1864–8
DURING HER MIDDLE forties Marian achieved something approaching peace of mind. The self-criticism, despair and morbid sensitivity which had continued to haunt even the commercial success of The Mill and the critical buzz of Romola now began to melt. The letters she wrote to friends during the mid-1860s have lost their characteristic defensive, combative tone. There are not so many swipes at ‘frivolous women’, fewer proud references to her lack of friends, less posing as an intellectual Olympian, unconcerned with what the masses think about her work. For the first time in Marian’s correspondence, there is something like an unguarded heart. A week after her forty-third birthday, in November 1862, she had written to M. D’Albert Durade: ‘I think this year’s end finds me enjoying existence more than I ever did before, in spite of the loss of youth. Study is a keener delight to me than ever, and I think the affections, instead of being dulled by age, have acquired a stronger activity – or at least their activity seems stronger for being less perturbed by the egoism of young cravings.’1 Viewed from outside there was no obvious reason for this softening. The two pieces of work which she produced during these years, Felix Holt, The Radical and The Spanish Gypsy, hardly marked a return to the glory days of Adam Bede and The Mill. Profits were down and praise muted, especially in the case of The Spanish Gypsy, a dramatic poem woefully lacking in drama. Thornton and Bertie continued to be a worry, especially as the time drew near when they would have to stand alone. And Lewes’s health seemed to get, if anything, more precarious.
The secret of Marian’s growing happiness lay in her new ability to absorb and transform these unsought factors in her life. The death of friends and family, the coolish response to her work, even Lewes’s gaunt face, no longer had the power to plunge her into headachy despair from which it took days to emerge. Her new serenity may have followed the menopause, leaving her free from monthly swings of mood and vitality. Then again, her successful re-integration into London literary society may have given her the confidence to brush off the kind of imagined slight which had once filled her mind for days. Whatever the reason, it was during these years that Marian began to acquire her reputation for an emotional serenity to sit alongside her undisputed intellectual and creative powers. The intense young men and women who wrote adoring letters from around the world, together with the lucky few who were invited to the Priory, were drawn not by Mrs Poyser’s country sayings or Maggie Tulliver’s stubborn curls, but by the voice of George Eliot herself. It was this voice – wise, tolerant, all-seeing – which seemed to understand their greatest joys and deepest fears. In an age of increasing unbelief George Eliot’s ability to point the way to a meaningful life bestowed on Marian Lewes the status of secular saint.
Reactions to a new portrait reflect this shift in the way Marian was perceived. Frederic Burton’s painting, which was finished in 1865, was no more flattering than the one by Laurence five years earlier, yet this time Lewes was delighted and gave permission for it to be shown at the Royal Academy. Where once commentators stressed Marian’s plainness, sniggeringly implying that she was most unlikely mistress material, these days they rushed to see nobility in her heavy features. The general and often-repeated impression that she looked like a horse was now fleshed out by more careful and kindly detail. A young Henry James agreed on meeting Marian that her face was ‘equine’, but added that it had ‘a delightful expression’.2 Others preferred to make comparisons with Dante, Savonarola and Locke who, while men, were at least wise ones. From this point the myth grew that there was something magically transformative about Marian Lewes’s face. Visitors who arrived at the Priory expecting long, lumpy features reported that they were introduced to a woman whose inner light recast her face so that she looked ‘both good and loving and gentle’.3 Appropriately for a woman named Marian, it was like hearing that a stony-faced Virgin had produced real tears.
Death was everywhere now. In November 1861 it came to the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who had been born the same year as Marian. It was not the passing of a youngish man she pondered so much as the effect on his poor widow.4 Queen Victoria’s intense and protracted mourning following the death of the Consort the following month was likewise to draw her sympathy on the grounds that ‘I am a woman of about the same age, and also have my personal happiness bound up in a dear husband whose loss would render my life simply a series of social duties and private memories’.5 The idea that she might one day have to live without Lewes pressed heavily. He was now in his late forties, and his face had grown thin and shockingly old. Even on holiday, where he had always rallied, he was now sometimes sick and faint. One doctor advised giving up naturalising because it entailed too much hanging of the head over rock pools and microscope. Mostly, though, it was a question of paying another visit to one more foul-tasting spa where, sociable as ever, the little man usually managed to bump into some equally frail literary friend. Although Marian was herself enjoying better health during these post-menopausal years, she was reluctant to leave Lewes behind in the land of invalids. She liked the idea that they were a ‘rickety old couple’, perhaps because its image of mutual dependence and old age suggested that they were long-time married.6 ‘We hardly know now what it is to be free from bodily malaise,’ she regularly intoned to her correspondents.7
Other deaths came nearer. In May 1866 the appalling Dr Brabant finally succumbed at the age of eighty-five. Marian must still have felt embarrassed at the memory of their awkward affair twenty years before, because her letter of condolence to his daughter Rufa Call skillfully avoids mentioning the old man’s name or, indeed, a single thing about him.8
News of another loss stirred up more positive attachments to the past. In early 1864 Robert Evans, the eldest son of her father by his first wife, had died. The news came in a courteous letter from Evans’s son, also Robert Evans. Apart from a little contact with her schoolgirl niece Emily, it was the first time Marian had heard from her family in seven years. She replied promptly to ‘My dear Nephew’, thanking Evans for his ‘kind attention’ towards her and recalling the ‘unbroken kindness and generous brotherliness’ of his father.9 In a fuller letter of condolence to her sister-in-law Marian expanded on her memories of Robert’s kindness – so different from Isaac’s coldness – and repeated her hope that if ever Mrs Evans were in town, she might pay a visit to the Priory. It was the kind of message which routinely closed letters between female relatives who lived at a distance, but in this case the meaning was momentous. By saying ‘To see you again or to hear from you . . . would be a very sweet renewal of the past’,10 Marian was asking Jane to break Isaac Evans’s boycott.
Once her grief had settled, Jane would probably have made the gesture Marian was hoping for: in her reply of 18 March she told her sister-in-law that the last book Robert Evans held in his hand had been Adam Bede.11 But death intervened again, this time making things more difficult. Six weeks later another letter came from Robert Evans announcing that Henry Houghton, Fanny’s husband, had died.12 Marian was in Scotland when it arrived, a point she emphasised to her nephew to explain a slight delay in responding. Now that a precious link had been made to her family, she was determined to protect it from misunderstanding: ‘my silence was not a neglectful one,’ she assured Robert Evans and, to make certain the letter reached him, she gave it ‘a double address’.13
Having sent her condolences to ‘my affectionately remembered Sister’ via Robert, Marian does not seem to have written directly to Fanny. Perhaps she was waiting for a sign that her half-sister was ready to break the ban on communication imposed by Isaac. If so, none was forthcoming. Fanny had moved from a sceptical youth into an orthodox middle age. Since complying with the boycott she had spent her time stalking Marian through the pages of her novels. She was sharp enough to note that the ‘marvellously clever’ Felix Holt was likely to be ‘much more to the taste of the ordinary novel reader than Romola was’ and even spotted that Marian had written a couple of articles in the first issue of a new periodical, the Fortnightly. None the less, when it came to the vexed question of her half-sister’s domestic arrangements, Fanny was as bigoted as any provincial farmer’s wife. On tracking down a photograph of Lewes in a Leamington bookstore she wrote with delighted disgust to Isaac that there was something positively inhuman about the face of the man who had ruined their sister’s life.14
Fanny’s bereavement stopped any further bridge-building between Marian and the Evanses. On the death of Henry Houghton Fanny moved to Nottingham to live with Robert’s widow Jane. Now any overtures made by Jane towards Marian would have to take place under the disapproving eye of Fanny. With this new pressure, the pace of reconciliation slowed. There seems to have been no communication between the Priory and Nottingham until two years later in August 1866, when Marian received a letter from her nephew inviting herself and Lewes to visit. This put her in a difficult position. While she was assured of a warm welcome from Robert, his wife and his mother, would she be forced to endure Fanny’s pointed absence? Rather than risk that painful possibility, she used the strategy she always adopted when faced with invitations to homes where she could not be sure she would not meet some snub from a fellow guest. She wrote back warmly to Robert thanking him and his wife for their ‘attention’ but excusing herself on the grounds that she had only just returned from two months on the Continent.15
But it was the death of twenty-year-old Nelly Bray which hit hardest. On 1 March 1865 the Brays’ adopted daughter finally succumbed to the consumption she had been fighting for several years.16 In her letter of condolence to Cara Marian’s thoughts turned inevitably to the subject she had discussed so many times with the Hennell sisters: the possibility of a future life.
