1859–60
‘TALKING OF GOOD books it is really gratifying to see our confidence in Adam Bede so confirmed,’ Lewes chirruped to Blackwood on 21 April 1859. ‘Two out of every three people I meet speak to me about it.’1
Only a few months earlier the mood had been very different. Although the book had been ready to go to press at the end of November 1858, Blackwood had dragged his feet. His excuse to the Leweses was that he was already committed to bringing out Bulwer-Lytton’s novel What Will He Do With It? in January, and did not want to run the two books against each other. The fact that Bulwer-Lytton’s dithering over the proofs had caused a backlog at the printers may have had more to do with it. But perhaps there was also a reluctance on Blackwood’s part to take the plunge with a book whose subject matter and pseudonymous authorship were almost certainly bound to cause a storm.
The wait made Marian and Lewes jumpy. A few weeks earlier Herbert Spencer had told them over dinner that the notorious blab John Chapman had guessed the real identity of George Eliot. Rumours drifting in from Warwickshire suggested that Evans family members were also putting two and two together. If publication were delayed any longer there would be no chance of bringing out Adam Bede pseudonymously and, as Marian told Blackwood on 1 December 1858, ‘I wish the book to be judged quite apart from its authorship.’2 Fidgety with frustration, she put together a ‘Remonstrance’ which, she told Blackwood in a letter of 22 December, Mr Lewes had suggested should be attached to the beginning of Adam Bede.3 The essay has been lost, but presumably it took nosy critics and readers to task for trying to break the author’s incognito. Blackwood hated it and pulled Lewes up sharply for indulging Marian’s dangerous fantasies: ‘It is not like so knowing a party as you to suggest so dangerous a preface as that proposed for G.E.’4
The matter was quickly dropped and the Leweses were forced to sit on their hands for another five weeks until Adam Bede finally appeared. Fleeting though the crisis had been, it flagged many of the problems that were to make the following year such a harrowing one. Marian’s ambivalence about being identified as the author of her work, Lewes’s tendency to fly off the handle and Blackwood’s instinctive dislike of confrontation all played a part in creating the difficulties to come.
When Adam Bede appeared in three volumes on i February 1859 it was not an instant hit. The all-important Charles Edward Mudie, who ran the biggest circulating library in the country and could make or break a new novel, agreed to take fifty copies, grudgingly increased to 500 under pressure. It was only when the notices began to appear, three weeks later, that everyone started discussing – and buying – the latest literary sensation, George Eliot’s Adam Bede. Mostly the reviewers picked up on the same things as Blackwood. They were charmed by the pastoral, amused by Mrs Poyser and her pithy sayings, shocked by the obstetric details – which strike the modern reader as downright coy – of Hetty giving birth in a field. The high point was E. S. Dallas’s review in The Times on 12 April which declared, ‘There can be no mistake about Adam Bede. It is a first-rate novel, and its author takes rank at once among the masters of the art.’5 The effect on sales was stunning. By the middle of March the first edition was sold out. By the summer the book was on its fifth print run. Gratifyingly, Mudie begged to be allowed to order extra. At the year’s end it was calculated that a very healthy 15,000 copies of Adam Bede had gone.
Even more gratifying were the personal testimonies that found their way to Marian. ‘Praise is so much less sweet than comprehension and sympathy,’ she wrote to Charles Bray on 7 September 1859 and luckily she got plenty of both.6 Jane Carlyle, still trying to decide whether George Eliot was a clergyman, gave the surest confirmation of success when she declared that the novel had put her ‘in charity with the whole human race’.7 J. A. Froude, perhaps unaware he was writing to the ardent Miss Evans from whom he had fled ten years previously, framed his praise in equally specific terms, declaring that Adam Bede ‘gave no pleasure. It gave a palpitation of the heart. That was not pleasure; but it was a passionate interest.’8
In Edinburgh the reaction was equally discerning. A cabinet-making brother of the Blackwoods’ clerk George Simpson responded with delight to the accuracy of the workshop scenes.9 His testimony went a long way towards cancelling the later sneer of Thomas Carlyle: ‘I found out in the first two pages that it was a woman’s writing – she supposed that in making a door, you last of all put in the panels.’10 It is lucky that Marian never heard this, for no one’s approval mattered more than Thomas Carlyle’s. Knowing that his youth had been spent ‘among the furrowed fields and pious peasantry’, the Sage of Chelsea had become identified in her mind with Robert Evans. If Carlyle liked the book then so, by her odd reckoning, would her father have done. In fact, Carlyle never could be persuaded to admire George Eliot, even before he knew she was that ‘strong-minded woman’ Marian Evans, and certainly not afterwards.
Even the fact that the Queen admired Adam Bede would not have made up for the disappointment over Carlyle. Victoria’s recommendations had sped all over Europe, from Prussia, where her daughter was Crown Princess, to Belgium, where her uncle Leopold was King. Hayslope’s rural rhythms and old-fashioned moral values reminded her of the Scottish Highlands. Adam Bede, with his strong back and straight talking, could almost have been one of her beloved gillies. It was now that Her Majesty commissioned two watercolours, one of Dinah preaching, the other of Hetty in the dairy.11
It felt sweet to Marian, ostracised for the past five years, to be fussed over, accepted (albeit as George Eliot) and placed at the very heart of the culture which had snubbed her. Yet as sales soared and reviewers gushed, she found herself overcome by a cold, sick dread. On 10 April she told Blackwood, ‘few authors, I suppose, who have had a real success, have known less of the flush and the sensations of triumph that are talked of as the accompaniments of success.’12
What spoiled Marian’s pleasure was her deep suspicion of popularity. Writing novels was, for her, a moral activity, more akin to producing philosophy than telling stories. While discerning comments from Jane Carlyle, Charles Dickens and J. A. Froude filled her with pleasure, she was gripped by the fear that if too many people liked her writing she must be doing something wrong. She even managed to communicate this to the normally pragmatic Lewes, whose response to the praise for Adam Bede became uncharacteristically tetchy. The opinion of the Statesman’s reviewer that the book was ‘One of the best novels we have read for a long time’ only succeeded in making Lewes snap, ‘The nincompoop couldn’t see the distinction between Adam and the mass of novels he had been reading.’13 Behind the graceless comment lay Marian’s contagious terror that Adam Bede had been mistaken by reviewers and readers alike as nothing more than an accomplished potboiler. For this reason she scrutinised Blackwood for signs that he was trying to market the book in the wrong way. On 25 February 1859 she wrote begging him not to extract from the reviews phrases like ‘best novel of the season’ or ‘best novel we have read for a long while’ in order to puff new editions of the book.14 Yet, confusingly, only a few months earlier she had quizzed him sharply about why Mudie ‘has almost always left the C[lerical] S[cenes] out of his advertised list, although he puts in very trashy and obscure books?’15
Luckily by now Blackwood recognised his new author’s tricky, tortured nature. He also understood what he was required to do about it. In a tactful letter of 16 March 1859 he opens with ‘I think I may now fairly congratulate you upon being a popular as well as a great author’, before continuing carefully, ‘The sale is nothing to the ring of applause that I hear in all directions. The only qualm that ever came across me as to the success of the book was that really to enjoy it I required to give my mind to it and I trembled for that large section of Novel readers who have little or no mind to give, but now I think the general applause is fairly enlisting even noodles.’16
The central contradiction about Marian which Blackwood grasped was that despite her proclaimed indifference to what the mass of people thought about her books, she remained morbidly dependent on their good opinion. She had never wanted to be an avant-garde writer, appealing only to the knowing few. By choosing to write novels, and by setting her stories among ordinary people, she was reaching for the broadest audience. And because that audience would, if it had known the details of Marian Evans’s personal life, surely have rejected her, it became doubly important that George Eliot’s novels should be accepted unconditionally. Any dip in sales was interpreted by Marian as a judgement not just of her artistic skill but of her decision to live with Lewes out of wedlock. Deep despair combined with lofty declarations of indifference usually followed quickly. It would not be long before Lewes decided to keep the sales figures to himself and begged Blackwood to do the same.
This violent swing between the need to be loved and the desire to stand above it all, between the thirst for acclaim and the suspicion of popularity, exhausted Marian in the months following the publication of Adam Bede. More crucially, it led her into a bewilderingly volatile position about money, which came close to destroying her relationship with the Blackwoods before it had hardly started.
