The Honeymoon (51 page)

And there he was, sprawled on his chair, her beautiful man, enthralled by her … his eyes wide and blue. Adoring her. Nephew, husband, loving and protecting her, guardian, her long-limbed man …

She was aware next of Johnnie carrying her upstairs in his arms, calling out, “Brett! Brett! I need your help. Fetch Sir James! Send someone!”

Every bump on the stairs was agony. He laid her gently on the bed, but the jolt was excruciating and she lost consciousness.

She came to when Brett placed a cold cloth on her head. “Ow! No, Brett! No. The cold hurts … I can’t stand it!”

Sir James hurried into the room, he didn’t even take his hat and coat off. She could feel the cold from the outdoors coming from him. He was looking down at her. He wasn’t smiling. As he felt her forehead and examined her, she saw a panicked look come into his eyes.

She heard Johnnie say, “I can’t watch this.”

There was the prick of the needle. Then the morphine took hold.

“Does it still hurt?” Johnnie asked.

“No,” she said, in surprise. She was gasping for air, but she managed to smile up at him. “Isn’t that wonderful? I don’t feel any pain at all now.”

He knelt down beside the bed and took her hands in his. She saw tears running down his cheeks. “Please, Marian,” he said. “Please, don’t leave me.”

Then she was gone.

Magnificat Anima Mea

To Joseph Luzzi, professor of Comparative Literature at Bard College, thanks for looking over the section on Dante. All errors are mine — or Johnnie Cross’s! My deep gratitude to Hilma Wolitzer, who read the manuscript, made acute comments, and suggested the novel’s title, and to other friends, writers all, who read various drafts and made valuable suggestions: Brooke Allen, Katherine Bouton, Gioia Diliberto, Emily Eakin, Leslie Garis, and Judy Sternlight; also to Anna Fels, physician and author, for helping me wade through George Eliot and Johnnie Cross’s medical histories. Thanks to Dr. Howard Markel for the same. My appreciation especially to John Burton, chairman of the George Eliot Fellowship in Coventry, England, and to Vivienne Wood, the vice chairman, for showing me Eliot’s world, and for their valuable insights into her character; and in Venice, to Matteo Giannasi, who gave me a tour of the Palazzo Giustinian, now the headquarters of the Venice Biennale, where Eliot and Cross stayed on their honeymoon.

To Joy Harris, my dear agent, without whom this book would not have happened, my thanks. I have never known
an agent so willing to work so hard for a writer. She has helped me make this novel what it is.

Marjorie DeWitt, editor at Other Press, and Amanda Glassman, the editorial assistant, did an absolutely outstanding job in going over the manuscript and making it better. I also want to thank Jessica Greer, publicity director; Terrie Akers, marketing director; Yvonne Cárdenas, managing editor; Iisha Stevens, production and operations manager; and Lauren Shekari, rights director, for their care, hard work, and attention to detail.

Above all, there is Judith Gurewich, publisher par excellence, with a mind like lightning, a devotion to her authors like no one else’s, who came to this armed with the most formidable intellectual background I have ever encountered in any publisher.

Finally, I thank my husband, David Nasaw, who has stood by me for thirty-seven years. He is my love.

For many years, I had pondered the strange, late-life marriage of my literary heroine, George Eliot, to John Walter Cross, a handsome young man twenty years her junior, who attempted suicide on their honeymoon in Venice. The accounts of the event in Eliot’s biographies were meager, and indeed, the couple seems to have lied, or deliberately misled people, about what had really happened. They did seem, on the surface, to have recovered from their traumatic honeymoon, but Eliot lived only a few months afterward. Was this a tragic ending to what was an essentially noble life, which encompassed not only the genius of Eliot’s writings, but also her long and loving relationship, out of wedlock, with George Henry Lewes, who had given her the confidence to become a writer and then died leaving her shattered?

As I began to write about Eliot’s marriage to Cross, I was drawn deeper into her life, and I became fascinated by her evolution as a woman and as an intellectual. Here was one of the most famous authors in England, almost universally kind and generous. She was a woman of contradictions: a proper Victorian lady, shy and reserved, and yet I
believe also a passionate and sensual person. Her “illicit” relationship with Lewes made her even more afraid of public disclosure, as did her daring decision later to run away with Johnnie Cross.

What were Eliot’s thoughts while all this was happening, thoughts that, for the most part, she kept hidden under the cloak of her nineteenth-century propriety? I decided to write a novel in which I would try to imagine them. It would be fiction, yes, but in writing fiction one is always searching for the truth.

Thus, writing the book was a little like writing a detective story, a search for clues, a piecing together of facts and inferences.