I don’t know whether you strongly share, as I do, the old belief that made men say the gods loved those who died young. It seems to me truer than ever, now life has become more complex and more and more difficult problems have to be worked out. Life, though a good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thought, it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this a part of religion, to go on pretending things are better than they are . . . So to me, early death takes the aspect of salvation – though I feel too that those who live and suffer may sometimes have the greater blessedness of being a salvation.17
The problem of what happened to the soul after death tormented the mid-century agnostic mind. If there was no God, did that mean there was no heaven? The new and growing craze for drawing-room seances sprang directly from the powerful hope that, even if God had gone, something of the human spirit remained after death. The Leweses were sceptical. During their second visit to the Villino Trollope in Florence in 1861 Lewes had argued vigorously against the whole nonsense of table tapping. Much later, in 1874, he and Marian were to storm out of a seance at Erasmus Darwin’s house ‘in disgust’ because the medium insisted on complete darkness.18 In an article which Marian wrote for the first issue of the Fortnightly in 1865 she pointed out that the human need for an afterlife was so strong that intelligent men and women swore blind that they had seen the fashionable medium Daniel Home float through the air.19
By the time William Thackeray sketched George Henry Lewes, Agnes Lewes and Thornton Hunt in 1848, the affair between Mrs Lewes and Hunt was probably under way.
George Henry Lewes with Pug, a present from her publisher John Blackwood to George Eliot. Both Eliot and Lewes adored dogs.
Holly Lodge, Wandsworth, oppressed Eliot with a sense of suburban claustrophobia. It was during their two years here that she wrote The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860.
The old mill at Arbury, a probable model for the mill in The Mill on the Floss.
‘The best of publishers’ is how Eliot described John Blackwood, the man who brought out all but one of her novels. His tact and encouragement went a long way to offsetting her morbid sensitivity and self-doubt.
Generally maintained to be the ugliest man in London, Lewes’s nickname was ‘Ape’. In the course of his lifetime he was variously described as resembling a French dancing-master, a mercurial little showman and a satyr.
In 1863 the Leweses paid £2000 for the Priory, Regent’s Park, the first house they had ever owned. The leading designer of the day, Owen Jones, was in charge of the decoration.
On Sunday afternoons the Leweses were ‘at home’. Twenty or so men and a few women would gather in the Priory drawing-room, hoping for the chance of a brief conversation with George Eliot.
Barbara Leigh Smith, later Bodichon, was the only woman with whom Eliot had something approaching a relationship of equals, with Smith neither hero-worshipping nor envying Eliot.
Described as tall and with beautiful hair, Romola, the heroine of Eliot’s 1863 novel, illustrated here by Frederic Leighton, was based on Barbara Leigh Smith.
The Heights at Witley, the country retreat in Surrey which the Leweses bought towards the end of their lives. They loved the ‘small paradise’ and even took up lawn tennis at the suggestion of John Cross. During the last summer of his life, Lewes would walk with Eliot at dawn through their patch of woodland in an attempt to relieve the pain of what was probably bowel cancer.
Catching sight of Eliot in the audience of a concert in 1877, Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s daughter, drew a hasty sketch on the back of her programme.
John Walter Cross, the thirty-nine-year-old banker, whom Eliot married eight months before her death at the age of sixty-one (Cross is seated on the right).
Unlike Lewes, Marian did not characterise this credulity as craven weakness. Again and again she returned to the sharedness of all human yearning, regardless of the doctrine in which it came clothed. Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, in which he charts his journey from Oxford High Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, drew her ‘as the revelation of a life – how different in form from one’s own, yet with how close a fellowship in its [spiritual] needs and burthens’.20 But she did not take refuge in a hazy theism made up of the most appealing bits of other people’s religions. Ever the natural historian, she understood that each way of worship was the product of a particular moment in man’s historic and social development. It would always be her native Church of England which spoke directly to her ‘as a portion of my earliest associations and most poetic memories’, rather than the dissenting traditions about which she had written so convincingly, and was to do so again in Felix Holt.21
But if Marian understood the human attachment to religious forms, she still believed that the best and highest thing was to live without them. The driving force behind her writing, she told Dr Clifford Allbutt, one of the earnest young men who became a friend and correspondent in the late 1860s, was to show readers ‘those vital elements which bind men together and give a higher worthiness to their existence’, while trying to wean them off their dependency on ‘an outworn teaching’ based on ‘transient forms’.22
It was this determination to live without the man-made props of faith which made Marian steer clear of Comte’s ersatz ‘Religion of Humanity’, a sort of secularised Catholicism. She had already made her feelings tactfully clear to the Congreves, but her obvious sympathy for Comte’s sociological writings meant that she would always find herself under pressure from those who wanted to recruit her to the cause. In 1866 she became friends with a young radical barrister called Frederic Harrison who had been influenced by Richard Congreve at Wadham and was an enthusiastic follower of Comtism in its cultist aspects. Initially Marian had asked Harrison to help her with the complicated legal plot which formed the background to Felix Holt. His enthusiasm for the task, together with his obvious moral earnestness – he was heavily involved in the trade union movement and the Working Men’s College – warmed her to him. Gradually their conversations began to roam over every aspect of human experience. Hopeful that Marian might put her talents in the service of Comte, Harrison wrote her a long letter on 19 July 1866 suggesting that her next book should show the Religion of Humanity in action. Helpfully, he even provided the sketch of a plot.23
Marian was gentle with Harrison, whom she had grown to like and respect. Whereas a few years earlier the young pup would have got a fierce letter from Lewes warning him not to be so impertinent, now Marian replied herself at length. She thanked Harrison for his suggestion and assured him that she was always interested to hear his ideas. She explains, though, that writing about Utopias does not make for good novels. Although she believes that fiction can deliver ‘the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity’, it is crucial that it should never become crudely didactic. For years she has strained to ensure that her novels present philosophical ideas in a ‘thoroughly incarnate’ form ‘as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit’. If at any point the writing should lapse ‘from the picture to the diagram’ then it becomes offensively preachy. In an unconscious recognition that Romola’s final chapters might well have had something of the diagram about them – and a Comtist one at that – Marian emphasises to Harrison the ‘unspeakable pains’ she took in the book to reproduce the texture of a living, breathing past.24
Having spent so long detaching herself and then revaluing the teachings of the Church of England, Marian was not about to sign up for another set of doctrines. She was happy to help the Positivists with a donation which never went higher than five pounds a year, just as she did for other causes whose energy she admired but whose aims she could not whole-heartedly endorse. Her personal friendship with the Congreves drew her to the first few public lectures which Richard Congreve gave on Positivism in the late spring of 1867. All the same, she was powerless to prevent the Positivists from hijacking her work for their own ends. Her poem ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’, published in 1874, was a case in point. Its expressed hope that a well-spent life would endure in the hearts and minds of those left behind made it into a kind of unofficial anthem for the Religion of Humanity. Yet as Congreve himself was careful to point out to a private correspondent in 1880, Marian Lewes ‘is not nor ever has been more than by her acceptance of the general idea of Humanity a Positivist’.25