It was the need to improve their joint finances which had first led Lewes to suggest that Marian try her hand at fiction. Initially Marian was able to rationalise this motivation by the curious suggestion that there was something ‘antiseptic’ about writing for money which guarded against the production of highly coloured trash. But with the huge success of Adam Bede came new temptations. It would be so easy to follow the example of a popular Blackwood novelist like Margaret Oliphant who paid her sons’ Eton fees by churning out 200-odd novels which bore more than a family resemblance. Marian had even toyed with the idea of producing a sequel to Adam Bede, possibly focusing on the popular Poysers.17 But to write derivative fiction in order to make certain money ran counter to her strong need to produce work which was socially and morally useful. ‘I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books’, she declared at one point to Blackwood during the tense negotiations of 1859, ‘except money to save me from the temptation to write only for money.’18
This pious wish the Blackwoods could easily have granted. The amount they had given her for the Scenes and Adam Bede was fine and fair. But Marian’s wavering self-worth led her into aggressive demands over what she should be paid for her next book, at this point usually referred to simply as ‘Maggie’. Add Lewes’s love of intrigue to the mix and the stage was set for six months of embarrassment and hurt feelings.
The first Blackwood heard about Marian’s new novel was in a letter of 31 March 1859, when she mentioned that it would be ‘as long as Adam Bede, and a sort of companion picture of provincial life’.19 Although this sounded promising, over the next few months several things happened to make Blackwood less sanguine. First there was the odd, gloomy short story called ‘The Lifted Veil’, which Marian had sent for interim publication in Maga. It is doubtful if he would have accepted it from anyone else and it must have made him reconsider whether George Eliot was going to turn out to be a one-book wonder.
Next, a series of embarrassing developments was making the Blackwoods uncomfortably aware that it would not be feasible to hide George Eliot’s identity for ever. Before long, everyone would know that the exquisitely moral Adam Bede had been written by the woman famous for taking someone else’s husband. Once that happened it was inevitable that sales of this and any subsequent novel would suffer. Indeed, once Mudie learned that George Eliot was Marian Evans, he threatened to boycott The Mill on the Floss completely. Blackwood, too, had received plenty of intelligence from his friends and from Joseph Langford, his London manager, that once the authorship was known the book was unlikely to sell well among the family audience.
The crisis which threatened to unmask Marian centred on a genteel down-and-out from Nuneaton called Joseph Liggins, whose supporters claimed he had written Scenes and Adam Bede. Liggins, a baker’s son who had been spoiled for the world by a Cambridge education and hopes of a church career, cut so shambling a figure that it is hard to believe he thought up the fraud himself. Indeed, he may never actually have maintained that he was Eliot, but simply allowed others to think he was. Quite why so many local gentry and clergy jumped to his cause is not clear: one theory has enemies of Lewes from Leader days stirring up the fuss as a kind of revenge.20 Whatever the origins of the deception, the result was to unleash a scandal that not only prematurely unmasked Marian, but raised doubts about her integrity and talent, which took years to die down.
When the Liggins rumour – or ‘Liggers’ as his name was scrambled in some press reports – first surfaced after the publication of the Scenes it all seemed light-hearted enough. Writing to Blackwood from Munich on 20 May 1858, where Marian was deep in Adam Bede, Lewes could even see it as a useful smokescreen: ‘the more confidently such reports are spread, the more difficult will be the detection of the real culprit.’21 Nearly a year later, with the rumour now taking hold in Warwickshire, Marian was still finding it funny. On 10 April 1859 she tells Blackwood that she has heard from ‘an old friend’ – actually Sara Hennell – that Joseph Liggins was now attracting sympathy on the grounds that he had not received a penny from the Blackwoods for his work. ‘I hope you and Major Blackwood will enjoy the myth,’ she teases.22
But within several days the mood had changed. Marian might have wanted to conceal her identity, but that was quite another matter from letting someone else ‘bear his arms on my shield’. On 15 April George Eliot wrote to The Times denying a statement which had appeared there a few days earlier from a busybody Nuneaton cleric that Liggins had written Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede. In a robust letter Eliot, who on grounds of gender and class could hardly be considered a gentleman, waxed indignant about how ‘he’ had been deprived of the usual courtesies extended to that breed. ‘Allow me to ask whether the act of publishing a book deprives a man of all claim to the courtesies usual among gentlemen? If not, the attempt to pry into what is obviously meant to be withheld – my name – and to publish the rumours which such prying may give rise to, seems to me quite indefensible, still more so to state these rumours as ascertained truths.’23 The Leweses had sent the letter to The Times without consulting the Blackwoods first, sensing that the publishers were a long way behind them. In truth, it suited the Blackwoods to let the Liggins rumour play for as long as possible. The more muddle there was, the longer it would be before George Eliot was definitively identified as Marian Evans Lewes.
Far from fading away, the crisis grew. By the middle of April a group of Warwickshire gentlemen were organising a subscription for Liggins to compensate him for the shabby treatment he was supposed to have received at the hands of the Blackwoods. Now that outright fraud was implied, the Leweses were moving towards the position that only a definitive statement that Marian was the author of Scenes and Adam Bede would refute the claims of the Liggins camp. Blackwood, more used to the rough and tumble of publishing, remained sanguine about being branded a cheat and in a letter of 18 May 1859 begged the Leweses to ‘KEEP YOUR SECRET’ until he had had a chance to meet them face to face. Nine days later he arrived at Wandsworth and, according to Lewes’s journal, ‘urged that the secret should stedfastly be kept, at least until after the next book’.24
In return for the Leweses’ continuing silence, Blackwood agreed to get involved in scotching the rumour. On 6 June he endorsed another letter to The Times from George Eliot. As far as Marian and Lewes were concerned, it was too little too late. ‘I am surprised at . . . the equanimity with which you have both sat down under the absurd imputation,’ Lewes wrote coldly.25 What stung was the realisation that the Blackwoods had been motivated by different concerns all along. The publishers’ priority was less to spare Marian’s feelings than to protect book sales. But what the Leweses found most hurtful of all was the implication that there was something tainted, embarrassing, wrong with the name Marian Evans Lewes.
By May the situation was out of hand. In Warwickshire a manuscript of Eliot’s work in Liggins’s writing was doing the rounds. Marian and Lewes constructed an angry letter to The Times denouncing Liggins as ‘an imposter and a swindler’.26 The editor of the newspaper, Delane, advised Blackwood to get the letter toned down. Marian sulkily agreed, but before she had a chance to go into print with the new version, a crucial communication arrived from Barbara Leigh Smith. Married in 1857 to an eccentric French doctor called Bodichon, Barbara spent half the year in Algeria and half in Britain. She was presently in London on one of her long summer sojourns. Barbara, who by now knew the secret of Marian’s authorship, reported on the gossip she had picked up on her recent round of smart drawing-rooms: ‘They assured me all the literary men were certain it was Marian Lewes . . . that they did not much like saying so because it would do so much harm . . . From their way of talking it was evident they thought you would do the book more harm than the book do you good in public opinion.’27
Finally Barbara had said what the Blackwoods had been hinting at all along: people thought that Marian Evans Lewes was ashamed to come out as the author of Adam Bede because of her unconventional private life. If this were not enough to make Marian righteously determined to break the secret, then a vicious article in the Athenaeum three days later did the trick. ‘It is time to end this pother about the authorship of “Adam Bede”,’ ran a piece by William Dixon in the magazine’s gossip column. ‘The writer is in no sense a “great unknown”; the tale, if bright in parts, and such as a clever woman with an observant eye and unschooled moral nature might have written, has no great quality of any kind.’28 Condensed into a few savage paragraphs were the two most hurtful accusations that had been made against Marian over the past few months. First, that she was a shameful woman pretending to be a respectable one. Second, that she had thought up the whole Liggins rigmarole as a gimmick to boost the sales of her books. On 2 July 1859 the Blackwood brothers attended a summit at Wandsworth, where the Leweses were now living, and it was agreed that the pseudonym would be given up. Although lunch went well, with John Blackwood struck by how happy Marian looked, by the end of the day she had crumpled under the delayed impact of the Athenaeum piece. A letter written to Barbara that evening breaks off abruptly with the shaky explanation: ‘I [am] very poorly and trembling, and am only fit to sit in a heap with a warm water bottle at my feet. So no more now.’29
The whole miserable business had left Marian suspicious about John Blackwood’s loyalty. Eighteen months earlier her brother had rejected her claim to be ‘Mrs Lewes’ and now her publisher was making it clear that ‘Marian Evans Lewes’ was a name with which his family could not afford to be associated. Just as resentment towards Isaac had so often been played out through money, so Marian now expressed her disappointment in Blackwood by testing the limits of his financial commitment to her.
