to a friend at the age of twenty-one. “I do not mean to be so sinful as to say that I have not friends
most
unreservedly kind and tender, and disposed to form a far too favourable estimate of me, but I mean that I have no one who enters into my pleasures or my griefs, no one with whom I can pour out my soul, no one with the same yearnings, the same temptations, the same delights as myself.” Four years later, in another letter, she reflected on her years of suffering: “Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.” She was absolutely convinced that “the bliss of reciprocated affection” was something she would never know.

Mary Ann had been marked early on as an ugly duckling, a characterization that would take on an even crueler edge for her as an adult. Someone once told her that she was, in fact, too ugly to love. Henry James called her the “great horse-faced bluestocking.” And her publisher, upon learning her identity, described her to his wife as “a most intelligent pleasant woman, with a face like a man.” Many went so far as to regard her as Medusa-like—not merely plain but hideous. She had a large head, a big nose, and unflattering physical proportions. She dressed badly. And she was rather humorless, a trait that added severity and heaviness to her face. She was the first to acknowledge her ungainly appearance, once describing herself as “a withered cabbage in a flower garden.” Still, she had kind eyes, and Henry James wrote of this “magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous” woman that “in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her.” Even her obituary in the
Times
, though praising her as “a great and noble woman,” could not refrain from mentioning her “irradiated features that were too strongly marked for feminine beauty.”

She had been raised in an intolerant family, which rejected those who didn't readily fit in. Aside from her “ugly” appearance, she held, from an early age, provocative views that distanced her from her family, particularly her father. Although she'd read theology texts passionately and had gone through a lengthy period of religious fervor, she became disenchanted. Eventually, her love of science and her passion for rational thought took over; a love of Wordsworth began to steer her into Romanticism and away from God. Moreover, when she and her father moved to Coventry, in 1841, she happily came into contact with agnostics, atheists, and freethinking intellectuals. She became especially close to her neighbors Cara and Charles Bray, both of whom openly enjoyed affairs outside their marriage.

Soon afterward, Mary Ann renounced her faith and stopped going to church. Rather than give up her newfound principles, she told her outraged father that she would leave home and make her own way in the world. He made no effort to stop her. She eventually returned to care for him, and even attended church again, but their last years together, until his death in 1849, were difficult. “My life is a perpetual nightmare,” she confided to a friend, “and always haunted by something to be done, which I have never the time, or rather the energy, to do.” While serving as her father's nurse, she did read aloud to him a recently published novel,
Jane Eyre
, by a writer called Currer Bell. And in his final months, she managed the frivolous task of translating Spinoza's
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

This period was yet another that led her to ruminate on notions of obligation versus independence, fulfilling duty versus chasing desires. In
Romola
, her historical novel set in fifteenth-century Florence, she would explore the question of where “the duty of obedience ends and the duty of resistance begins.”

How Mary Anne, Mary Ann, or Marian Evans—full of secret ambition but lonely, prim, and lacking confidence—transformed herself into George Eliot is a remarkable story. She often felt that she'd been given the mind of a man but not his opportunities. At thirty-one, she was numb, still grieving after her father's death, revealing in a letter that “the only ardent hope I have for my future life is to have given to me some woman's duty—some possibility of devoting myself where I may see a daily result of pure calm blessedness in the life of another.” Around this time, she became Marian, another in a line of appellation shifts. And somewhere, “George Eliot” was patiently waiting to meet her.

BOOK: Nom de Plume
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