Until now Marian had very seldom mentioned politics or public events in her letters and journal. It was not that she had no interest in these matters, simply that she had always been more concerned with the social and psychological organisation of mankind. Her belief that human development was necessarily slow and organic meant that the quick cut and thrust of politics seemed not so much wrong as irrelevant. Intellectual fervour was a poor social glue compared with the feelings, associations and memories which bound communities together. It was for this reason that on 1 August 1865 Marian refused Mrs Taylor’s request that she and Lewes contribute to the Mazzini fund, set up in support of Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian patriot. While she admired the man himself, she worried that his followers might resort ‘to acts which are more unsocial in their character than the very wrong they are directed to extinguish’.26
But from the mid-1860s Marian showed signs of a growing engagement with the political process. This was partly due to the influence of Lewes, whose work was once again taking him to the heart of public life. In October 1864 he had given up the Cornhill, keen to be master of his own time. But now Trollope was trying to entice him back into harness with the editorship of the Fortnightly, which was intended to map the new Britain as it emerged from the now inevitable Second Reform Act. According to the Prospectus, written by Lewes, the Fortnightly’s aim would be ‘that of aiding Progress in all directions’, including science, politics and literature.27 But there was to be nothing prescriptive about it. For the first time in publishing history contributors would sign their articles, so making it clear that the review’s liberalism consisted in its willingness to listen to a wide range of different opinions.
Lewes eventually agreed to take on the editorship for £600 a year, as long as he could have a hard-working sub-editor – the kind of person Marian had once been at the Westminster – to carry the burden of routine. He achieved the same deal, too, at the Pall Mall Gazette, another periodical run by George Smith. Quite why Lewes had decided to take on so much work, especially when he was not well, is a puzzle. It may have been money. Marian had not had a commercial hit for four years, and her new project, the dramatic poem called The Spanish Gypsy, was unlikely to make much. In a letter to Cara, Marian mentioned proudly how lucky she was to have a husband who did not pressure her to churn out one best-seller after another.28 Perhaps Lewes now felt morally bound to take up some of the financial strain which had rested exclusively on Marian for the past eight years. But did he also relish being seen as a powerful person in his own right? Certainly the first thing he did on getting to the Fortnightly was to ask Marian to contribute an article for the opening issue of May 1865. Signed ‘George Eliot’, it flagged to the world that there was only one man in London who had the influence to entice the nation’s greatest novelist back into journalism. This piece – the one sharp-eyed Fanny had spotted – was followed by two rather plodding articles for the Pall Mall.
Whatever the reason for his return to editing, Lewes’s new jobs drew him back to the heart of the nation’s business. He was out all the time now, meeting politicians and peers, as well as the more usual writers and artists. After the relative quiet of the early 1860s, the public mood had darkened. Economic depression meant industrial unrest, which in turn was fuelling demands for an extention of the franchise. Middle-class women, too, no longer confined themselves to campaigns for improving education and employment opportunities. Bessie, Barbara and Clementia had their eye on nothing less than the vote for women.
Lewes was not Marian’s only source of information. In February 1862 she had received a circular from James Quirk, a kind-hearted curate at Attleborough who had made a nuisance of himself during the Liggins business. In it he explained how local ribbon weavers were suffering from the effects of a strike among the Coventry workers.29 At the end of the year Marian sent a pound to the Coventry men via Charles Bray, keenly aware that the parallel plight of the Lancashire cotton factories was diverting attention away from the Midlands.30
Friends were in trouble too. Since 1860 when a trade treaty had been signed with France, the Coventry silk industry had been in decline. The Brays and Hennells, whose fortunes depended on it, had been obliged to move away from Rosehill altogether and settle at Barr’s Hill Terrace on the outskirts of Coventry. They struggled constantly to find tenants for their house at Sydenham, too. ‘Dear Sara,’ wrote Marian to Cara Bray on 16 July 1867, ‘I think a great deal, though she may not, of her income being reduced.’ She may implicitly have meant the Brays too, for she goes on to beg Cara to let her know if she can give them any financial help.31 But the unhappiness did not stop there. Arthur Helps, Lewes’s old friend and the bearer of several kind messages from the Queen to Marian, had recently lost everything when he tried to produce a profit from the clay deposits at Vernon Hill.32
It was against this backdrop of distress that demands to extend the franchise had been growing. The Great Reform Bill of 1832 might have seemed like a huge symbolic victory for progress, but it had done little to change the balance of power in Britain. Well-to-do middle-class men could now vote, Birmingham had been given an MP and the most blatant examples of corruption had been tackled. But that still left the vast majority of men and all women unrepresented. Thirty years on it became clear that a second instalment of electoral reform was inevitable. Although the first attempt foundered on 12 April 1866, a bill enfranchising skilled working-class urban men was passed the following year.
Marian, as always, took a cautious view of political change. The heady days when she had sung out to John Sibree about the European revolutions of 1848 were long gone. These days, the bent of her mind was, she explained to Clifford Allbutt, ‘conservative rather than destructive’, and she remained convinced that political change which ran ahead of social and psychological development was at best useless and at worst dangerous.33 The hopes riding on the secret ballot – for so long a key demand of radical campaigners – struck her as absurd.34 Likewise, she thought the giving of the vote to urban working-class men a mixed blessing. Without the moral and social education that would make them cherish the best of the status quo, there was a danger that they would cut loose from their roots and degenerate into a selfish mob.
The same thing went for the vexed issue of what had become known as ‘The Woman Question’. Ever since Marian had gone to live with Lewes, her feminist friends had been trying to harness the prestige of her name to their various causes. Clementia Taylor, Bessie Parkes (now Belloc) and Barbara Bodichon had all at one time insisted on calling her ‘Miss Evans’, under the assumption that her living arrangement represented a refusal of the married state. And even now that they had finally got the point that Marian would have preferred to be legally married, they still assumed that she must be a natural supporter of votes for women. In fact, Marian felt about the question exactly as she did about working-class men: until women were properly educated, female suffrage would remain ‘an extremely doubtful good’.35 For this reason she was deliberately vague when Clementia Taylor tried to get her to back John Stuart Mill’s amendment to the Reform Bill, which proposed enfranchising women on the same terms as men. To Sara Hennell she was more candid: ‘I love and honour my friend Mrs Taylor, but it is impossible that she can judge beforehand of the proportionate toil and interruption such labours cause to women whose habits and duties differ so much from her own.’36
Those habits and duties which Marian was thinking of included child-rearing, housekeeping, looking after the elderly – all chores that women without Mrs Taylor’s large income were obliged to carry out themselves. Although Marian had no desire to keep middle-class women confined to simpering, ignorant ‘angels in the house’, she worried that too much education would lead them to turn their backs on ‘the great amount of social unproductive labour’ which they currently undertook.37 While she agreed that women needed equal access to education if they were to have ‘the possibilities of free development’, she wanted that development to keep women securely attached to the family and the home rather than in paid employment.38 Instead of a new generation of mediocre women novelists, painters and doctors, she wanted intelligent wives and thoughtful mothers. ‘The highest work’ – the creative work which she did – must always be reserved for the special few.