The negotiations over The Mill started off pleasantly enough. After a long day at Wandsworth on 25 June, John Blackwood reported to his brother, in retrospect a touch complacently, that Marian ‘honestly confesses to a most deep seated anxiety to get a large price for the new Tale and I think we will be well able to afford to give it. It should be a little fortune to her.’30 Over the next few months there was nothing to suggest that anything was wrong. Blackwood continued to send good news about the sales of Adam Bede and to commiserate over the nastiness of the Athenaeum piece. He generously offered to bring forward one of the scheduled payments for Adam Bede if it would help with the Leweses’ heavy moving costs to Wandsworth. He even picked up on an earlier hint that Marian wished some noble patron would send her a pug as a thank you for Adam Bede. After getting a sporting cousin to scour the country for the right sort of animal, in July Blackwood via Langford presented a delighted Marian with Pug. Despite the chill which was to set into their correspondence over the next few months, no letter from Marian or Lewes was complete without a mention of the new arrival’s wagging tail and sneezing habits.
Although Blackwood liked what he had read of the manuscript of ‘Maggie’, he had dragged his feet over making a firm offer. On 13 September Marian tried to nudge him into action. Resentful that she had to expose herself like this, she compensated with a defensively bold tone. Reminding him that ‘I have now so large and eager a public’ that any new novel was bound to sell well, she expressed her concern that if the book was first serialised in the magazine, up to 40,000 readers would be lost for the subsequent book publication.31 She wanted to know how Blackwood proposed to compensate her.
Blackwood picked up on the aggressive tone and consulted the Major before responding. But far from being a supple parry, his letter of 21 September was clumsy, oblique and, as it turned out, deeply damaging. Instead of addressing her arguments against serialisation, Blackwood plunged straight in with ‘I wish to have your new novel for the Magazine as from what I read of the story I feel confident that it will be admirably adapted for publication there. Publishing in that form we will give you at least as much as we would for it to publish in any other way.’32 He offered her £3000 for serialisation and book copyright for four years, without making it clear whether this included compensation for the loss of sales from readers who had seen the story in the magazine. He also, nastily, cut her down to size by reminding her that Scenes had actually been a poor seller until Adam Bede had arrived on the market as a retrospective tonic. Then, in an uncharacteristically insensitive conclusion, he added that he did not intend to attach the name ‘George Eliot’ to the magazine instalments of the new book, ‘and it would be great fun to watch the speculation as to the author’s life’.33 Having been briefed about her anguish over the Athenaeum attack, it is odd that Blackwood should think that it would be remotely ‘fun’ for Marian to undergo yet more gossip about her private life.
The very next day Marian sent her icy response.
Your letter confirms my presupposition that you would not find it worth your while to compensate me for the renunciation of the unquestionable advantages my book would derive from being presented to the public in three volumes with all its freshness upon it.
It was an oversight of mine not to inform you that I do not intend to part with the copyright, but only with an edition. As, from the nature of your offer, I infer that you think my next book will be a speculation attended with risk, I prefer incurring that risk myself.34
This time Blackwood took three weeks to reply, having first consulted an outraged Major. In the circumstances, the letter was a model of restraint. John Blackwood sent good news of the flourishing sales of Adam Bede and Scenes, dealt tactfully with yet one more detour in the Liggins business, and said simply and generously, ‘The Major and I are very sorry indeed that you cannot entertain our proposal for the new Tale. I hope Maggie gets on as gloriously as she promised.’35
Marian’s response was ominous. For a start, she signed herself ‘Marian Evans Lewes’ rather than ‘George Eliot’, a switch which Major Blackwood was quick to spot – ‘I am rather sorry to see the change of signature.’ The name which bound publisher and author together, in secret and success, was being decisively withdrawn. ‘George Eliot’, Marian was reminding Blackwood, belonged to her alone. There were other signs, too, that she was angry. Avoiding any mention of current negotiations, she ticked him off about some proofreading mistakes in a new edition of Adam Bede and dropped heavy hints about the book’s continuing ‘great success’.36
Blackwood must have had to bite his tongue when he replied on 27 October. He apologises for the printing blunders, delights in the progress of ‘Maggie’ ‘in whom I shall always feel a very keen interest’ and tells her that Blackwoods are going to give her an extra-contractual £400 as an acknowledgement of the huge success of Adam Bede.37 Marian’s response by return contains crisp thanks, spends a whole paragraph on how enduringly wonderful Adam Bede is, and harries Blackwoods for not taking action over the publisher Newby, who has advertised a bogus sequel to Adam Bede.38
This time the saintly Blackwood had been pushed too far. Marian’s mean-mindedness threw him into a ‘fit of disgust’.39 He was perfectly aware that she was being courted by other publishers – indeed, she had made a point of telling him – and assumed that she was now playing a waiting game to see who would offer the best price for her new novel. His hurt feelings quickly became office gossip. Simpson, the clerk in Edinburgh, wrote to Langford, the London manager, saying: ‘Mr. John and Major B are utterly disgusted and I do think would now decline the new book if it were offered them.’ Usually the Blackwood people managed to use Lewes as the scapegoat for any little bits of bad behaviour from Marian, but this time Simpson maintained that it was Eliot who was ‘inordinately greedy’ and expected some ‘wonderful price’ from a rival firm.40 By 16 November, in a flurry of mixed pronouns, he was denouncing George Eliot on the grounds that ‘he was an avaricious soul’ who had ‘sold herself to the highest bidder’.41
On 18 November Lewes attempted to break the stand-off with a letter that only succeeded in making things worse. ‘What days these are for furious speculation in the periodical world!’ he crowed to Blackwood. ‘My precious time is occupied with declining offers on all sides – every one imagining that he can seduce George Eliot, simply because he (the everyone, not G.E.) wants that result.’42 Obvious though the tactic was – Simpson snorted to Langford that it was the sort of crass gambit that young ladies went in for – it happened to be true. The year before, an ‘oily and fair-spoken’ American literary agent had offered Marian an extraordinary £1200 for a short story while a Derby clergyman had suggested that she might like to contribute a piece to the Parish Magazine urging the clergy to elevate their notions of love and courtship.
Most of the overtures, however, were from altogether more orthodox quarters. None other than Lewes’s old friend Charles Dickens had recently made contact after twenty-three years. He had liked Scenes and loved Adam Bede, maintaining that ‘I cannot praise it enough’.43 Now he was after a novel to serialise in his new periodical All the Year Round. When he came to dinner at Holly Lodge, the Wandsworth house to which they had moved in February 1859, the evening went well. Although Dickens was always careful to emphasise that he had not actively tried to poach Eliot from Blackwoods, he was happy to exploit the Leweses’ dissatisfaction with the Edinburgh firm. He asked Lewes to write a piece for All the Year Round on the Newby business and the whole ethics of advertising bogus sequels. But it was Marian he was really after. The terms Dickens proposed for Eliot’s work were flatteringly generous, allowing her to keep the copyright and reprint the novel in book form with whichever publisher she chose. But time was the problem. The Leweses never seem to have considered giving Dickens The Mill and Marian did not see how she could meet his deadline by having her next book ready to start serialisation in summer 1860.
Dickens was especially keen that All the Year Round should be a success because the previous year he had disbanded his previous magazine Household Words, after a quarrel with the publishers Bradbury and Evans. They, in turn, had set up Once a Week to rival Dickens’s new project and were equally keen to court George Eliot. The editor, Samuel Lucas, laid siege to Marian during the spring of 1859, sending letters care of Blackwood asking her to contribute a serial. Marian asked Blackwood to respond with a refusal on her behalf, hoping that he would take note of how greatly she was in demand.44 Bradbury and Evans’s next strategy was to approach Eliot through Lewes, even resorting to asking him to write a novel for them. Lewes does not seem to have been offended by so blatant a tactic and even discussed with Marian whether he should take up their offer. In the end he decided – wisely, given the awfulness of his two early tries at fiction – that ‘I should not swerve from Science’.45
Throughout these tense autumn months Marian continued to drop hints that despite having rejected Blackwood’s offer she still expected that he would be the book’s publisher. On 6 October she wrote to Langford, the London manager, and asked him to recommend a ‘hard-headed lawyer’ who could brief her on the legal background to Mr Tulliver’s court case.46 Lewes, too, was keenly aware that there was still no firm and viable agreement with any publishing house for the new book. In fact, Smith and Elder were soon to make an offer, a staggering £4500. But this reached Wandsworth on 1 December and four days earlier Marian had decided that she could not wait any longer. In desperation she had written to Blackwood:
I am induced to ask you whether you still wish to remain my publishers, or whether the removal of my incognito has caused a change in your views on that point.
