1876–80
THE LEWESES SPARED no expense in fitting out the Heights, certain that this was the last home they would ever be called upon to furnish. Although Marian declared herself bored and fidgeted by the details, especially when they interfered with work on her new book, she enjoyed the game of creating the perfect country house environment. There was even going to be a billiard table, for any guests who found themselves at a loose end on a rainy day.
So it was a pity that Lewes was dying. His guts and bowels were in spasm all the time now. The only relief came at dawn, when he threw off the bed covers, woke Polly and set out for a ramble through the patch of woodland attached to the house. Visitors were shocked by how gaunt he looked, while London gossips who caught an occasional glimpse of him speculated about whether, this time, he was actually dying. The man himself was as jaunty as ever, joking and telling stories, and on one occasion singing his way through The Barber of Seville to the astonishment of a visiting Johnny Cross.1 If all this pluck was for Marian’s benefit it worked: the letters she wrote that summer of 1878 reported him as suffering from nothing more ominous than ‘gout’. Domestic life went on almost as usual: literary neighbours and nuisances continued to call, and on one occasion Lewes found himself at Tennyson’s house, trying to be kind about the Laureate’s latest venture, a plodding drama on the life of Thomas à Becket.2
Beyond Witley it was another matter. The annual trip to Oxford during Whitsun had been spoiled by Lewes’s poor health. Ordinary irritations like jostling tourists and vanishing luggage had become intolerable to the crampy invalid and his increasingly anxious partner. In July they accepted Blackwood’s invitation to visit his estate in Scotland, then thought better of it. ‘You do not realize my state,’ Lewes explained to his disappointed host. ‘If I could even read an amusing book for three hours I should consider myself strong enough to come. But I can’t work at all, and can’t read for more than an hour.’3 In the end, the furthest the Leweses got that year was to Newmarket, where they spent a few days during October with the Bullock-Halls.
They were drawn there by Turgenev, an old friend and admirer, who was to be among the house party at Six Mile Bottom. Newer faces, no matter how talented, did not have the same power to break through their increasing self-absorption. On i November Henry James paid a dismal call to the Heights. Instead of the warm and admiring reception he was expecting – The Europeans was just out – he found two chilly, elderly people sunk in misery. Sitting in a ‘queer, bleak way’, one on each side of the fireplace, the Leweses barely greeted him, failed to offer tea and clearly could not wait for him to leave.4
On 11 November the Leweses left Witley for the last time to spend a week in Brighton. They saw Marian’s niece Emily Clarke, treating her to dinner and a trip to the Aquarium. Emily had always adored Lewes and he, genuinely thoughtful, had recently provided her with an ear trumpet to help with her deafness. Despite breezy walks along the sea front, Lewes was in worse pain than ever, though in his journal he put it down to nothing more sinister than ‘piles’. Back in London, Sir James Paget diagnosed that old and vague friend, ‘a thickening of the mucous membrane’.
Despite increasing incapacity, it was business as usual at the Priory. Lewes intervened in a crisis over his nephew Vivian, whose proposal to a girl called Constance had been turned down by her father. Lewes sent an encouraging letter to the doubtful paterfamilias, which must have worked, for the couple married soon afterwards. Then, on 21 November, Lewes wrote to Blackwood, enclosing the manuscript of Marian’s new book, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, sketching arrangements for its publication.5
After another week of excruciating pain, Lewes acknowledged that he was dying. On the 29th Johnny Cross was summoned for a final summit about Marian’s investments and business affairs. As a parting gift Lewes handed the younger man his stock of prized cigars to pass on to Willie Cross, an enthusiastic smoker.