It was what she saw as her unique position – both domestic and professional – which made Marian reluctant to be quoted on anything to do with women. Behind the scenes, though, she was ready to listen and learn. In November 1867 she asked Barbara Bodichon’s friend Emily Davies to tea in order to hear her plans for a women’s college attached to Cambridge University.39 As cautious towards Girton as she was towards the Positivists, Marian donated a modest fifty pounds in March 1868 and asked it to be tagged ‘From the author of Romola’. If any of the girls entering the college in 1869 got round to reading their benefactor’s book, they may have wondered at the fate of her stupendously learned heroine and by extension their own. Romola ends up not as a scholar, doctor or teacher, but as a nurse-cum-mother-cum-saint.
On 29 March 1865, The Spanish Gypsy having ground to a halt, Marian began a new novel. In Felix Holt, The Radical, she returned once again to ‘that central plain, watered at one extremity by the Avon, at the other by the Trent’.40 The year is 1831, just before the passing of the Great Reform Act which its advocates believed would bring the electoral system into line with modern conditions once and for all. With the benefit of hindsight, Marian was able to show that 1832 was actually the thin edge of the wedge, the first step in a process that was moving into its second phase even as she wrote. By concentrating on the role of the unenfranchised urban mob in the 1832 election she was implicitly asking whether these men were ready for the vote in 1867.
Naturally, Marian drew on her own terrifying memories of the December 1832 general election. As a girl in Nuneaton she had watched from a school window while the poll descended into chaotic fighting between the Tories and Radicals. The magistrate read the Riot Act, while a detachment of Scots Greys was ordered to break up the angry mob. Many were trampled, one man died, and Robert Evans’s scare stories about the French Revolution had never seemed so real.41 As always, Marian buttressed personal knowledge by careful reading: as she prepared for Felix Holt she worked her way through The Times and the Annual Register for 1832–3, read Macaulay and copied out long excerpts from Samuel Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical.
Marian’s mature position on franchise reform steered a middle way between her father’s die-hard resistance and the lunge towards universal suffrage which was favoured by many of her progressive friends. In her masterly Introduction to Felix Holt she shows that while there was much that needed changing about the Midlands on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act, ‘there were some pleasant things too, which have also departed’.42 Pocket boroughs, an unrepresented Birmingham, the Corn Laws and widespread pauperism might all have vanished under the new regimes, but so had a way of life which was gentle, rhythmic and self-sustaining. She shows how the community of pre-industrial Britain is being threatened by the hurrying pace of modern life – of stagecoaches which can race from one end of the country to another in only a few days, bringing change and creating a bland homogeneity. Returning to her old distinction, rooted in Riehl, between change which presses slowly from below and that which is imposed speedily from above, Eliot makes the point that progress is a mixed blessing, creating new problems even as it attempts to tackle old ones.
This conservative sensibility is shared by the novel’s hero, Felix Holt, a radical of the most unusual kind. For while he identifies himself with the working classes, Holt remains pessimistic about what would happen if they got the vote. The way in which the local miners form an encouraging mob around any candidate who ‘treats’ them with ale suggests that once enfranchised they would throw their weight unthinkingly behind any politician who played on their immediate self-interest. For Felix, as for Marian, working men needed to be taught to cherish the status quo before they were fit to change it.
In a series of set-piece speeches to groups of local workers Holt lays out his idiosyncratic stall. He maintains that the standard demands of the radical programme – for annual parliaments, universal male suffrage and reformed electoral districts – are nothing but ‘engines’. These engines work well or badly according to the ‘passions, feelings, desires’ which power them.43 And given the ignorant state of most working men, these passions, feelings and desires are likely to be self-serving and short-term, easily exploited by the parliamentary candidate with the biggest pocket. In a confusing jump, Felix suggests that working men will gain more power by forgetting about the vote and going soberly about their everyday business, lifting their heads only occasionally to exert moral pressure on their lords and masters.
Felix is a prig. Built on an even more massive scale than Adam Bede, he shares the carpenter’s idealisation of the ‘working-day world’ over the abstractions of religious or political ideology. Like Adam, he has a good basic education, which he prefers to put in the service of his fellows rather than use as a stepping stone into the middle class. ‘That’s how the working men are left to foolish devices and keep worsening themselves,’ he explains to Rufus Lyon, the Independent minister, ‘the best heads among them forsake their born comrades, and go in for a house with a high door-step and a brass knocker.’44 Instead of straining for ‘clerkly gentility’, Felix divides his time between watchmaking, trying to stop his widowed mother selling patent medicines and playing self-appointed moral guardian to the masses.
The upright, oak-like Felix Holt is thematically pitted against the fat, pragmatic Harold Transome. Transome, heir to a dwindling fortune, has recently returned to the Midlands after fifteen years in the Near East. While he is expected to run for Parliament, his mother and clergyman uncle are mortified when he announces that far from being a Tory, he will stand as a Radical. But he is just the kind of Radical that Felix is not – unprincipled, ego-bound, loving to hurt. In the end, Transome loses the election and damages his reputation by his association with the violent, looting mob. He redeems himself only by speaking in court on behalf of Felix Holt who has been unfairly accused of leading the riot and killing a policeman.
Transome’s careless egotism, his inability to see or care for others, originates in the self-enclosed hell of Transome Court. A careful chronological reading of Marian’s notebooks suggests that she had always seen the drama of the Transome family as the main thread of the book, with the political story grafted on later. The fact that she was reading Aeschylus at the time implies that she was still interested in themes that had engaged her in The Mill – the fall of a once solid family. Certainly the descriptions of Mrs Transome’s bitter, withered life among the heavy sunlight and shabby drapes of a house she can barely afford to run are more vivid than anything we ever learn about the tiresomely upright Felix. The reason for Mrs Transome’s misery lies deep in the past. As a handsome young married woman she had had an affair with the sleek, self-serving family lawyer by whom she had a son, Harold. Saddled with a feeble husband, she has spent the last thirty-five years running the estate and trying to contain the greedy damage done by the lawyer Jermyn. Only the thought that the handsome Harold might one day return from Smyrna and restore Transome Court to its glory has kept a tiny light flickering inside her.