I have never myself thought of putting an end to a connection which has hitherto not appeared inauspicious to either of us, and I have looked forward to your being my publishers as long as I produced books to be published; but various indications, which I may possibly have misinterpreted, have made me desire a clear understanding in the matter.47
Two days later Blackwood replied with what turned out to be the breakthrough letter. He is frank about being ‘very much annoyed or rather, I should say, hurt at the tone in which my offer for the new novel was replied to.’ He acknowledges that other publishing companies ‘may offer a sum such as I would neither think it right nor prudent to give’.48 He says that he would have quite understood if Marian had taken a higher offer ‘but I think I should have been told so frankly instead of having my offer treated as if it were not worth consideration at all’.49 But it was in his concluding paragraph that Blackwood showed himself once again to be attuned to her particular dilemma. He admits that he has always opposed the withdrawal of the incognito and recognised frankly that ‘in the eyes of many’ it will prove a disadvantage. However, ‘my opinion of your genius and confidence in the truly good, honest, religious, and moral tone of all you have written or will write is such that I think you will overcome any possible detriment from the withdrawal of the mystery which has so far taken place.’50
Marian responded with equal candour, explaining that she had been hurt by Blackwood ignoring her queries about whether he would recompense her for the loss of book sales through serial publication. She also admitted: ‘Your proposition at the same time to publish the story without the name of George Eliot seemed to me (rendered doubly sensitive by the recent withdrawal of my incognito) part of a depreciatory view that ran through your whole letter, in contrast with the usual delicacy and generosity of your tone.’51 Then she explained how annoyed she had been by his refusal to take steps to stop Newby advertising the bogus sequel to Adam Bede.
Blackwood’s final letter in this painful sequence was, uncannily, written from that ‘fine quaint old place’ Arbury Hall where he had gone as the guest of Charles Newdegate, Isaac Evans’s employer. He said nothing new in his letter composed carefully over 2–4 December – merely repeating that he had always wanted to bring out ‘Maggie’, that he nearly always published anonymously in the magazine, and that he and his brother knew their business well enough to know whether to tackle Newby or whether to let him expose himself as a scoundrel. He proceeded to invite himself to lunch on the following Wednesday at Wandsworth so that he could make a binding arrangement over ‘Maggie’. When Blackwood arrived on 7 December, the vexed issue of serialisation was dropped as well as Lewes’s lingering hope of bringing the book out in monthly shilling instalments. It was agreed that Blackwood would give her £2000 for book publication. It was not a particularly generous offer, especially when compared with the magnificent sum of £4500 from Smith and Elder, which had come in a few days previously. But at least ‘we may consider the publication of Maggie settled’, Marian wrote with something approaching relief on 20 December.52
The relationship with the Blackwoods was not the only one which came near to breaking over the incognito business. Marian’s closest friendships, already changed by her intimacy with Lewes, were further strained by the decision to keep her authorship secret. The Brays, Sara Hennell and John Chapman had all provided support during the difficult Coventry and Strand years, and were bound to feel hurt when they discovered that they had been shut out from Marian’s growing happiness and success. Never keen on Lewes, they found it easy to blame the little man for pulling the girl they thought they knew into a shadowy world of fudge and equivocation.
The first pressure on the incognito had come from Warwickshire. In her chatty letter acknowledging Marian’s ‘marriage’ in late May 1857 Fanny Houghton had mentioned that Joseph Liggins, a man remembered vaguely from the half-sisters’ overlapping youth, was said to be the author of the new series in Blackwood’s Magazine. If Fanny was angling for a confession, she was disappointed. Marian wrote back with a mixture of contrived vagueness – miscalling the stories ‘Clerical Sketches’ – and inexplicable certainty, telling Fanny that no less an authority than Mr Blackwood had told Mr Lewes that the stories were by ‘Mr. Eliot, a clergyman, I presume’.53
Fanny was not the only member of the Evans family to have suspicions. Isaac had also been reading Blackwood’s Magazine and found his thoughts jumping to his sister. Later, when Adam Bede came out, he had been heard to mutter that ‘No one but his Sister could write the book’ and that ‘there are things in it about his Father that she must have written’.54 Although Isaac had resolved never to speak to Marian, he was proud enough to grumble about her.
Frustratingly, we do not know what Isaac thought about Marian’s next book, The Mill on the Floss, which so obviously draws on their shared childhood. The next we hear of the Evanses is not until 1866 when Fanny wrote to Isaac about the up-coming Felix Holt – perhaps also with a hint of exasperated pride? – ‘I am on the tip-toe of expectation to see the forthcoming novel by Mary Ann. It is too much to hope that no member of her own family will figure in it.’55
The Evanses were not the only Midlands people to have been reading George Eliot’s work with interest. In May 1858 John Blackwood was watching the Derby at Epsom when he was hailed by Charles Newdegate with, ‘Do you know that you have been publishing a capital series of stories in the Mag., the Clerical Scenes, all about my place and County?’ Newdegate was certain the author was Liggins, but was so delighted with the tales’ ‘delicacy, good taste, and good feeling’ that he appeared not to be in the least offended. Indeed, he seemed to relish the whole business enormously, boasting that he was sure he could provide a ‘key’ to the characters and their real-life counterparts.56
If Blackwood was unsettled by the revelation that his new author’s refreshingly ‘realistic’ fiction might be nothing more than crude documentary, he disguised it in a lightly worded request to Marian that she should ‘write me a line with a message’ to Newdegate.57 Marian was quick to sense the seriousness of the implications and her answer went far beyond ‘a line’. As always when under pressure, she retreated to an Olympian position, declaring that ‘it is invariably the case that when people discover certain points of coincidence in a fiction with facts that happen to have come to their knowledge, they believe themselves able to furnish a key to the whole’. She admits that ‘certain vague traditions’ about Sir Roger Newdigate were woven into the story of Sir Christopher Cheverel, but ‘the rest of “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story” is spun out of the subtlest web of minute observation and inward experience, from my first childish recollections up to recent years’.58
This was not the first time Blackwood had found himself accosted by people who claimed to have relatives who had stepped out of a George Eliot story. The previous August he had received a letter from the Revd W. P. Jones of Preston asking if he was planning any more ‘Clerical Scenes’. According to Mr Jones, ‘Janet’s Repentance’ was based on an episode in the life of his dead brother and he was ‘utterly at a loss to conceive who could have written the statements or revived what should have been buried in oblivion’.59 When gently pressed by Blackwood, Marian had, as always, taken refuge in a defensively superior attitude to the way in which ordinary mortals insist on misunderstanding the creative process. ‘I suppose there is no perfect safeguard against erroneous impressions or a mistaken susceptibility.’60
But the third time it happened, Blackwood was getting worried. In June 1859 he received a badly constructed, uncertainly grammaticised letter from Revd John Gwyther, the curate at Chilvers Coton whose unlikely crush on a mysterious Countess had provided the raw material for ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’. In laborious detail Gwyther explains how his ‘Eldest Daughter’ had been reading the ‘Clerical Scenes’ when she spotted the borrowing. With unexpected insight Gwyther says that he doesn’t believe that Joseph Liggins had it in him to produce the ‘Clerical Scenes’. He believes the author must be a Mr King, who was curate at Nuneaton during those crucial years.61
Perhaps because he was shocked by how Gwyther’s meandering and ungrammatical communication was exactly the kind that Barton would have written, Blackwood thought it deserved a detailed response. Marian composed a letter in which she came the closest she would ever get to an admission – and perhaps a recognition? – that she had gone too far in using the details of other people’s lives.
The author of the ‘Scenes of Clerical Life’ and ‘Adam Bede’ begs me to inform you that he is not the Rev. W. H. King, but a much younger person, who wrote ‘Amos Barton’ under the impression that the clergyman whose long past trial suggested the groundwork of the story was no longer living, and that the incidents, not only through the licence and necessities of artistic writing, but in consequence of the writer’s imperfect knowledge, must have been so varied from the actual facts, that any one who discerned the core of truth must also recognize the large amount of arbitrary, imaginative addition.
