The Honeymoon (27 page)

“I want it printed under a pseudonym,” she insisted to George. “I can’t bear to have my real name used. I can’t bear the scrutiny.”

“Probably it must be a man’s name,” he said. “If the critics know it’s a woman it’ll never be taken seriously.”

“Yes,” she said. “ ‘George,’ ” she said, smiling mischievously. “I will be ‘George’!”

“ ‘George’?” he repeated.

“Yes. ‘George.’ ”

“I’m very honored,” he said, with a laugh. “But not ‘George Lewes.’ I can’t take credit for your work.”

“What about ‘Eliot.’ ‘George Eliot’?” she said. “A nice, simple name, easy to say.”

“Madame George Eliot, then,” he said, bowing to her.

The publication date for
Scenes of Clerical Life
was January 8, 1858. A few days later, George came bounding up the stairs, tripping in his eagerness. “I’ve got some very pretty news for you.” He reached into his coat and drew out a copy of the
Times
.

“Read it!” he commanded. He stood smiling, watching her.
“… a sobriety which is shown to be compatible with strength, clear and simple descriptions and a combination of humour with pathos in depicting ordinary situations …”
It was a review of her book.

She stood there limply. “Oh, God.” And then, falteringly, “Maybe this means I can go on.”

“Bollocks! It means you have no choice.”

Blackwood had sent presentation copies of the book to prominent people. Charles Dickens wrote complimenting the author on his “marvels of description,” but he swore that no man could have written it.

Blackwood was beginning to wonder who his author really was. One Sunday he was visiting London from Edinburgh, and he came to supper to discuss with George the business of “George Eliot’s” publication.

Blackwood was about forty, with light, Celtic skin, thin lips, a twinkle in his eye, and a broad, Scottish accent. George, of course, introduced him to “Mrs. Lewes.” As always, she attempted to stay in the background, not wanting to be noticed.

“Will I ever meet the real George Eliot?” Blackwood asked.

George looked at her. “Would you excuse us a moment?” he said. Blackwood nodded.

She left the room and George followed her into the hallway.

“Should I?” said George.

“Yes,” she said, fearfully.

They reentered the parlor where Blackwood stood waiting.

“May I introduce George Eliot?” George said.

“My goodness!” Blackwood cried, with a broad smile. “I am delighted.”

After a moment of laughter, in which he shook her hand vigorously at finally getting to meet his author, Blackwood said, “But I think we should keep the nom de plume. I like the mystery of it. It will spur sales.” And so it was decided.

Always, George propped her up. He cut bad reviews out of the newspapers and handed them to her with holes in them. He even kept good reviews from her if they referred back to a negative one.

Success emboldened her, gave her courage. That May, she forced herself finally to tell Isaac that she was now living with George.
“I have changed my name,”
she wrote,
“and have someone to take care of me in the world.”

A week passed. Silence. Then, a letter from Mr. Holbeche, the solicitor: her brother, Isaac, was so
“hurt at your not having previously made some communication to him as to your intention and prospects that he cannot make up his mind to
write.”
When and where was she married? Isaac wanted to know. She could only write back the truth.
“Our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond. He is unable at present to contract a legal marriage …”
Within days came a letter from Chrissey saying that Isaac had forbidden her ever to speak to Marian again.

Holding the letter in her hand, she saw Isaac in her mind’s eye, tight-lipped, vengeful, cold, once the bright little boy she’d adored beyond anyone in the world. He’d cut her off as if her love for him was meaningless, as if he’d never felt the warmth of her little arms around his neck, or heard her calling after him, “Wait for me, Isaac!”

She didn’t understand. Was Chrissey right that he was punishing her simply because he was jealous of her intelligence, for being independent of him?

His anger had gone to that part of her that would always be within her, forged in her childhood: the gossipy ways of the little country town in which she’d been raised, its strict etiquettes of love and courtship, the shame of a woman unable to resist her sexuality and who succumbs to it out of wedlock. It was as if she were naked now, for all the world to see.

She remembered that terrible story Aunt Elizabeth, her father’s sister, who was a Methodist minister, had once told her. Aunt Elizabeth worked in a prison where she met a young woman who’d given birth to a baby out of wedlock, and then in shame and terror had abandoned it. The woman realized what she’d done and she ran back to save it, but by then the baby was dead. She was accused of murder and sentenced to be hanged. Aunt Elizabeth had prayed with her for forgiveness and accompanied her to the scaffold.