Marian also recognised that Lewes was on his way out. On 25 November she wrote to Blackwood asking him to postpone the publication of the new book. She had a horror of the public assuming that she had been busily working away on her manuscript all the while that Lewes was dying. Later that evening she wrote to Barbara Bodichon of her ‘deep sense of change within, and of a permanently closer companionship with death’.6
On 30 November, just before six in the evening George Henry Lewes died. He was sixty-one. The certificate gave the cause as enteritis, but Paget told Charles that his father had been suffering from cancer, which ‘would have carried him off within six months’.7 Charles kept news of the death and the funeral quiet, perhaps at Marian’s request. As a result only a dozen people turned up at Highgate Cemetery Chapel for the funeral on 4 December. Old friends – and there were many – were naturally upset to discover that they had been deprived of the chance to pay their last respects. The service, a kind of watered-down Anglican one, was conducted by Dr Sadler of the Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel. The Harrisons and the Burne-Joneses were there. Herbert Spencer broke the habit of a lifetime and attended. Marian did not go and nor, probably, did Agnes. The chief mourners were Charles Lewes and Johnny Cross. John Blackwood, heading for death himself, was represented by Joseph Langford.
Without George Henry Lewes there could have been no George Eliot. Lewes gave Eliot his Christian name, introduced him to a publisher and managed his career shrewdly over twenty years. He got the best financial and distribution deals for Eliot, yet never once put him under pressure to write for money. He understood The Spanish Gypsy, as well as Adam Bede, and delighted in them equally. In short, Lewes provided just that kind of committed, discriminating, selfless support which authors dream of.
But none of this would have counted for anything without the corresponding caretaking which Lewes performed in Marian Evans’s private life. It was his encouragement which enabled her to make the break from poorly paid periodical journalism to highly profitable fiction writing. His deep understanding of her contradictory emotional needs allowed him to provide exactly what she required to continue working in the face of self-distrust and despair. Observing that his early comment on her lack of dramatic power unsettled her, Lewes was careful to keep all such further thoughts to himself. His doubts about The Mill, Romola and The Spanish Gypsy went straight into his journal, while he drip-fed Marian a diet of sunshiny approval. When that was not enough he chivied Blackwood into boosting the message with a stream of detailed and fulsome letters.
Lewes has been criticised for the way he kept Marian aloof from the professional and lay criticism which might have steered her away from the eccentric detours of her mid-career. Although he maintained that he never showed or told her anything, he was always careful to communicate any bits and pieces that he knew would keep her buoyant. A nice comment from a clever man or news of a peak in sales always found its way back to Marian. What detractors from this method missed was that if Lewes had ceased to wrap Marian in cotton wool she would have stopped writing completely. Without his mothering there would have been no Spanish Gypsy, but there would have been no Middlemarch either.
Lewes’s professional life, away from Marian’s, was something extraordinary. The early years of journalistic ducking and diving showed an intellectual range that few could equal. If some of his editors, Marian included, found him slipshod, this was because he was under pressure to publish and move on quickly. None the less, his best work from this period was to become hugely influential. His biography of Goethe remained the standard work for decades and his enthusiastic, fluent writings on science, especially The Physiology of Common Life, nudged hundreds of young men, including Pavlov, towards careers which would have been unthinkable a few decades earlier.
Once Lewes was relieved from the need to make money by Marian’s growing wealth, he showed himself quite able to settle down and specialise. Even those who disliked him had to admit that by the 1860s he had become much more than a versatile hack. ‘I have heard both Darwin and Sir Charles Lyell speak very highly of the thoroughness of his knowledge in their departments,’ admitted Charles Norton through clenched teeth.8 And those who liked Lewes found it easier to go further. According to William Bell Scott, the old intellectual sparring partner of his youth, Lewes was ‘nearly the only man among all my friends who has never ceased to advance’.9 The project he was working on when he died, Problems of Life and Mind, was to set out an agenda which shaped research in the physiological and psychological sciences for the first two decades of the next century.
It was this classic tale of the clever outsider who penetrates the Establishment that gave rise to rumours that Lewes was Jewish. These reached a climax with the publication of Daniel Deronda, which had American biographers making facile connections between the subject matter and the racial origins of George Eliot’s partner. It was more than the fact that Lewes had not gone to university – practising Jews could not attend Oxford or Cambridge – that made people think this way. There was also the fact that in 1866 he had written a piece in the Fortnightly about his student days at the Philosophers Club in Red Lion Square, where he had learned about Spinoza from the watchmaker Cohn. And finally there was his dark, grubby appearance, which chimed with popular racial stereotypes. Far from improving with age, Lewes looked more unwholesome than ever. Catching sight of him in the street in the mid-seventies, Edmund Gosse described a ‘hirsute, rugged, satyr-like’ little man.10 An enduring dandiness in the form of fancy waistcoats only added to the impression that he must surely be a cousin of Disraeli.