But for any annoyance, even though it may have been brief and not well-founded, which the appearance of the story may have caused Mr. Gwyther, the writer is sincerely sorry.62
The worrying suggestion that Marian was some kind of plagiarist would not go away. The reluctant admission by the Liggins camp in November 1859 that their man had, after all, not written the Scenes and Adam only succeeded in clearing the ground for new and embarrassing rumours. The chief source of these was Charles Holte Bracebridge, a huffy-puffy magistrate with a genius for getting things wrong. Just like Mr Brooke of Middlemarch, Bracebridge had ‘gone into everything’, but with no obvious benefit to himself or anyone else. Genuinely moved by Liggins’s broken-down home and outstanding grocery bills, the well-meaning meddler had been at the forefront of the campaign to raise funds for the literary genius so shamefully treated by Blackwoods.63
Even once Bracebridge had been forced to give up the idea of Liggins’s authorship by a series of letters from Charles Bray, he clung to the odd theory that Liggins had ‘collected’ the material from which Marian, whom he remembered from a meeting during the Rosehill days, had written her fiction. This in turn led him to make his own blundering investigations into the models for the characters in her books. Most damagingly, he interviewed the garrulous daughter of the Methodist Elizabeth Evans, who claimed that her cousin Marian had often come to Wirksworth in her youth, pumped her mother for stories of the preaching life and had even copied down one of her sermons. As far as the gullible Bracebridge was concerned, this was all the proof needed to show that the tall, calm, fair Dinah Morris was an exact copy of the tiny, noisy, dark Elizabeth Evans.
After another exchange of letters Bracebridge mercifully began to splutter out of steam. On 9 October he wrote: ‘I frankly accept your declaration as the truth, and I shall repeat it, if the contrary is again asserted to me.’64 But the whole business had left Marian with an urgent need to defend her creative practice to the Brays and Sara Hennell. These, after all, were the people to whom she had on several occasions voiced her fear that she did not have a jot of creative talent. In the light of all the excited local gossip, were they now harbouring suspicions that she had indeed done nothing more than rifle through her earliest memories and change a few names?
Certainly Charles Bray had never seemed to grasp just how offensive Marian found Bracebridge, nor how serious were the implications of his claims. On 19 September Marian had written Bray a long letter trying to explain: ‘I am seriously annoyed at Mr Bracebridge’s conduct and letters.’ She cedes that there are two portraits in ‘Clerical Scenes’ – Amos Barton and Buchanan – but that ‘there is not a single portrait in Adam Bede’. Determined to redeem herself as a creative artist rather than a journalistic hack, she ends, ‘I do not think you would suspect me of telling falsehoods about my works: but you might imagine there was truth in these statements about Adam Bede.’65
Knowing Bray’s leakiness, Marian made it clear that these comments were to go no further. But two weeks later she wrote to Sara explaining the extent to which Dinah Morris was modelled on Elizabeth Evans and this time she may have authorised Sara to use the information as she saw fit. For twenty years later, when Marian’s death started up new chatter about the origins of her art, Sara felt free to send a copy of this 7 October letter to a newspaper. In what amounts to a miniature essay Marian carefully lays out the extent of her contact with her Methodist aunt. There were three meetings in all, during the late 1830s and early 1840s. During one of these Elizabeth Evans told her the story of her epic prison visit, the incident which formed the kernel for the Hetty Sorrel story. This is the extent of Marian’s borrowing. ‘How curious it seems to me that people should think Dinah’s sermon, prayers, and speeches were copied – when they were written with hot tears, as they surged up in my own mind!’66
Even now the Brays could be forgiven for wondering if Marian was telling the truth about where her fiction came from. They had been kept in the dark for several months over her relationship with Lewes, as well as the fact that she was successfully writing fiction. And in the months leading up to a difficult evening in June 1859 when she finally revealed to them that she was George Eliot, her manner had been shifty. In October 1858 when Sara had asked which recent pieces in the Westminster belonged to her, she had teased, ‘Do not guess at authorship – it is a bad speculation. I have not written a word in the Westminster’.67 Only six months earlier Charles Bray had joked that she must be about to bring out a novel to which she parried by asking when his poem was going to appear, before concluding, ‘Seriously, I wish you would not set false rumours, or any other rumours afloat about me. They are injurious.’68 No one could blame the Brays for being confused. Marian had wanted them to guess that she was writing fiction, and had dropped heavy hints to that effect – a ploy she had also used with Bessie Rayner Parkes when explaining why she was not free to contribute a piece to her newly established English Woman’s Journal. Yet when they followed her lead by asking questions about her work, she clammed up and accused them of nosiness.
The actual moment of revelation went horribly wrong. On 20 June the Leweses attended a performance of the Messiah at the Crystal Palace and afterwards dined with the Brays and Sara Hennell. A couple of years earlier the Brays had sold Rosehill to John Cash and his wife, the former Mary Sibree, and had joined Sara and her mother at Ivy Cottage, in the grounds of the big house. They had also, perhaps unwisely, bought a house in Sydenham for which they had constant problems finding tenants. On this occasion Sara had come down from Coventry clutching her latest work-in-progress, Thoughts in Aid of Faith, keen to get her old friend’s reactions. Mary Ann, however, had her own plans for this meeting, the first she had had with Cara since she had left for Germany with Lewes. She was about to reveal that she was the mysterious author of the new literary hit, Adam Bede. In the excitement of the moment, Sara’s dreary manuscript got pushed aside.
At the end of the visit, Lewes returned Sara’s manuscript to her, together with negative comments about the ‘decided disapprobation’ which both he and Marian felt for its laborious attempt to extract a framework for faith in the context of unbelief.69 Sara was hugely hurt, crying on the way home in the train because she had not had her much-anticipated chance to go through her work with Mary Ann herself. Charles Bray, who had never liked Sara very much anyway, wrote conspiratorially to Mary Ann the next day: ‘I know you would not have grudged the half hour she wanted, although I am quite of opinion, no good could have come of it. I don’t believe she can do better and if she likes to amuse herself and spend her money in publishing, she can afford it and she does no one any harm and it may attract some half-doz congenial minds.’70
But before she received this letter, Marian had already written to Sara apologising for the way in which her own exciting news had hijacked their meeting. She regretted ‘that the blundering efforts we have made towards mutual understanding have only made a new veil between us’. Then she continues, ‘Dear Sara, believe that I shall think of you and your work much, and that my ear and heart are more open for the future because I feel I have not done what a better spirit would have made me do in the past.’71
If Sara had been under the illusion that her friendship with Mary Ann was under pressure only from the geographical distance between them, she was now obliged to recognise that there were fundamental forces keeping them apart. The letter she wrote acknowledging that something had changed for ever was graceful, touching and sad: ‘I have been fancying you, as ten years ago, still interested in what we then conversed together upon . . . I see now that I have lost the only reader in whom I felt confident in having secure sympathy with the subject (not with me) whom I most gratefully believe – believed in – that she has floated beyond me in another sphere, and I remain gazing at the glory into which she has departed, wistfully and very lonely.’72
With Herbert Spencer there was no need to fudge. On 12 October 1856 he had stopped off in London during one of those interminable health-boosting Continental trips. According to Spencer’s version – designed, as always to give him the leading role – he had again suggested that Marian should try her hand at fiction, only to be told that she had already started on ‘Amos Barton’. Although Marian’s decision to confide in Spencer seems to have been spontaneous, it was judicious. A man who habitually gave so little of himself away could be trusted with other people’s closest secrets. But after two years of absolute discretion Spencer found himself in a difficult position. During dinner with the Leweses on 5 November 1858 he revealed that the newly elevated ‘Dr’ John Chapman had asked him ‘point blank’ if Marian had written the Scenes.73 Spencer’s fastidiousness about not spreading the rumour also meant that he found it hard to lie to an old associate. In any case, as he later explained in his autobiography, ‘I have so little control over my features that a vocal “No” would have been inevitably accompanied by a facial “Yes”.’74
Lewes and Marian were furious at what they saw as Spencer’s treachery. They waved away his scruples with their favourite precedent, that of Scott who had denied being the author of the Waverley novels and justified himself later by saying it was akin to claiming the right to stay silent in court. Years later Marian was to distance herself from such blatant dishonesty by claiming that she had no idea that Lewes had issued categoric denials on her behalf. In the highly strung state in which the Leweses now approached anything to do with the incognito issue, Spencer’s inability to see things their way appeared as deliberate mischief-making. When Pug arrived from Blackwood, Marian theatrically declared that the creature had come ‘to fill up the void left by false and narrow-hearted friends’.75
It would have been difficult for Spencer to give Chapman a categoric denial, since the good doctor was clearly confident about his hunch. Like the Coventry trio, he had noticed that Marian had done no journalism over the past eighteen months. Despite the fact that he had sent her an extra five pounds for her marvellous essay on Young, she had ceased to suggest new topics for the Westminster. Chapman was familiar enough with her finances to know that she needed to get money from somewhere and his mind naturally turned to fiction, especially the Scenes of Clerical Life with their Warwickshire settings around which she had guided him during that crucial visit to Rosehill during which they had agreed to abandon their affair. The moment Spencer had left after dropping his bombshell on 5 November, Marian sat down and wrote to her old lover:
I have just learned that you have allowed yourself to speak carelessly of rumours concerning a supposed authorship of mine. A little reflection in my behalf would have suggested to you that were any such rumours true, my own abstinence from any communication concerning my own writing, except to my most intimate friends, was evidence that I regarded secrecy on such subjects as a matter of importance. Instead of exercising this friendly consideration, you carelessly, certainly, for no one’s pleasure or interest, and to my serious injury, contribute to the circulation of idle rumours and gossip, entirely unwarranted by any evidence . . . Should you like to have unfounded reports of that kind circulated concerning yourself, still more should you like an old friend to speak idly of the merest hearsay on matters which you yourself had exhibited extreme aversion to disclose?76
This must have given Chapman an uncustomary pause for thought, since he did not reply for nearly two months. Although Marian had told her journal on 30 November that she did not intend to have anything more to do with him, she none the less responded to his letter when it eventually arrived, if only to give herself the pleasure of saying ‘it does not seem likely that further letter-writing would advance our mutual understanding’.77 Being elevated to the status of a professional man had not changed Chapman’s most basic emotional responses. The idea that Marian was not available to him was hugely exciting, and he begged for the chance to come to Wandsworth and explain his behaviour. But she refused, saying coldly that she was far too busy moving house.