But Harold’s arrival is a disappointment. He is accompanied by a small son and no wife: the implication is that the boy’s mother was a local courtesan whose meek manner perfectly suited the despotic Harold. And although blandly attentive to Mrs Transome, Harold takes no notice of her real needs. Instead of listening to her worries about the estate, he makes carelessly flattering remarks about her dress and figure. His will, though sheathed in silk, strikes Mrs Transome as unassailable: ‘Harold’s rapidity, decision, and indifference to any impressions in others which did not further or impede his own purposes, had made themselves felt by her as much as she would have felt the unmanageable strength of a great bird which had alighted near her, and allowed her to stroke its wing for a moment because food lay near her.’45
The mechanism by which Marian brings the political and the Transome strands of her story together is a tangled legal plot which makes the Newdigate-Newdegate case of her youth look simple. With the expert legal help of Frederic Harrison she wended her careful way through the impenetrable business of entail and settlement. Her ultimate aim was to have the Independent minister’s daughter Esther Lyon shown to be the rightful inheritor of Transome Court, and to do this Marian had to add swapped identities and unknown parentage to the already rich mix. Her need for absolute realism means that this part of the plot takes up far too much of the book. All that really matters is getting Esther to a point where she is obliged to make a decision between fulfilling her dearest fantasy of becoming a lady, or marrying the resolutely proletarian Felix Holt.
In the end, of course, Esther chooses Felix, drawn by what seems to be the properly moral choice. Her previous life of surface and studied refinement has been replaced by a deep attachment to his stringent, difficult way of life. It is a decision which brings her into line with the values of the man who has raised her as his own, the Independent minister Rufus Lyon, whose quaint virtue is modelled on Francis Franklin, the father of Marian’s old Baptist schoolteachers.
The fiendishly tricky legal plot made Marian’s imaginative return to the Midlands countryside less of a pleasure than it might otherwise have been. Even a month away in France during the summer of 1865 could not raise her spirits. By Christmas she was ‘sticking in the mud’ and ‘miserable’.46 But the next month a saviour came in the shape of Frederic Harrison, who was only too delighted to have the honour of being the first person, apart from Lewes, to read a George Eliot manuscript before it went to the publishers. His expert help boosted her confidence and the writing speeded up until on 1 June 1866 Lewes was able to record in his journal: ‘Yesterday Polly finished Felix Holt. The sense of relief was very great and all day long suffused itself over our thoughts. The continual ill health of the last months, and her dreadful nervousness and depression, made the writing a serious matter. Blackwood . . . thinks the book superior to Adam Bede. I cannot share that opinion; but the book is a noble book and will I think be more popular than the Mill.’47
If conserving the best of the past was what Felix Holt was all about, then it fits nicely that it was the occasion on which ‘old relations’ were now restored with Blackwoods.48 Marian’s feelings for George Smith had never been as warm as the ones she retained for ‘the best of publishers’. At first she may have relished the fact that, unlike Blackwood, Smith never presumed to comment or interfere with his authors’ work. He had been content to pay Marian a big fee for Romola, send her occasional boxes of chocolates and custom-made luggage, then quietly assess in his own time whether or not he had profited by their arrangement. By contrast, Blackwood tended to fuss and flap along the way and his payments were modest, but there could be no doubting his engagement with Marian’s work.
Smith claimed in his memoirs that Marian and Lewes came to him first with Felix Holt and that he turned them down. They wanted £5000 for the book and he wasn’t convinced that it was ‘a profitable venture’.49 It’s not absolutely clear whether this is retrospective embroidery on Smith’s part: it must have been hard to go down in history as the man to whom George Eliot offered her only duff novel. Whatever the case, Blackwood certainly believed that Marian had returned voluntarily to the fold. Gratifying though this might be, he was not about to override his customary caution. Lewes had asked him to make an offer for the book without seeing it, which Blackwood pleasantly but firmly refused to do. If it should turn out to be another Romola, he wanted time to think. Marian agreed to send the first two volumes to Edinburgh, but was so anxious about their reception, on every level, that she insisted Blackwood telegraph the moment he got them.50 In the event she need not have worried: three days later Blackwood was able to write to Lewes that he was ‘lost in wonder and admiration of Mrs Lewes’ powers. It is not like a Novel and there may be a complaint of want of the ordinary Novel interest, but it is like looking on at a series of panoramas where human beings speak and act before us.’ The same day William Blackwood made an offer of £5000, and the correspondence with Marian, which in recent years had dwindled to a few notes about royalties, was now restored to its former fullness.51 Before very long she was back leaning on John Blackwood as she had never done with Smith: asking him to track down historical references to add documentary authority to the background of the book.
Blackwood genuinely loved Felix Holt. After the turgid strangeness of Romola – which he had been lucky enough not to publish – it was wonderful to be back in a Midlands landscape teeming with vivid, particular characters. The gossip in the saddler’s, the smell of feather and leather in the golf ball maker’s shop, the chat of the town worthies all enchanted him. And, of course, the political conservatism of the piece was exactly what he liked too. ‘I had nearly forgot to say how good your politics are,’ he said in a postscript to his first full response to the book on 26 April. ‘As far as I see yet, I suspect I am a radical of the Felix Holt breed, and so was my father before me.’52
So impressed was Blackwood by Felix Holt that shortly after the Reform Act was passed he asked Marian to write an ‘Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt’ along the lines of the speech made by Disraeli to the working men of Edinburgh. It is hard to imagine that many of the ‘artisans, and factory hands, and miners, and labourers’ whom Holt addressed were likely readers of the January 1868 issue of Blackwood’s. Still, his earnest appeal that they should use their new vote carefully to preserve the ‘treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and manners’ must have played well with the predominantly Tory-voting middle-class readership of Maga.53 At this point it became clear that, despite the precedent of Disraeli speaking to the men in Edinburgh, Holt was not a Tory democrat. His position was more like that of Matthew Arnold, who believed that culture should be guarded by ‘the remnant’ or, looking further back, by Coleridge’s notion of ‘the clerisy’.
Certainly most of the reviewers approved of Felix Holt. Dallas gave his usual praise in The Times and John Morley, Lewes’s successor at the Fortnightly, was equally enthusiastic in the crucial Saturday Review.54 A very young Henry James was more muted in the Nation and some of the more stuffy critics found Eliot’s return yet again to illicit sexual relationships distasteful.55 A few voices were raised in criticism of the wearisome legal details, but as Bulwer-Lytton put it, ‘it has the excellence of good writing.’56 One critic, trying to be clever, even thought he had found an error in the legal plot. Frederic Harrison rushed to reassure Marian that no such mistake had been made, and on another occasion declared that he knew ‘whole families where the three volumes [of Felix Holt] have been read chapter by chapter and line by line and reread and recited as are the stanzas of In Memoriam.’57 In truth this was unlikely, but Harrison had by now worked out that this was exactly what Marian needed to hear.
By the time Felix Holt was published, Marian’s celebrity had become a phenomenon in itself, standing between herself and new friendships, as well as transforming those which lingered from the past. Things had not been easy with Sara Hennell since the embarrassment of Thoughts in Aid of Faith of 1860 which both Marian and Lewes had found pretentious and dull. Sara’s inscription on Marian’s copy – ‘in grateful remembrance of how much I owed to her during the season of happy intercourse which formed the “German” period of our lives’ – suggests that at one level she accepted that their intimacy belonged to the past. But in other ways she clearly felt that she had the right to comment on Marian’s work as if they were still both struggling writers together. Her remarks on The Mill may have been perceptive, but they were not wanted, especially the part where she urged, ‘Go on! – write once more, and give us something . . . better.’58 Likewise, although she was quite right when she said of Romola’s character that she was ‘pure idealism . . . you have painted a goddess, and not a woman’, the point was that no one had asked her.59 Most annoying of all was the moment in spring 1862 when Sara mistakenly assumed that a second-rate tale appearing in Blackwood’s was Marian’s work. ‘Salem Chapel’, the latest in a series called ‘The Chronicles of Carlingford’, certainly covered familiar George Eliot territory, dealing with the conflicts between Evangelicals, dissenters and High Churchmen in a country town. But it was written by the hackish churchwoman Mrs Oliphant, whose hazy understanding of dissent showed up in the false tone and many inaccuracies of the piece.