She told George the story. “Do you think I might make a novel out of it?” she asked.

“I think that’s a grand idea,” he said.

“You always say that about everything I do!”

He took her in his arms. “I cannot help it if I live with genius,” he said.

It would be a country story, filled with the scent of hay and the sweet breath of cows. She created a character, Adam Bede — like her father, tall and strong, a carpenter, a moral man. Adam falls in love with Hetty Sorel, but Hetty is in love with the local aristocrat, Arthur Donnithorne.

As she composed the story, she tried to remember everything about the minutiae of country life. When, exactly, did the foxgloves bloom? She looked it up — July 3. And when was the hay harvested? July 13.

Blackwood kept asking what she was writing, but she refused to tell him. “I can’t bear him to say anything negative,” she told George. “I’ll be so disheartened I won’t be able to go on.”

She read parts of it aloud to George. “Adam’s too passive,” he said. So she wrote a scene where Adam gets into a fistfight with Squire Donnithorne in the woods.

Hetty becomes pregnant with Donnithorne’s child. She has the baby, but, as in Aunt Elizabeth’s story, she abandons it. She hears its cries and she too runs back to save it, but it’s too late. She’s tried for murder and comforted by the exquisite lay preacher, Dinah.

When
Adam Bede
was published, the
Times
wrote that the author
“takes rank at once among the masters.”
The book sold
ten thousand copies in one year; it was printed in America and translated into German, Dutch, Hungarian, French, and Russian. None other than Leo Tolstoy called it the
“highest art flowing from the love of God and man.”
Rumor had it that Queen Victoria loved the novel so much she read it aloud to Prince Albert in bed at night.

But along with success must there always come some punishment? Only a month after
Adam Bede
was published, Chrissey wrote that she was ill with consumption. It had now been two years since she’d heard a word from Chrissey, on Isaac’s orders.
“How very sorry I have been,”
Chrissey wrote,
“that I ceased to write and neglected one who, under all circumstances, was kind to me …”
Chrissey had lost two more of her children, Fanny from typhus, and Robert, making his way to Australia to find work, had drowned at sea.

Of course, she wrote back to Chrissey saying she still loved her and had forgiven her for everything.

A few days later Chrissey’s daughter, Emily, wrote to say that her mother had died. Isaac had taken Chrissey from Marian long ago, but still she mourned. Gone was the sweet sister of her youth, her big sister, who had comforted her when she was a cold and frightened little girl at Miss Lathom’s.

Because of
Adam Bede
, for the first time in their lives they had money. They leased a house of their own, Holly Lodge in South Fields. They bought new linens, crockery, and carpets from a wholesale store on Watling Street. The house was yellow brick, three stories tall, and airy, with bay windows, though it was semidetached, surrounded by other
houses. There was only a low hedge of laurel and holly between it and the road. But she and George could each have a study now.

Few visitors came, and rarely any women because of their unmarried state. Marian wasn’t sorry. She’d have preferred excommunication to having to sit through visits with frivolous women. Of course Barbara Smith came, but Barbara wasn’t afraid of anything.

A miracle had occurred for Barbara. After she had visited them that summer in Tenby three years before and confessed her torment over John Chapman, her father, Ben Smith, had whisked her and her sisters away to Algiers to get her out of Chapman’s reach. There, Barbara had met a French-Algerian doctor, Eugène Bodichon, and she, who had so loved
The Arabian Nights
, had fallen in love with the tall, dark-skinned man. The doctor proposed. Barbara eagerly accepted. Again, her father had protested the marriage, worried that the doctor was another fortune hunter. Barbara insisted that she was going to marry him anyway — she was over twenty-one now, twenty-seven in fact, and her father couldn’t prevent the marriage. Ben Smith set up a trust protecting her money from the doctor and reluctantly gave the marriage his blessing.

They had a small wedding in London. One summer evening, after the wedding, Barbara had brought Eugène to meet Marian and George. The doctor was exotic-looking, with thick black hair, but his English was poor. During supper, Barbara, her cheeks flushed, had mostly talked for him, about his work treating the indigenous people of Algiers, about his book on how the French settlers were vulnerable to native diseases. All the while, the doctor had gazed at
her with a smile on his face, watching her, but, Marian felt, anxious to be elsewhere. “Eugène says he can’t bear to live in London,” Barbara said, “so we’ve reached a compromise. We’ll live in Algiers in winter, where I’ll have a studio and paint, but we’ll spend our summers here in London because of the heat.”