This was enough to whip up Chapman into a frenzy. By February he was writing again, this time hinting that he knew she was George Eliot. This was serious stuff and drew an immediate response from Lewes:
My dear Chapman,
Not to notice your transparent allusion in your last, would be improperly to admit its truth. After the previous correspondence, your continuing to impute those works to Mrs Lewes may be meant as a compliment, but is an offence against delicacy and friendship. As you seem so very slow in appreciating her feelings on this point, she authorizes me to state, as distinctly as language can do so, that she is not the author of ‘Adam Bede’.78
Now that there was no point in courting the Leweses, Chapman exploited his privileged information for all it was worth. Still involved with the Westminster, he inserted a paragraph at the end of a long review of Adam Bede in April 1859, which nudged and winked the reader towards the idea that George Eliot must surely be a woman.79
The fact that Lewes had done exactly the same thing in 1847 to Charlotte Brontë, virtually telling readers of his review of Jane Eyre that Currer Bell was a woman, did not mean that there was any mercy for Chapman. Henceforward he was persona non grata, although he was clumsy enough not to have realised the extent of his disgrace. Nine months later he wrote, with breath-taking cheek, to ask whether he could reprint Marian’s five big Westminster essays in book form, sharing the profits with her. ‘Squashed that idea,’ Lewes reported briskly in his journal.80
In the Leweses’ brooding state, Spencer’s determination to stick to his principles seemed like a gleeful attempt to undermine them. An unhappy visit in March 1859 ended with Lewes telling his journal that ‘jealousy, too patent, and too unequivocal, of our success, acting on his own bitterness at nonsuccess, has of late cooled him visibly’.81 Yet only six months later Spencer managed to redeem himself in the only way which worked with Marian, by writing a letter praising her work. He declared that he had read Adam Bede ‘with laughter and tears and without criticism. Knowing as you do how constitutionally I am given to fault-finding, you will know what this means.’82
Barbara Bodichon, as always, was the only person to get it exactly right. She had not prodded and probed Marian during those eighteen months when the fiction was still a secret. Yet nor had she expressed unflattering disbelief when the authorship became clear. Gratifyingly, she claimed to have guessed Marian’s identity when she came across an extract from Adam Bede in an Algerian newspaper, which made her exclaim, ‘that is written by Marian Evans, there is her great big head and heart and her wise wide views.’83 This was exactly the thing which both Marian and Lewes liked to hear. Except, of course, for the fact that Barbara had made the blunder of calling Marian by her ‘maiden’ name. In a postscript to the letter of thanks which Marian wrote on 5 May 1859 Lewes added, ‘dear Barbara, you must not call her Marian Evans again: that individual is extinct, rolled up, mashed, absorbed in the Lewesian magnificence!’84
Barbara kept her secret even once she was back in London, becoming the Leweses’ eyes and ears in the city’s literary drawing-rooms. Her revelation in June that everyone assumed that Marian Lewes was too ashamed to admit to being George Eliot proved to be the spur that ended the incognito. On the 30th of that month Lewes wrote to tell Barbara that they had decided to break the secret. ‘You may tell it openly to all who care to hear it that the object of anonymity was to get the book judged on its own merits, and not prejudged as the work of a woman, or of a particular woman.’85
It would be odd if this atmosphere of paranoia had not seeped into Marian’s writing. At the height of the Liggins scandal, and before she had properly started on The Mill, she had sent what she called a ‘jeu de melancolie’ to Blackwood.86 ‘The Lifted Veil’ was part-way between short story and novella, and pleased no one. The tone was indeed melancholy, recalling the gothic doom of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, and resembling the kind of thing which Mary Braddon was soon to do so well at. Written in the first person, it recounts the experience of a weak, wealthy young man called Latimer, who has the ability both to see into the future and to read others’ minds. These odd gifts bring him to the edge of despair, as he finds himself assaulted by the rush of hostile, envious, degrading thoughts which proceed from the people around him. Latimer is also able to foresee the moment and method of his death, which he knows will be contrived by his wife Bertha, an evil woman whose attraction lies in the fact that she is the only person whose mind he cannot read.
Despite the weirdness of the piece, there are ingredients in the story which mark it as Marian’s. The Continental settings of Geneva, Vienna and Prague clearly come from her memories stored up from the 1858 trip. The scientific details, which culminate in a ghoulish blood tranfusion in which Bertha’s maid is temporarily raised from the dead, must have been inspired by Lewes’s experiments on live frogs. But, more specifically, it is Latimer’s experience of being assaulted by the unspoken envy, spite and hate of his immediate circle which echoes Marian’s own situation. When she wrote to Blackwood to thank him for Pug, she had said, melodramatically, ‘I see already that he is without envy, hatred, or malice – that he will betray no secrets, and feel neither pain at my success nor pleasure in my chagrin.’87 In her isolated brooding, the hoo-ha over Liggins had turned from a bit of unpleasant gossip into a concerted effort by enemies to strip her of every happiness.
Blackwood was sufficiently acute to see where the darkness in ‘The Lifted Veil’ came from. He hated the story, but managed merely to say soothingly to Marian that he wished ‘the author in a happier frame of mind and not thinking of unsympathising untrustworthy keepers of secrets’.88 Still, he was too much the businessman to let sympathy interfere with profit. While he was prepared to publish the story in Maga and give her £37 10s for it, he was not going to fall in with Lewes’s suggestion that he break his practice of anonymous publication and use George Eliot’s name as a way of stopping the Liggins rumour, on the grounds that the Warwickshire homebody was hardly likely to produce a tale of pseudo-science set on the Continent.
Blackwood’s refusal to ‘fritter away the prestige’ of George Eliot on a duff story prompted a new spasm of suspicion in Marian. She was less offended by his lukewarm response to her work than by the realisation that the Blackwood brothers must often have discussed her ‘unfortunate position’ between themselves. This feeling that she was being watched and whispered about seeped even into her feelings about her new home, Holly Lodge, in suburban Wandsworth, where she began to feel that she was constantly overlooked by ‘houses full of eyes’.89
The Leweses had moved into the house at a propitious time, five days after the publication of Adam Bede. Holly Lodge, in Wimbledon Park Road, was bigger than anywhere they had lived before, and the expansion reflected their increased wealth and growing certainty in one another. Only a few weeks earlier Marian had written in her year’s end journal entry: ‘Our double life is more and more blessed, more and more complete’, while Lewes told his journal that he felt ‘a deepening of domestic happiness’.90 The new house was intended as a family home, where the Lewes boys could base themselves when they had finished their schooling in Switzerland. Significantly, this was also the first time that Lewes would move all his books and belongings out of the marital home in Kensington and into the home he shared with Marian.