For inspiration, I first went to the many biographies of Eliot. I began with Gordon S. Haight’s magnificent
George Eliot: A Biography
, and the seven volumes of her letters which he edited, and upon which all other biographies stand. There were her journals, collected by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson, and John Walter Cross’s highly sanctified but nonetheless revealing biography of his wife written after she died. Frederick R. Karl’s finely detailed
George Eliot, Voice of a Century
, and Kathryn Hughes’s
George Eliot: The Last Victorian
, a more contemporary interpretation of her life, were invaluable.
Those of Us Who Loved Her: The Men of George Eliot’s Life
, by Kathleen Adams, offered many new facts. I was especially fortunate to find, in the Princeton University Library, Eliot’s notes for her unfinished novel about the Napoleonic Wars. But I profited from scores of other books about Eliot, too numerous to mention.

Eliot once told John Cross that
The Mill on the Floss
was her most autobiographical novel, and indeed, it provided
insights into her relationship with her parents and with her brother, Isaac, as did Eliot’s poetry, particularly her
Brother and Sister Sonnets
. Many clues were contained in Eliot’s autobiographical essays, such as “How I Came to Write Fiction,” her essays on painting, and her accounts of her travels through Europe, particularly of meeting Franz Liszt in Weimar.

Perhaps the most important people in opening up the world to the young Marian Evans were Charles and Cara Bray of Coventry. Charles Bray’s
Phases of Opinion and Experience During a Long Life: An Autobiography
, was especially helpful in understanding the new world that confronted the twenty-one-year-old Marian. As for Dr. Robert Brabant, who probably seduced Eliot and certainly betrayed her, letters to and from Eliot’s friends, particularly Cara Hennell, were revealing in understanding the crisis that occurred at his house in Devizes, as were secondhand accounts given by Eliza Lynn Linton in
My Literary Life
and by Brabant’s daughter, Rufa, in John Chapman’s diaries. Those diaries, discovered rather dramatically in a secondhand bookshop in Nottingham in 1913, and collected by Gordon Haight in
George Eliot & John Chapman, with Chapman’s Diaries
, also contributed to my account of Eliot’s romance with Chapman, as did Rosemary Ashton’s delightful
142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London
.

Eliot’s friendship with the beautiful and fascinating Barbara Smith Bodichon sustained her through much of her adult life. Pam Hirsch’s excellent biography of Bodichon helped me to create a fictional portrait of the relationship.

As for Herbert Spencer, that strange man, whose early work Eliot nurtured and whom she came to love, and who
went on to become the most famous philosopher of his time, his two-volume
Autobiography
provided me with an account of his life, and also moments of humor. (I have no doubt that Spencer himself was entirely conscious of this.) Selections from
The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer
, edited by David Duncan, were of great use to me.

For the wonderful George Henry Lewes, I am indebted to Rosemary Ashton’s
G. H. Lewes
, and to
The Letters of George Henry Lewes
, edited by William Baker.
Dramatic Essays
, by Lewes and John Forster, provided much information about Lewes’s humanity and wit.

The most difficult character to track was John Walter Cross. I traced his family tree, information about the bank his family owned, and accounts of the Crosses in Scottish and New York newspapers. I discovered his own, tentative attempts at writing in the archives of
Macmillan’s Magazine
, and those of his sister Mary, too. Contemporary descriptions of Cross were very useful, by Cross’s friend, Lord Acton, and by Eliot’s adoring acolyte Edith Simcox in her
Autobiography of a Shirtmaker
, edited by Constance M. Fulmer and Margaret Barfield as
A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot
.

In trying to fictionalize the story of Eliot’s relationship with Emanuel Deutsch, I owe a debt to Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams for her paper “Emanuel Deutsch of ‘The Talmud’ Fame” (Jewish Historical Society of England, Transactions, Session 1969–70).

Researching life in nineteenth-century Venice was a particular joy, as I read the travel essays of Henry James, William Addington Symonds, and William Dean Howells. Augustus John Cuthbert Hare’s
Venice
was a favorite. Sarah
Bunney’s paper, “Mr. and Mrs. Cross with the Artist John Wharlton Bunney in 1880,” in the
George Eliot Review
(2011), helped me to imagine Eliot and Cross’s visit to the artist.

These are only a few of the sources I read as I constructed my fictional world. I studied the floor plans of Eliot’s homes, nineteenth-century railway timetables, accounts of resorts of the period, John Ruskin’s
Stones of Venice
, the programs of concerts Eliot would have attended, and old maps and photographs of London, Venice, and other European cities.

All this enabled me to try and imagine George Eliot’s thoughts and feelings as she lived out her life, and then, on December 22, 1880, as she died, with John Walter Cross, who truly did love her, at her side.

OTHER PRESS