A week after sending off a snappy note to Coventry denying she was the author of ‘Salem Chapel’, Marian repented and wrote a softer letter to Sara, admitting that she could see how the mistake might have been made.60 She had talked so often about the piety of memory and the unimportance of intellectual agreement compared with emotional affiliation that she was determined not to be riled by Sara’s increasingly difficult ways. Rather than sulkily withdrawing from the older woman, Marian merely mildly reminded herself, by means of a letter to Cara, to be patient with Sara’s self-absorption. And while she continued to find Sara’s writing impenetrable – volume one of the new Present Religion: As a Faith Owing Fellowship with Thought (1865) was virtually unreadable – Marian had reached the point in her life where she was able quite genuinely to offer tactful support.61
The new faces which found their way into Marian’s life were still mainly male. Usually they had been scooped up by Lewes during one of the many breakfasts, lunches and dinners which he now attended in his role as editor. Robert Browning, the poet and politician Richard Monckton Milnes, the constitutionalist Walter Bagehot and the scientist Huxley now supplemented the old circle of Spencer, Pigott and the Congreves. The intimate Saturday evenings had been replaced with Sunday afternoon At Homes, the amateur, musical entertainment with wide-ranging conversation. In time these gatherings became so large that it was impossible for Marian to meet more than a lucky handful of her guests: by 1868 Frederic Harrison was noting wistfully that ‘talking is impossible in your Sunday conversazione’.62
Clearly the little difficulty of the Leweses not being married no longer mattered. Success had a magic effect on people’s moral scruples. The most blatant change of heart involved the sculptor Thomas Woolner who in 1854 had written an unpleasant letter implying that Marian was a whore. But on bumping into her with Lewes at the Louvre in 1867 he became a fan and a friend, and a regular visitor to the Priory.63 And W. B. Scott, the man to whom the nasty letter had been written, also renewed his relationship with Lewes and was happy to report that Marian was ‘the most bland and amiable of plain women, and most excellent in conversation’.64
The experience of living and socialising almost exclusively with men meant that Marian developed an interested understanding of their lives, especially those of the young whom she identified as ‘just the class I care most to influence’.65 Clifford Allbutt, for instance, was a young doctor with whom she stayed in touch even when he moved to his appointment at the Leeds Infirmary. From there he wrote to Marian about his religious doubts and his frustratingly long engagement, and asked her to come with Lewes to see round his hospital.66 The two-day trip in September 1868 suggested many details that would find their way into Lydgate’s story in Middlemarch.
Then there was Emanuel Deutsch, a prodigiously clever young German working at the British Museum whose expertise in Jewish history and culture sustained Marian’s growing interest in the subject. He was to give Marian lessons in Hebrew and his tragically short life suggested some of the details for Mordecai, the scholar-saint in Daniel Deronda, Marian’s last novel.
Another young man who played a part in shaping George Eliot’s legacy was Oscar Browning, fellow of King’s College Cambridge and a master at Eton until he was dismissed for making sexual advances to the boys. Chatty and adoring, he invited Lewes and Marian to the school in June 1867 to row on the river and watch a cricket match.67 When Marian remarked how much she liked one of his chairs, he arranged to have a copy made and sent to her. His gossipy biography of George Eliot in 1890 was one of the major sources of the rumour about Lewes’s infidelity.
Naturally there were times when Marian missed women. One day in 1864 when Bessie Rayner Parkes took a friend along to the Priory, she had found Marian marooned in a sea of masculinity: ‘It was so sad to see Marian sitting alone with four men when we entered the room. Isa and I brought in quite a wholesome atmosphere of womanhood and I read in Marian’s expressive face that she felt it.’68 Gradually, though, brave women were beginning to make overtures. In May 1867 Lewes had introduced Marian to Lady Amberley at the first of the Positivist lectures given by Richard Congreve. Lady Amberley had immediately issued an invitation to lunch, but was told that this was ‘against rules’.69 Instead, she visited the Priory soon afterwards, slightly panicky as to what the correct ‘etiquette’ might turn out to be.70 After a slow start, Marian came to like the young woman and in time two of Lady Amberley’s sisters, equally lively and well-married, also became regular callers at the Priory.
Although these three Stanley girls all invited Marian to their homes, she continued in her old practice of turning them down. With other women, though, she was learning to be more flexible. It was around now that she met two young people who were to become, in time, her keenest disciples. At this stage they were simply restless young married women drawn to Mrs Lewes’s wise and empathic manner. There was Nina Lehmann, daughter of Lewes’s old Edinburgh friend Robert Chambers. Marian sometimes visited the Highgate home which Nina shared with her cultured industrialist German husband, Frederick, for an evening of music and well-informed talk. When Nina was sent to Pau for her health in 1867, the Leweses stopped off for two days on their way to Spain. Nina was in seventh heaven, writing rapturously to her husband, ‘I think she loves me – we are sworn friends. What a sweet, mild, womanly presence hers is – so soothing, too, and elevating above all.’71 Another young woman who had the distinction of home visits from George Eliot was Georgiana Burne-Jones, wife of the painter, Edward. Marian was so enchanted with Georgie’s knowledge of art and allied matters that she and Lewes frequently arrived at the young couple’s house in Fulham, bearing gifts for their children like doting grandparents.
As Marian’s celebrity grew it was not snubbing but mobbing which posed the greater threat. Even in obscure corners of the Continent there was no guarantee that earnest fans might not suddenly descend. During a stay in Granada in February 1867 where they had gone after seeing Nina Lehmann in Pau, Lewes had abandoned his usual precaution of scribbling his name illegibly in the hotel register with the result that ‘it was whispered round at once who we were, and the attention of the guests was flattering but boring’. One enthusiastic American lady in the throng, whom Lewes could not help noticing was ‘very pretty’, claimed that she regarded Romola as her Bible, and begged for an autograph.72 For Marian, who even in her unknown years had chosen to eat hotel dinners in her own room to avoid strangers’ glances, it was all becoming an ordeal.
This new expansiveness in Marian’s private life sent echoes through her work. The hermit years at Richmond, Wandsworth and even Blandford Square had produced novels which sprang from the deepest parts of her memory and psyche, untouched by anything happening around her. But with the opening up of the Priory years, Marian’s work became more susceptible to immediate influence. Felix Holt, as we have seen, was written partly in response to the events leading up to the 1867 Second Reform Act. Its successor, The Spanish Gypsy, owed its genesis to two of the many new friendships which were breaking in upon the Leweses’ dual solitude.
The poem had a laborious gestation and, just like Romola, was at one point put aside for an English novel, Felix Holt. The twisted turn of events started in February 1863 when an old friend of Lewes, Theodore Martin, brought his wife to the Priory. Marian was delighted with Helen Faucit, whom fifteen years earlier Lewes had tagged ‘the finest tragic actress on our stage’, and decided that she would like to write a play for her.73 The Martins, in turn, showed Marian a charming portrait of Helen by Frederic Burton which, in a roundabout way, led to Burton both painting Marian and accompanying the Leweses on holiday to Italy in May 1864. It was while the trio was visiting the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice that Marian was struck by an Annunciation, possibly by Titian, which gave her the idea of writing about a young woman chosen from the ranks of ordinary womanhood to ‘fulfil a great destiny’.74 Once home she became convinced that the only setting which would do was that of Spain in the 1490s when the struggle between the ruling Catholics and the Moors was at its height.