Then there was Lewes’s behaviour, which continued to be the antithesis of the English gentleman’s. Wealth and success had not left its usual polish. Right up to his death he was chatting away in French, noticing pretty girls and cracking risqué jokes. He seemed always, metaphorically, to be winking and poking you in the ribs. Observers found it odd and often resented that such a rake should be the partner of the earnest, moral George Eliot: Mrs Gaskell wondered how such a wholesome woman could be attracted to such a ‘soiled’ man.11 But closer friends, Eliot’s as well as Lewes’s, understood that he provided the crucial airy counter-balance to her marshy gloom.
Lewes and Marian admired, as well as loved, one another. He honoured her genius without resenting it, while she saw that behind the flippant mask was a man of enormous personal integrity. Lewes’s conduct as a family man was irreproachable. When the experiment in Shelleyan living broke down in the mess of Agnes’s affair with Thornton Hunt, Lewes accepted his part in the whole unhappy business. He continued to support his wayward wife who, as the daughter of a landowning MP, might be expected to find resources of her own. He worked himself into chronic ill-health to provide not just for his own sons, but for the batch of children Hunt had sired on Agnes. And despite the latter’s hopelessness with money, Lewes never went beyond the odd snappy comment, even helping her get her affairs in order when Hunt died having long since left her. In addition, Lewes kept a watching financial brief over his mother, and his brother’s widow and son. As a father he was loving and involved, and his decision to send his three sons to school in Switzerland, well away from gossipy London, was a logical one, even if it also allowed him to concentrate on his new relationship with Marian.
These were the qualities which Marian turned over in her mind as she sank deep in mourning. For a week she kept to her room, poring over Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ and other verse of consolation. Meanwhile, hundreds of letters of condolence arrived at the Priory, to be intercepted and sifted by Charles. In his note of 5 December Herbert Spencer tried his best to get beyond his own self-involvement by assuring Marian, ‘I grieve with you.’12 Turgenev, writing from Paris two days earlier, said that he hoped that Marian would ‘find in your own great mind the necessary fortitude to sustain such a loss! All your friends, all learned Europe mourn with you.’13 Anthony Trollope wrote a touching obituary – one of many – in the Fortnightly Review.
What eventually got Marian out of her bedroom was her determination to finish the fourth volume of Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind. Although it was still at note stage, this was not the frozen pedantry of a ‘Key to All Mythologies’ waiting for the organisational skills of a widowed Dorothea. Lewes’s intentions were advanced and reasonably clear, and Marian was familiar enough with the subject to be able to assemble and order the material. Despite offers of fact-checking from Lewes’s old scientist friends, Marian was beset with the fear that she might misrepresent him in some way. Or worse still, that some textual error of hers might be ascribed to him. Although Problems I and II came together relatively quickly, Problem III proved to be trickier, and much of February was spent in headachy despair. In the end Marian decided to publish Problem I separately in May, under the title The Study of Psychology, with the rest of the work following a few months later.
Gratified by the way that so many of the tributes from academic and professional scientists had emphasised Lewes’s influence on younger scholars, Marian resolved that the best way to perpetuate his name was to set up a scholarship. After taking soundings mainly from Cambridge men, she designated £5000 to fund the George Henry Lewes Studentship, designed to support a young physiologist at an early stage in his research career. The Studentship was to be held for three years at Cambridge and would provide the kind of access to first-class facilities of which the young Lewes, with his borrowed microscope, had only dreamed. The first appointee, chosen by trustees who included T. H. Huxley and Henry Sidgwick, went on to become a professor and over the decades some of the country’s finest physiologists held the Studentship. With Barbara’s nudging Marian opened the award to female candidates. However, it was not until after the Great War that the first woman was appointed to the George Henry Lewes Studentship.