Convenience rather than lingering attachment to the marriage was the reason why he had taken so long to make a complete break. Dealings with the first Mrs Lewes continued to be reasonably warm, as long as the discussions steered clear of money. Agnes adored Pug when Lewes brought him for a visit, and Nursie dog-sat at Holly Lodge when the couple went on holiday to Wales in the September of 1859. Agnes had been an early reader of ‘Amos Barton’ in manuscript and loved it, although she did not know the identity of the author. The Leweses’ increased affluence meant that the £250 which they gave Agnes each year was less of a strain to find. Only occasionally did Marian allow herself to criticise Agnes to others – probably the second wife’s habitual complaint about her predecessor’s extravagance – and she always sent out written retractions immediately afterwards.91
Marian’s earnings from Adam Bede allowed the Leweses to house-hunt in the prosperous south-west London suburbs of Mortlake and Putney before settling on Wandsworth. After years of using landladies’ sheets and plates, now was the time to invest in their own and they went up to town on several bulk-buying shopping trips. It was this sudden acquisition of the paraphernalia of middle-class prosperity after years of penny-pinching which alerted some sharp-eyed observers to the possibility that Marian Lewes might indeed be the author of this year’s most successful new novel, Adam Bede.
Letters which Marian wrote during the early weeks at Holly Lodge remind one of the years she had spent running a working farmhouse. The perennial problem of finding a good servant has her putting adverts in The Times, making enquiries locally and even consulting Cara Bray about the possibility of importing various reliable Coventry girls down to London. But it was a measure of the unusually flexible way in which the Leweses divided their responsibilities that Lewes took over much of this routine domestic correspondence so that Marian could concentrate on her new novel.
Nor did moving into a suburban villa mean that the Leweses suddenly adopted the conventional life of a prosperous middle-aged couple. People still refused to come and see ‘Mrs Lewes’, regardless of whether they knew she was George Eliot. Barbara Bodichon had recently reported her failure to badger Mrs Owen Jones, wife of the designer, into visiting with the rather tactless declamation, ‘Oh Marian, Marian, what cowards people are!’92 In fact, Marian was probably relieved: with the Liggins gossip at its height she did not have the slightest desire to expose herself to the small-minded disapproval of ‘respectable society’.
Despite having put the word around that they did not wish to get caught up in the tiresome business of social calling, shortly after their arrival the Leweses received a visit from their near neighbours the Congreves. Marian vaguely recalled Maria Congreve from Warwickshire. Her father, Dr Bury, had attended Robert Evans during his last illness and sung Miss Evans’s praises as a devoted sick-nurse. Richard Congreve was a clergyman who had given up Orders so as to pursue and publicise the work of Auguste Comte. Maria was keen to know Marian: she claimed that the older woman had made such an impression on her during their one brief meeting at Foleshill that she had often continued to think about her during the intervening years.93 In the meantime she had heard all the Coventry gossip about Marian going to live with Lewes and was struck by ‘the unfairness with which a connection like theirs was visited by society – the man cut off from scarcely anything, the woman from all she most values’.94
The men were less predisposed to get on. Although Lewes had been an enthusiastic pioneer of Comte’s early work, he had parted company with the philosopher over his attempts to turn Positivism into a religion, complete with saints, temples and a sort of pseudo-Madonna. Congreve, the one-time clergyman, remained enthusiastic about this development and had just translated Comte’s Catechisme Positive (1852). He also retained an Oxford man’s disdain for the garrulous little Lewes, who could never quite throw off the tag of journalist, despite his best endeavours. Privately, Congreve wished it were possible to see Marian without her jaunty Siamese twin.
Still, Lewes and Congreve were careful enough to make sure that their intellectual differences did not spoil the intense friendship which was developing between their women. Maria Congreve would be the first of a series of younger women – in this case there was a seventeen-year gap – who would offer Marian uncritical devotion until the end of her life. Marian, who was in a particularly fragile mood at the time, was highly susceptible to Maria’s offer of undying loyalty. The Congreves had no sooner set off on a five-month trip to Europe in May than Maria was writing letters to Holly Lodge, promising that Marian was never out of her thoughts. Marian in turn walked Maria’s dog and kept an eye on her garden. Already regretting the decision to move to claustrophobic Wandsworth, she none the less maintained extravagantly to her new friend that ‘you are worth paying a price for’.95
Lewes had been due to make his annual visit to Hofwyl just when the storm over the Athenaeum piece and the decision to drop the incognito had blown up. He could hardly leave Marian in Wandsworth, surrounded by the houses with their unblinking eyes. Since the Congreves had by now reached Lucerne on their tour, it made sense for Marian to travel out with Lewes on 9 July and stay with their new friends while he went on to Hofwyl to see the boys. During these soft, golden days Marian revealed to Maria that she was George Eliot. Away from Lewes’s sceptical presence, she may also have discussed the possibility of an afterlife. With Chrissey gone, the question of what survives of the soul after death pressed upon her. Although she could not allow herself the easy consolation of an orthodox view of heaven, the Positivists’ idea that the essence of the departed person remains in the memories of those left behind became an increasing comfort to Marian. It was to form the main theme of her best-known poem ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’, which the Positivists adopted as their anthem.
This visit to Hofwyl was a special one, for it was now that Lewes told his sons about the full extent of his relationship with the woman whom they had previously known only as the mysterious ‘Miss Evans’ who sent good wishes and excellent presents. During a walk in the woods Lewes ‘unburthened myself about Agnes to them. They were less distressed than I had anticipated and were delighted to hear about Marian.’96 The emotional blow was softened by the discovery that their new stepmother was the author of Adam Bede, a book whose celebrity had reached even their isolated boarding-school community.
Lewes was not the only one with family responsibilities now. Later that summer, at the end of August, Marian and he broke their journey back from a few days’ holiday in Wales at Lichfield, where Chrissey’s two surviving daughters had been placed at school by their father’s brother.97 Just like the Lewes boys, the Clarke girls seem to have been delighted to learn about their new nearness to fame.98 Marian stayed in touch, making sure there was enough money for clothes and books. Emily, the eldest, wrote regularly and it would be interesting to know if the teenage girl ever let slip to her Uncle Isaac any details about her glamorous, generous ‘Aunt Pollie’.
After Lichfield the Leweses had headed for Dorset where Marian was keen to find a mill in which she could set her new novel. At the beginning of the year she had gone into town to the London Library to research ‘cases of inundation’ and found useful examples of widespread destruction in the northeast of England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.99 She knew that the climax of the book would involve a huge, destructive flood and it was important that she get the details straight in her own mind. There had been a mill at Arbury, but she needed to find something on a bigger scale. Although an obliging miller in Weymouth showed her over his property, it was not quite right, so in late September the Leweses tried Newark and Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. This time Marian found what she was looking for. The Trent and its tributary the Idle would do nicely for her fictional Floss and Ripple. By the time she returned to her writing that October she had a clear picture of the landscape which was to play such a major part in The Mill on the Floss.
It is that landscape, wide and flat, which opens the book. A nameless narrator, chilly in the weak February sun, wanders on the outskirts of the red-roofed town of St Ogg’s. He – the confident tone seems to suggest the voice is male – describes the fields stretching into the distance, the hedgerows thickened with trees and the ships laden with coal, wood and seed which pass up the River Floss to unload their cargoes at the waiting wharves. Turning off to walk along the banks of the tributary Ripple, the narrator comes across Dorlcote Mill, familiar from many years before. The big wheel ceaselessly spurts out ‘diamond jets of water’, while the wagoner drives the grain-laden horses home over the bridge.100 Meanwhile a little girl – who turns out to be Maggie Tulliver – is watching the scene intently, barely distracted by the ‘queer white cur with the brown ear’ who leaps and barks beside her.101
It soon becomes apparent that the narrator’s description of the landscape goes beyond simple scene-setting. There is a Riehl-like understanding of the relationship between the natural world and the men and women who inhabit it. Maggie’s fearsome Dodson aunts are as inevitable and integral a part of St Ogg’s as the red roofs and twisty streets. The three women – inspired by Christiana Pearson’s sisters – are described as examples of how peasant life has developed in provincial urban Britain by the end of the 1820s. There is Aunt Glegg, who hoards her stock of good linen and lace until the old stuff is worn out. Her clothes are so carefully conserved that by the time she gets to wear them they are spotted with mould and comically old-fashioned. Then there is Aunt Pullet whose marriage to a wealthy farmer allows her to indulge a passion for fancy medicine. She lovingly lines up her blue bottles and shudders at her elder sister Glegg’s insistence on carrying a mutton bone in her pocket to ward off rheumatism.