From the start the omens were not good. Just as with Romola, Marian over-researched herself into imaginative paralysis. Reading up on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall did not provide that important spark, not even with Lewes plugging away in parallel on Don Quixote. The journal entries make depressing reading. After an agonising few months on the first two acts, Marian started ‘sticking in the mud continuously’ and found herself plunging in ‘a swamp of miseries’. Act Three was disrupted by Christmas 1864, Act Four could not be resuscitated even by a ten-day trip to Paris and by the middle of February even the usually upbeat Lewes had to admit that the play wasn’t working. On the 21st of the month Marian recorded in her journal that he had ‘taken my drama away from me’.75
The next two years were taken up with Felix Holt, which appeared in June 1866. Marian and Lewes did their usual thing of escaping immediately to the Continent to avoid having to confront the book’s fate directly. While they toured Germany and the Low Countries, John Blackwood oversaw slow sales (another effect of the difficult economic situation) and came to terms with the idea that for the first time he was going to lose money on a George Eliot novel. The reviews, though, were sufficiently positive to make everyone involved feel that Marian Lewes’s return to her original publishers had been a success: ‘I do not know that I ever saw a Novel received with a more universal acclaim,’ wrote Blackwood in his old, admiring way.76 At the end of the year he offered Marian £1000 for the copyright of all the novels, with the intention of bringing them out in a sixpenny series complete with illustrations.77
Six days later, on 27 December, the Leweses set off on another trip, this time to the South of France. Inevitably Lewes had found the Fortnightly commitment too draining and had asked Trollope to release him. Ostensibly the trip was for the sake of his health, but during a walk on the beach at Biarritz Marian confided that she hoped they might press on to Spain where she could research the background for her abandoned play which she was now considering recasting as a poem. For two frail middle-aged people they did very well, travelling by rackety diligence and cold trains through San Sebastian, Barcelona, Granada and Seville. This was the pleasurable part of research, the drinking in of random sights, sounds and impressions which would eventually have to be worked up into a picture of a life very different from anything Marian had written about before. Having decided that her heroine’s ‘great destiny’ would be to lead the gypsies in their fight against the Moors, Marian was keen to spend time absorbing the gypsy culture, carefully observing one family troop as they danced and sang. She also occupied herself with the more usual examples of high Western culture, viewing the paintings in the Prado in Madrid, and wandering through the magnificent cathedral in Seville.78
Having been told that her new work was connected with Spain, Blackwood was naturally hungry for details: ‘is it a Romance?’ he asked.79 Her reply from Granada can hardly have thrilled him: ‘The work connected with Spain is not a Romance. It is – prepare your fortitude – it is – a poem.’80 As it turned out, Blackwood did indeed need fortitude, because the poem was not completed for another year, on 29 April 1868. The usual mix of depression and headache stopped Marian pushing ahead on her return to London in the middle of March 1867. This time it was not just a question of getting the historical detail right, or bringing the characters to life, but of turning what had started off as a prose drama into a dramatic poem. The end result was, inevitably, an odd mix of narrative and dialogue, mainly blank verse but with some linking passages of prose and lyric.
Just as with Romola, Marian knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the piece. Lewes’s renewed dyspepsia – he had fattened up wonderfully in Spain, despite worries about the food – also suggested that he was far from easy. By the beginning of July they were off again in search of health, this time for a fortnight at the Isle of Wight. When that failed to work, they decided to try to recover the happiness of their honeymoon days by returning to Weimar, where they had first lived together in 1854. They repeated walks, re-inhabited lodgings, recreated schedules all in the hope that some of that easy flow would return. But by the time they were back in London on 1 October it was clear that Marian was once again facing the kind of paralysis which had preceded Romola. When she struggled to the close of part one by the end of the month, Blackwood suggested setting it in print, complete with possible variations, so that she might get a realistic sense of how it might read.81 It was a kind gesture, particularly since he obviously did not like it. For the first time ever he avoided making a direct comment about Marian’s work and offered her only £300, a fraction of the £5000 he had given for Felix Holt.
If The Spanish Gypsy had been written by anyone else, Blackwood would not have published it. The poem is strained and plodding, clever and dull. The influence of the Leweses’ new friend Robert Browning is clear, especially his dramatic monologues ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’. But Marian’s vision did not lend itself to verse. Although she could manage metre as well as the next man, the compressed form did not allow her to build character or create landscape with the fullness she had achieved in her novels. Instead of intricate descriptions of inner worlds and psychological states, there are only rough approximations of mood and type. Even the heroine, Fedalma, feels like a pencil sketch. And, just as in Romola, far too much energy has gone into re-creating a world which, despite Marian’s best endeavours, remains distant and dead.
Still, The Spanish Gypsy makes interesting reading because of the way it both develops and anticipates typical George Eliot themes.82 Fedalma is made to choose between duty and desire. She may either marry her beloved Duke Silva or take up her hereditary role as a gypsy princess, destined to lead her people to a better life in Africa. Fedalma’s decision to honour the obligations of family and race recall Eppie’s renunciation of life at the Red House and Esther’s rejection of the ease of Transome Court. Both girls, like Fedalma, choose to put their duties as daughters, fathers’ daughters, over social status. Fedalma’s renunciation of an ordinary woman’s satisfactions in favour of an exceptional destiny – just like Titian’s Virgin she will not experience mortal childbirth – anticipates Alcharisi in Daniel Deronda, who sacrifices motherhood to her singer’s vocation. And the position of the gypsies as a disinherited and despised race points the way to Marian’s growing interest in the Jews as the inheritors of true culture.
Publicly people said they liked the poem, in private they were not so sure. Frederic Harrison, who had gushed over Felix Holt and urged Marian to try poetry, thought that it was a mess. Professional critics like Henry James and Richard Holt Hutton realised that verse simply was not her medium and looked forward to the time when she would return to what she did best.83 But by some fluke of a capricious market, The Spanish Gypsy actually sold well and brought Marian a modest profit. People wrote suggesting that she turn it into a play, or asking permission to set the minstrel songs to music.84
With hindsight, these mediocre middle years, which saw the publication of Romola, Felix Holt and The Spanish Gypsy, are redeemed by what came after, the magnificent Middlemarch. But what would have happened if Marian had simply stopped writing in 1868, silenced by death or despair? She would be remembered for the great trio of English provincial novels, Adam Bede, The Mill and Silas Marner, and perhaps for the minor triumph that is Felix Holt. But she would have been set down as a medium talent, to stand alongside Elizabeth Gaskell. As it was, she continued to write, producing a few more so-so poems until at the beginning of 1869 she began to plan the book which would elevate her to the rank of the Immortals.