If coming up with the idea of the Studentship had been a comfort and a kind of pleasure, getting hold of the £5000 to fund it was a painful business. All Marian’s assets, cash as well as bricks and mortar, were in Lewes’s name. To claim them back again she had to go through a complicated and humiliating two-stage process. Lewes’s will of 1859 left the copyright of his work to his sons and everything else to ‘Mary Ann Evans, Spinster’, who was also the executrix. Beady-eyed Fanny Houghton spotted the will in the paper and was not impressed, first by the tiny amount which Lewes himself left – under £1000 – and then by the fact that the name of Evans was yet again publicly associated with that nasty man: ‘his poor legacy was a farce,’ Fanny wrote to Isaac on 28 January 1881, ‘besides, her name ought not to have been mentioned. The sons should have been made executors.’14 On 16 December 1878 Marian went to court to prove the will, an ordeal which even the usually snipy George Simpson thought she should have been spared.15 But before she could get possession of her own property she had first to change her name by deed to Lewes. In January 1879, witnessed by Charles Lewes and John Cross, Marian legally took the surname she had been using since 1857, but this time combined it with her childhood Christian names. Thus by a long and strange detour she had become, at the age of fifty-eight, ‘Mary Ann Evans Lewes’.
Restarting her personal life took longer. Marian hid away over Christmas and New Year, refusing to see any of the old friends who arrived at the Priory with tender enquiries and thoughtful gifts. She shrank even from the sight of Charles as he worked softly to acknowledge the hundreds of letters which were pouring in.16 Luckily the young man had the sense and sensitivity to understand his stepmother’s need for solitude. In a series of notes and conversations he begged her close friends to be patient and to let her ‘choose her own way and her own time of struggling back to life’.17
Not until she had finished a complete second reading of the fourth volume of Problems on 5 January did Marian communicate with the outside world in the form of a letter to Barbara Bodichon. ‘Dearest Barbara,’ she said, ‘I bless you for all your goodness to me, but I am a bruised creature and shrink even from the tenderest touch. As soon as I feel able to see anybody I will see you.’18 A month later, and with the Priory pipes burst by the vicious cold, Marian wrote to Georgie Burne-Jones to say that ‘my everlasting winter has set in. You know that, and will be patient with me.’19 Johnny Cross was also told not to pester. He had taken Marian’s comment of 22 January that she would see him ‘some time’ to mean that she would see him soon. On 30 January she wrote back telling him that she had meant a ‘distant time’.20 At the moment all her energy must be dedicated to finishing Lewes’s work.
But only a week later there were signs that Marian was beginning to thaw. One day she ordered the carriage to be got ready for a drive along the Kilburn Road. Over the next few weeks she gradually ventured further, past the hideous suburbs to something approaching the countryside. There she stopped the carriage, got down and walked alone through the fields.21
On 7 February Marian wrote again to Cross telling him: ‘In a week or two I think I shall want to see you. Sometimes even now I have a longing, but it is immediately counteracted by a fear.’ That fear was the feeling that she might bore him with a ‘grief that can never be healed’.22 But Cross knew all about that terror too, for only nine days after Lewes’s death he had lost his own beloved mother. It was this shared experience of loss which meant that on Sunday, 23 February, John Cross was the first person since Lewes’s death to make a personal call on Marian. Even Herbert Spencer, who presented himself the same day, was turned away.23 This was the breakthrough which Charles Lewes had assured her friends would come. By the end of the following month Marian had seen Spencer, Georgie Burne-Jones and Elma Stuart.
