Sophie and the Sibyl (39 page)

Authors: Patricia Duncker

BOOK: Sophie and the Sibyl

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Johnny Cross soon became known in the London clubs as ‘George Eliot’s widow’, but nothing ever shook his dedication to her memory. Max and Sophie extended their family with three more children after Leo, who never remembered the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta, or the towering Madonna, and never visited Torcello again. But he and his brother and sisters, all of whom grew to be robust, intrepid and adventurous, illuminated the old age of their grandparents, the Count and Countess von Hahn. Sophie became famous for her racehorses, which she bred and trained herself. She also became notorious in Berlin, for wearing bloomers and bicycling. Wolfgang Duncker startled his entourage and caused an explosion of gossip by suddenly, in his mid-fifties, marrying a rich widow, Frau Anastasia von Humblot, a large and opulent lady, some years older than he was. She invested in the publishing house, which grew in fame and prosperity. Max bowed out as the sleeping partner and the firm became Duncker und Humblot. They still exist today. I always trot along to visit them on their stand when I am working at the Leipziger Buchmesse.

Leo never lived to be old. He followed the family tradition and pursued a career in the army that led to his death in the trenches of the Great War in 1915. All that could be found of his exploded body was gathered together by his loyal companions and his parents were told of an heroic death in battle, surrounded with sufficient glory to suggest that he died at the head of a cavalry charge. Max, devastated, engaged a spiritualist to contact his dead son. This medium, who came with excellent testimonials assuring all clients of her spiritual power and the authenticity of her American shaman spirit guide, engendered a bitter dispute within the household. ‘Leave the dead alone,’ snapped Sophie, shivering with rage. How could her husband sink to such melodramatic unreason? Grief must be borne with that terrible patience no one can teach. Max died of a stroke in 1922. His lined face, still handsome, turned purple over a period of twelve hours. He did not regain consciousness. Sophie mourned him deeply, but never attempted to raise his ghost in a shudder of ectoplasm.

The scene begins to darken.

Sophie von Hahn died quietly at Wilhelmplatz in Berlin at the age of eighty, surrounded by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her hair, coiled beneath a black net, gleamed still, just as the Sibyl’s hair had done in her old age, thick and magnificent, but quite white. She suffered a little from arthritis in the shoulders, but that was all. An undiagnosed heart condition carried her off. The year was 1934. Hitler, busy consolidating his power in the Third Reich, prepared to transform the debates contained in
Daniel Deronda
concerning the Jews of Germany and all Europe into not merely a shrewd reading of the horror to come, but a prophecy. How did she know? She cannot have known.

George Eliot’s writing methods appear to be rational, studious, unsparingly calculated and intellectual; you might even argue, academic. She prepared the ground with careful research, read books in many languages, and gave herself up to lengthy meditation. But she told me that in all she considered her best writing, there was a ‘not herself’ that took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting. And I believe her. For there is, in great writing, a sinister power, primitive and overwhelming, whose grasp upon the organs within us unsettles and disturbs. And an imagination such as hers, which causes whole worlds to surge into being, is never safe, nor entirely comforting. Beware the writing on the wall, hostile, unintelligible. For every single letter will remain there for ever, waiting to be read. And beware the imagination which seizes the roots of our times, reads the underground seams, clutches at the pulse of our common blood, then stares, unflinching, into the darkness ahead.

THE END

Afterword

Throughout this tale I have mixed fiction with the detail of real lives in outrageous ways. I have used real names, real documents, existing evidence. And that was always part of my plan. Truth and the imagination are not at odds with each other. This story weaves fictitious characters, both George Eliot’s and my own, into the recorded histories of the writer and her entourage. I wanted fiction and history, as the historian Richard Holmes once put it, speaking of the biographer and his subject, to shake hands across time. I intended to write a Victorian comedy of manners, which had, as all comedy must do, a darker and more sinister set of shadows at the edge. For what would it be like, as a writer, to be forced by someone else, someone in some future time, to spend years in the company of people you invented purely for your own pleasure, and to be answerable to them?

The ambiguity of my relationship to George Eliot is noted in the epigraphs. I have always adored her work with a passion not unlike the one Edith Simcox harboured for the lady herself. I doubt that I would have much liked Marian Evans Lewes. But I would have fallen in love with George Eliot in the 1870s, just as I did one hundred years later, and revered her power, both as a writer and as an intellectual. I began reading her last great books first:
Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda
and then, in the summer of 1973,
Romola
. I have read all she wrote many times since then, and I have had the honour of teaching her work to generations of students. But the grain of resentment one writer always feels for another whom she hails as ‘Master’ – and I use that word advisedly – would not dissolve. I have not loved her unchangeably, as Edith did.