Marian’s increasingly public life was buttressed by a domestic happiness which grew more secure as the years passed. So it is odd that this was the time when London gossip was busy putting Lewes down as unfaithful. It is possible to see how the rumour started. The little man was out on his own virtually every evening, flirting, chatting, always managing to end up next to the prettiest woman. The fact that he had not divorced Agnes and married Marian, despite having the money to explore and exploit any legal loophole, suggested to some that he liked the situation the way it was. Clearly Marian and Lewes were both aware of the rumours, because on one occasion when Lewes was away Marian explained her decision not to attend a lecture by Richard Congreve on the grounds that people might jump to false conclusions about her ‘husband’s’ absence.85
We don’t know if any of Lewes’s flirtations ever ended in sex, but they certainly never developed into relationships. Lewes was as staunch as ever in his love and admiration for the woman he called ‘Polly’, always delighted when the dinner conversation turned to the subject of her genius. Whenever he came across an interesting new face, he immediately issued an invitation to the Priory so that she could share his discovery. The Sunday At Homes increasingly came to resemble a cross between a court and a church service, in which the best minds in London paid homage to George Eliot. It was now that Lewes was dubbed the ‘mercurial little showman’ by George Meredith as he bobbed and weaved around the room, making sure that Marian was neither bored nor overwhelmed by the people he ushered to her side. If he occasionally had sex with other women – and there is no direct evidence that he did – it never came close to threatening his relationship with ‘the best of women’. Marian’s dedication at the front of the manuscript of Felix Holt suggests her sense of absolute security: ‘From George Eliot (otherwise Polly) to her dear husband, this thirteenth year of their united life, in which the deepening sense of her own imperfectness has the consolation of their deepening love.’86
Aside from their undimmed affection for one another, joint responsibility for young and old strengthened Marian’s and Lewes’s commitment to one another. Early in 1864 Captain Willim had died, bringing to an end a painful marriage of over thirty years. For Lewes’s mother it was a relief to be free of this angry man who had tried to control every aspect of her existence. For her son and his partner it meant extra work. The Captain’s tangled business affairs were sorted out by the end of March, but that didn’t resolve the problem of how and where the old lady was to live. In the end Mrs Willim seems to have continued in Kensington, but she made an increasing number of visits to the Priory. Sometimes she joined Lewes and Marian on their daily walks round Regent’s Park Zoo, once taking fright when Lewes got a couple of bear cubs out of their cage.87 During the remaining six years of her life she put pressure on her son not to spend too much time away from her on the Continent. This, maintained Marian, was the reason why they never made their planned trip to the East.
Charlie was as easy as ever. His close relationship with Marian and Agnes, together with his obvious love of domestic life, made him a candidate for early marriage. When his parents returned from their trip to Italy in 1864 he told them that he had become engaged to Gertrude Hill, granddaughter of the public health reformer Dr Southwood Smith. Gertrude was four years older than Charlie, pretty and with an excellent contralto voice – all factors which made Lewes and Marian unflatteringly surprised that she would want to marry ‘our amiable bit of crudity’.88 Marian, as always, lost no time in playing the part of concerned mother and expert moral voice: ‘One never knows what to wish about marriage,’ she intoned to D’Albert Durade, ‘the evils of an early choice may be easily counterbalanced by the vitiation that often comes from long bachelorhood.’89
The two aunts who had raised Gertrude seem to have had no worries about her marrying into one of the most notorious households in the land. The one bit of curiosity came from Gertrude’s sister Octavia Hill, later well known for her work in public housing, who asked about Mrs Lewes’s religious beliefs. By now Marian had had enough practice to play the role of concerned moral matriarch to perfection. Although on 21 September 1866 she admitted in a letter to François D’Albert Durade that she and Lewes ‘enjoy our tete a tete too much’ to be looking forward to becoming grandparents, by the time Gertrude had lost her first baby a week later she was writing with all the grief of a concerned mother-in-law.90
Thornie and Bertie were off their hands, too. Thornie had left for Durban on 16 October 1863 in his usual bouncy way. During the three-month journey he scandalised his fellow passengers by dressing up as the devil, and editing a robust and saucy ship’s newspaper.91 His first couple of years in Africa were spent getting into scrapes and sniffing at different possibilities, until he decided finally on farming. On 9 September 1866 Bertie was removed from his pupillage in Warwickshire and shipped out to join his elder brother.
We do not know much about the next two years except that by the end of them all the money was gone. In October 1868 a pathetic letter arrived at the Priory from Thornie asking for a loan. In the first instance he wanted a modest £200 to cover his losses on a wild scheme to trade blankets for ivory with the local tribesmen. But then he went on to more serious matters. He was, he told his father, ‘gradually wasting away. I eat almost nothing, nothing but delicacies tempt me, and those we can’t afford.’ He described the fearsome pain which racked his back and chest, making him shout out in agony. Were he fifty instead of twenty-four, he said, he would have walked over the nearest waterfall by now. His only hope was to return to Britain and consult the best doctors. ‘I know this trip, seeing physicians etc, perhaps undergoing some operation will cost a great deal of money, but – que voulez vous. It is my last chance in life, and you are the only person I can apply to, so I don’t hesitate to make the application.’92
Of course Lewes sent the money immediately, haunted by the vision of his jaunty boy crushed by pain. But nothing had prepared him for his first sight of Thornie eight months later. For once, the boy had not exaggerated: he had lost four stone and was barely able to stand, let alone walk. The day after his arrival his condition suddenly deteriorated to the point where all he could do was lie on the ground and scream. But this was Sunday and guests were due. Into the crisis walked two American women, Grace Norton and Sara Sedgwick, accompanied by their friend, the young writer Henry James, who had already written three reviews of George Eliot and was all agog to meet the literary mother whom he had come to kill. Marian tried bravely to carry on something approaching ordinary conversation, chatting about their recent trip abroad. But soon all pretence at normality was given up and James knelt on the floor trying to soothe Thornie, while Lewes rushed to the chemist for some morphine.93
It was the lack of a clear diagnosis which made Thornie’s decline so difficult to deal with. Perhaps it was only a kidney stone, in which case something might be done. Even the best doctors, including the Queen’s physician Sir James Paget, admitted they were stumped. ‘We feel utterly in the dark as to the probabilities of his case,’ Marian wrote to Cara on 21 August, ‘and must resignedly accept what each day brings.’94 When Charlie arrived back from a holiday in June, unaware of his brother’s condition, the sight of the skeletal Thornie shocked him into a faint. One afternoon Agnes came to visit, at which point Marian tactfully went out, leaving the legal Mrs Lewes alone with her child. Pigott came in to play cards. Barbara Bodichon, who had done so much to set Thornie up in Africa with letters of introduction, also popped in twice a week to distract him.95
By the end of August it was clear that Thornie was dying. This was no kidney stone but tuberculosis of the spine, a horrible condition in which the backbone gradually crumbled away. Marian already knew something of the terrible devastation it could wreak on a merry disposition: the January 1856 edition of the Westminster had carried her essay on Heinrich Heine, the German wit and philosopher who was tortured by this ‘terrible nervous disease’.96 Mercifully Thornie did not follow Heine’s example and linger agonizingly for a decade. He died, in Mutter’s arms, on 19 October.
Although Thornie resembled his father, Marian had never liked the boy. It is possible that once his noise and bluster had been tempered by life she would have learned to love him, but at this point he was still an annoying, disruptive pup. And yet there can be no doubt about her grief when he was gone, ‘still a boy’ at only twenty-five. This time she had no need to think herself into the role of pious mother; the words and feelings came easily. ‘This death’, she wrote in her journal, ‘seems to me the beginning of our own.’97