Throughout the whole sad winter of 1878–9 Edith Simcox had been hovering in the wings. Her diary shows her making almost daily visits to the Priory, oblivious to the dreadful weather. She was not, of course, allowed to see Marian, but she became on increasingly good terms with the servants who clucked over her wet clothes and wondered at her devotion. In the closing days of Lewes’s life she had sent little notes of enquiry up to the house, only to be told by Brett, the parlourmaid, that there was no change and little hope. On the last day, the 30th, Edith paced up and down in front of the gates. At one point she saw ‘a carriage like a doctor’s’ draw up and two men get out. For twenty minutes she stood in a dream, struck by the way in which passers-by continued their ordinary lives while she waited, trembling, for the fateful news. When the doctors eventually reappeared she rushed towards them and asked if there was no hope. ‘A tall man, probably Sir James Paget, answered kindly: “None: he is dying – dying quickly.” ’24
If Edith fantasised that grief would tear down Marian’s defences and allow her to rush in and comfort her beloved, she was disappointed. Until the momentous 12 April when she was finally admitted to the Priory drawing-room, she had to make do with briefings on her beloved’s progress from Gertrude Lewes in Hampstead and Eleanor Cross in Weybridge. The Priory servants were also useful sources of information, happy to let Edith hang around and pick up scraps of gossip. On one occasion she bumped into Johnny Cross doing the same thing and hoped that Brett would pass on to Marian news of ‘our meeting as friends’.25 Yet despite her over-identification with the Lewes household, Edith retained some of the good sense and brisk authority that belonged to her other, active life. When she heard that the Priory cook had been gossiping to the neighbours about Mrs Lewes’s howls of grief, she hinted to Brett that it would be a good idea if everyone tried ‘not to be too communicative’ in future.26
Aside from working steadily on Problems of Life and Mind throughout the first half of 1879, Marian found other ways of staying close to Lewes. She went through his papers, reread Goethe and visited the grave in Highgate where she discussed plans with the gardener for planting ivy and jessamine. On at least two occasions she became so lost in mental conversations with ‘my lost darling’ that, despite her scepticism about all things supernatural, she really believed she saw his ghost.27
Back in some kind of circulation, Marian began to discover just how much of her life had previously been screened and sorted by Lewes. The business side of things continued to be taken care of by Johnny, who advised her efficiently and unobtrusively on her investments. But when it came to the small change of friends and family, she found herself besieged by requests to which she was not sure how to respond. On 21 April Lewes’s nephew Vivian came and asked for £100. She gave him fifty pounds, but he returned it the next morning with a covering letter ‘confessing his error’. Bessie Belloc, personally wealthy, wanted £500, probably for a pet feminist cause.28 Unprotected by Lewes’s twinkly but firm shield, there was a danger that Marian could be seen as a soft touch. On 22 April she dashed off a panicky note to John Cross at his city office begging him to come at once and advise her.29 He arrived that same evening and a letter turning down Bessie’s request was sent shortly afterwards.
But the greatest impertinence came from a new source. Until now Bertie Lewes’s widow, Eliza, had been happy to stay in Natal with her two children, living off the £200 which Lewes sent annually. But Eliza was a calculating woman and her father-in-law’s death panicked her into wanting to strengthen her connection with Marian who, after all, was the source of the crucial £200. So without waiting to be asked she bundled little Marian and George on to a boat and headed for Britain, arriving on 28 April. They were collected by Charles and taken to stay in Hampstead. Marian visited them the next day and brought them back to the Priory for lunch. Tensions emerged immediately. The ‘little Africans’ were rude and rough, especially in contrast to their small Lewes cousins. Eliza missed the deference of colonial life and launched into a tirade against the rudeness of the British working class. More alarming still, she clearly thought that she was going to be invited to live at the Priory. Marian quickly put her right in a ‘painful letter’ written on the 29th.30 Despite constantly threatening to return home to Natal, Eliza never did. Supported by Marian’s money and great name she stayed in Britain, moving from place to place until she found some kind of tetchy stability in Brighton.