My starting point was the coincidence of my name and that of her German publishers. Duncker Verlag of Berlin did and still does exist. I first noticed the connection while I was reading George Eliot’s Journals. She recorded the £30 paid to her by ‘Duncker of Berlin’. Duncker is not an uncommon name in Holland and Germany. At that moment I was merely amused, but then the seed began to grow. If someone who bore my name had been so closely connected to the writer I loved, why should I not take his place? Eliot was as fascinated by the relationship of mentor and disciple as I am, both as a subject for fiction and as a personal drama in the drawing room. It is a relationship that recurs in her novels and one that she cultivated in her personal life. She set herself up as a Great Teacher. I have always been one of her disciples. But it is in the nature of the disciple to question and challenge the Master, even as you fight alongside her throughout your writing life.

I have deliberately written a Neo-Victorian novel that follows the method of John Fowles’s powerfully awful tale,
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
. Fowles’s Victorian narrative is set in 1867; his narrator is a thinly veiled version of Fowles himself, whose character, a pompous sexual know-all, speaks from the patronising distance of the late 1960s. My story follows the last triumphant years of George Eliot’s writing life, from the autumn of 1872 in Homburg through to her death in London in 1880. My narrator, the other voice in this fiction, is a sceptical young woman of Sophie’s age, very firmly based in the present day, that is, in the second decade of the twenty-first century. She has never been as infatuated with George Eliot as I am, and I followed her into the past.

Readers who long to know the truth, in so far as it can ever be known, concerning George Eliot’s life, and who wish to disentangle her facts from my fictions, and indeed from her own, would be wise to read the novels first and then, perhaps, begin to read their way around the vast list of biographical and critical studies that exist. Here are the books that made all the difference to me. I wish to acknowledge that debt and record my thanks. My first biographical port of call was, of course, Gordon S. Haight,
George Eliot: A Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), which I first read in 1976. All critics and scholars studying Eliot’s work have good cause to be grateful to him, even when they disagree with his approach and conclusions, as I do. Haight is the editor of the 9-volume edition of
The George Eliot Letters
(New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1954–55, 1978). Eliot’s first biographer was John Walter Cross,
George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals
, 3 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1885). Her Journals are edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnstone:
The Journals of George Eliot
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Eliot’s contemporary biographers are numerous, and over the years I read Ruby V. Redinger,
George Eliot: The Emergent Self
(London: The Bodley Head, 1975), Jennifer Uglow,
George Eliot
(London: Virago, 1987), Ina Taylor,
George Eliot: Woman of Contradictions
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). Rosemary Ashton is the witty and scholarly biographer both of G.H. Lewes and of Eliot herself:
G. H. Lewes: A Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and
George Eliot: A Life
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996). She gives quite wonderful, persuasive readings of Eliot’s works and sends us all, as readers, straight back to the novels. Kathryn Hughes’s
George Eliot: The Last Victorian
(London: Fourth Estate, 1999) is delightfully irreverent, and I learned a great deal from Rosemarie Bodenheimer,
The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans. George Eliot, Her Letters, and Her Fiction
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Among the many critical studies of George Eliot’s work, Gillian Beer’s
George Eliot
(Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986) was the one I read and reread, alongside her classic work on Darwin,
Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). But the documentary source which transformed my understanding of my ‘vindictive little game’ remains Edith Simcox’s Journal,
A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox’s Autobiography of a Shirtmaker,
eds. Constance M. Fulmer and Margaret E. Barfield (London: Taylor and Francis, 1998). Edith fell deeply and irrevocably in love both with Marian Evans Lewes and with the mind of George Eliot; her journals are devastating in the rawness of the feelings she records. She loved and lost ‘the master mistress of her passion’. She was not writing for publication, and she was there.

France 2014

Acknowledgements

There is a strong community of Victorian and Neo-Victorian writers, scholars and academics, past and present, whose work has informed and inspired my own. I wish to thank in particular Rosario Arias, Stevie Davies, Christian Gutleben, Ann Heilmann, Mel Kohlke, George Letissier, Mark Llewellyn. I owe a great deal to Merle Tönnies and all the ‘academic gals – and guys’ at the University of Paderborn in Germany.

Thank you to everyone who helped me complete and produce this book: my editor and publisher Alexandra Pringle and her wonderful team, especially Alexa von Hirschberg; my agent Andrew Gordon at David Higham; Mary Tomlinson for close work on my text and her accuracy and expertise; my German translator Barbara Schaden for her help with the foreign languages. And thank you to Kathryn Hughes for sharing her knowledge of George Eliot and the nineteenth century in such generous ways.

The University of Manchester granted me time away from my usual duties to work on this book. Thank you to my colleagues and students in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, and in my own department.

Above all I would like to thank my first readers for their enthusiasm, thoughtful criticism and unfailing support – they are, as always, Janet Thomas and Sheila Duncker.

A Note on the Author

Patricia Duncker is the author of five previous novels:
Hallucinating Foucault
(winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize in 1996),
The Deadly Space Between
,
James Miranda Barry
,
Miss Webster
and
Chérif
(shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2007) and
The Strange Case of the Composer and
his
Judge
(shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger award for Best Crime Novel of the Year in 2010). She has written two books of short fiction,
Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees
(shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1997) and
Seven Tales of Sex and Death
, and a collection of essays,
Writing on the Wall
. Patricia Duncker is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.