As if to underline that it is Riehl and his Natural History of German Life which inspires this analysis, the narrator halts the story half-way through the book and takes us along the banks of the Rhône. We are shown the remains of deserted villages, long destroyed by catastrophic floods. Far from suggesting that a noble way of life has tragically disappeared, the narrator suggests that ‘these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhône, oppress me with the feeling that human life – very much of it – is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers’.102 The Tullivers and the Dodsons are likewise ‘emmet-like’, their respectable, ignorant lives devoid of the harsh necessity that makes the rural peasantry romantic or the intellectual capacity that nudges town dwellers to stretch beyond themselves for something ‘beautiful, great, or noble’.103
The narrator tells us that it is important we should feel the ‘oppressive narrowness’ of Maggie’s and Tom’s existence if we are to understand the dilemmas of their lives. Using ideas of evolution drawn from the just-published The Origin of Species (1859), but long familiar to Marian from her wide reading in natural science, the narrator describes how Tom and Maggie are destined to rise above ‘the mental level of the generation before them’. But their minute progress is not so much a glorious triumph as a painful struggle with the previous generation to which they are still bound with ‘the strongest fibres of their hearts’.104 Maggie’s yearning for a life which exceeds that of her mother and aunts is thwarted not simply by the limitations of the society in which she lives, but by her own residual attachment to the traditional duties of a daughter. Like Marian, she spends years caring for her infirm father, waiting and watching while Tom claims the wider world as his arena. ‘While Maggie’s life-struggles had lain almost entirely within her own soul, one shadowy army fighting another, and the slain shadows for ever rising again, Tom was engaged in a dustier, noisier, warfare, grappling with more substantial obstacles, and gaining more definite conquests.’105
The frustration of Maggie’s ambitions have bothered feminist critics for years. She stands in that line of George Eliot heroines from Dinah through Romola to Dorothea who are allowed to work towards a meaningful identity and even, temporarily, to find one, before being granted a diminished scope of action at the end of the book. Maggie, who has struggled with faith, longed for culture, and searched for education, is obliged by her family’s reduced circumstances to become a schoolteacher. Her only access to polished living is as a guest in her cousin Lucy Deane’s house. When she dares to defy convention by spending the night away from home in the company of a man to whom she is not married, she ends up ostracised. In the slow evolutionary crawl there is no place in St Ogg’s for the female who refuses to be reconciled to her place in nature. Or, as her bewildered father puts it, ‘an over ’cute woman’s no better nor a long-tailed sheep’.106
This evolutionary plot is just one of the organising threads of The Mill on the Floss. Another is Greek tragedy, which is why Lewes favoured the title ‘The House of Tulliver’, with its echoes of ‘The House of Atreus’. The Tullivers are brought low by a mixture of human failing and uncanny coincidence. Mr Tulliver becomes bankrupt after he overreaches himself by going to law. Dorlcote Mill ends up in the hands of his sworn enemy, lawyer Wakem, who then offers Tulliver employment as its manager. Wakem’s eldest son, the hunchback Philip, happens to have been educated with Tom and so has met and fallen in love with Maggie. Thus the stage has been set for a fierce battle years later when Tom refuses to allow Maggie to continue her meetings with the son of the man he blames for his father’s ill-fortune.
Greek tragedy, too, inspires the famous ending in which Maggie and Tom are joined together in death in a way they never managed in life. A freakish flood sweeps through the valley and Maggie goes to rescue Tom from the mill in a boat. As the brother and sister row towards St Ogg’s huge fragments of industrial flotsam overwhelm them and they go down ‘in an embrace never to be parted – living through again in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together’.107
Strictly speaking, the ending breaks the rules of Greek tragedy because it has nothing to do with what has gone before. The flood is a terrible act of God, rather than the result of any action by Maggie, Tom or anyone else. The coming together of the estranged brother and sister arises not from any consequence of the plot, but from Marian’s own deep desire to experience vicariously a reconciliation with the brother who now seemed lost to her for ever. The last few turbulent pages of the book were written in an emotional frenzy. ‘Mrs Lewes is getting her eyes redder and swollener every morning as she lives through her tragic story,’ Lewes reported to Blackwood with grim approval during the first week of March.108 A month later, and now on holiday in Italy, Marian reported to Blackwood that Maggie and her sorrows still clung to her painfully.109
The puffy red eyes and lingering low spirits suggest that Marian was more closely attached to this material than she had been to any other. Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life were based on stories and characters suggested from other people’s pasts: The Mill on the Floss trawled her own. Just like little Maggie, she too had run away to join the gypsies, had cried away her unhappiness in the wormeaten attic, had felt her mother’s disappointment in her plainness. Most crucially, she had known what it was to devote herself to an older brother who did not want her, who meted out stern punishments for minor mistakes, who preferred riding his pony to playing with a little girl.
No writer has ever given a better account of the relationship between brother and sister. Tom and Maggie bicker over jam puffs, fishing rods and pocket money. Maggie’s spark and cleverness is constantly checked by Tom’s need to rule and punish. Despite the final passage of the book, which suggests that in death they finally returned to a state of merged rapture, in fact we never see Maggie and Tom achieve more than fleeting harmony.
In her depiction of the young Tom Tulliver Marian excavated the origins of the beloved boy who had grown up to be the stern, unyielding Isaac Evans. Right from the start, Tom is described as having inherited the rigid righteousness of his Dodson relatives. By only thirteen, ‘he was particularly clear and positive on one point, namely that he would punish everybody who deserved it: why, he wouldn’t have minded being punished himself if he deserved it, but then, he never did deserve it.’110 As he grows into a man Tom’s ‘saturnine sternness’ enables him to graft year after year until he is able to pay back his father’s debtors and reclaim the mill. But it is this very fixity that means he is unable to understand why Maggie should want to be friends with Philip Wakem, the son of their father’s enemy. Despite the fact that he knows and likes Philip personally, Tom is unable to moderate his view of the world to allow Maggie to continue to meet the man with whom she is half in love. He is, in Eliot’s famous phrase, a ‘man of maxims’ who applies clumsy moral generalisations to unique and delicate circumstances.111
If Tom is unable to accommodate the situation with Philip Wakem, how much less is he able to understand Maggie’s brief infatuation with Stephen Guest. In the scene when she returns from her chaste night on the boat, he greets her with spitting rage. Marian had informed Isaac of her own elopement by letter and had never had to face his immediate reaction, only his settled contempt. In this encounter between Maggie and Tom she imaginatively worked out how that conversation might have gone between herself and Isaac. Tom, ‘trembling and white with disgust and indignation’, shouts at her, ‘You will find no home with me . . . You have disgraced us all . . . I wash my hands of you forever. You don’t belong to me.’112 Maggie tries to explain that her relationship with Stephen is sexually innocent – something which Marian could not claim with Lewes – but Tom is unable to hear her. Instead, he rages at her in a way which Marian remembered from those endless rows during the holy war when Isaac accused her of consulting only her own wishes. ‘You struggled with your feelings, you say. Yes! I have had feelings to struggle with – but I conquered them. I have had a harder life than you have had; but I have found my comfort in doing my duty. But I will sanction no such character as yours: the world shall know that I feel the difference between right and wrong.’113
Marian’s intense involvement with her material meant that she lingered over it for longer than she should. She admitted to Blackwood that she had treated Tom’s and Maggie’s childhood years with such an ‘epic breadth’ that the rest of the story had become oddly squashed. It is not until the third volume that she fully introduces Stephen Guest, the man for whom Maggie will ruin her reputation. In the rush, Guest becomes little more than a quick sketch of a wealthy, careless young man and Maggie’s ‘elopement’ with him – the relationship is not consummated – remains unlikely.
What is well handled, because once again it comes straight from Marian’s own raw experience, is the community reaction to Maggie’s ‘sin’. Drifting down river on a boat with Stephen, Maggie has reminded herself just in time that he is engaged to her cousin Lucy. Despite Stephen’s protestations of love for her, Maggie is determined to set aside her own desires in favour of duty and the couple return after a night on board ship together. St Ogg’s is scandalised. ‘The world’s wife’ would not have minded too much if they had come back married. It would even have found glamour and romance in the situation, despite the unhappiness caused to Lucy Deane and Philip Wakem, to whom Maggie was half-promised. But what the local gossips cannot forgive Maggie is her coming back a ‘fallen woman’, devoid of either virtue or husband. While in a young man of Stephen Guest’s age and class such a lapse can be forgiven, Maggie Tulliver is nothing more than ‘a designing bold girl’.114 These chapters were written just at the time when the Liggins scandal was focusing attention on Marian’s own irregular domestic situation. In her deft, sarcastic analysis of how the world’s wife is quick to condemn behaviour that she neither knows nor understands, she was surely thinking of those women like Mrs Owen Jones who had refused Barbara Bodichon’s invitation to get to know her. And it was to avoid the kind of speculation and scrutiny that had been stirred up by the publication of Adam Bede that four days after The Mill was finished Marian and Lewes set off for Rome.