John Blackwood had been so struck by the beauty of the Heights, when he first saw it in June 1877, that he told Marian that ‘something should be born here’.31 A couple of surviving fragments of projected novels from this time suggest that Marian thought so too. One scrap is nothing more than a list of names for characters drawing heavily on her stay in Geneva in 1849. The second is a sketch for a novel set in Midlands England during the time of the Napoleonic War. Neither plan came to anything.32 Now nearing sixty, Marian did not have the emotional or physical strength to embark on another big novel. Her journal review for the year shows her doubtful about whether she should attempt any more writing at all. ‘Many conceptions of works to be carried out present themselves,’ she wrote, ‘but confidence in my own fitness to complete them worthily is all the more wanting because it is reasonable to argue that I must have already done my best.’33
As it turned out, Marian did think it worthwhile pushing on, although not along the lines that Blackwood had imagined for her. Over that last difficult summer when Lewes was dying she wrote the sixteen essays that make up Impressions of Theophrastus Such. The last piece of business Lewes carried out at the end of November had been to send the manuscript off to Edinburgh.34
Certainly not a novel, Impressions purports to be a series of essays and character sketches by Theophrastus Such, a Herbert Spencer-ish kind of bachelor who declares, ‘the person I love best has never loved me, or known that I love her’.35 They form an immensely dense, intricate piece of work, which literary scholars find fascinating because it seems to show Eliot anticipating many of the themes and debates of literary Modernism. The allusive title, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, for instance, points to the impossibility of defining intellectual origins or charting the point where an artistic influence becomes a borrowing. The first essay, ‘Looking Inward’, explores the shifting nature of consciousness and the fictionality of autobiography.36 As this suggests, these are not easy essays to read. Their punning references to other, earlier texts meant that they were unlikely to be understood, let alone enjoyed, by any but a highly educated élite.
George Eliot’s turning away from her usual broad readership excited dismay among the newspaper critics. The Times, for instance, admitted that Impressions was ‘emphatically a work of genius’, but worried that it put a ‘serious strain on the facilities’ of the reader.37 The tendency which had been there in the ‘Jewish’ half of Daniel Deronda to ignore the likely interests of the British reading public was seen again in the final essay of Impressions, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ This piece returns to the question of how the Jews can develop an identity in exile that honours the inherited traditions that sustain cultural difference, without falling into sectarianism and bigotry.38
As Theophrastus’s discussion develops, it becomes clear that he is talking about other kinds of exile too, including his own. In the second essay of the collection, ‘Looking Backwards’, he has described his rural Midlands childhood in rapturous detail. Biographers of George Eliot have long used this lyrical description of ‘the tiled roof of cottage and homestead’, ‘the long cow-shed’ and ‘the broad-shouldered barns’ to pad out the scanty details of Mary Anne Evans’s childhood. According to Theophrastus, the memories of these ‘childish loves’ have become vital to him over the intervening years during which he has lived the urban, disconnected life of the modern intellectual, eventually settling in a fretful London ‘half sleepless with eager thought and strife’.39
As Marian sat in the garden of the Heights in a county far removed from her own, she too pondered the power of early memory to give her a continuing sense of belonging to a particular community, while still leaving her free to experience the complexity and anonymous freedoms of the modern world. In all her seven novels she had never suggested that the way forward was to return to an imaginary past. Indeed, she makes it clear that this would not be possible. Her Midlands landscapes are always developing, albeit slowly. Middlemarch has the railway, Hayslope its Methodists. Or, as Theophrastus puts it in ‘Looking Backwards’: ‘our midland plains have never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me; yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of worldwide change, some new direction of human labour has wrought itself into what one may call the speech of the landscape.’40
Marian Lewes was never a romantic conservative of the unthinking kind. The Young England movement of the 1840s, which clung to an imagined feudal past and suggested turnip growing as the answer to the social ills caused by industrialisation, struck her as ludicrous. She was a modern woman who, pushed along by Lewes, was interested in the technological developments unfolding around her. Shortly before his death they had both attended a demonstration of the prototype of the telephone. Marian’s concern, echoed in Theophrastus’s wordy essays, was how to find a way of preserving the best of the past while embracing the benefits of the future.
Marian was diffident about publishing Theophrastus Such, tormented by the usual worries that it was not good enough, together with a new concern that it might be disrespectful to Lewes’s memory. In the end she made Blackwood affix the cumbersome notice, ‘The Manuscript of this Work was put into our hands towards the close of last year, but the publication has been delayed owing to the domestic affliction of the Author.’ Blackwood extended her every kindness, not fussing too much over the fact that she was holding up the type and letting her read the proofs in her own time. In the end, his assessment of the book was nearer the mark than hers: when it was published in July it quickly ran into three editions and sold 6000 copies in the first four months.
Around the time that Theophrastus Such was published Blackwood had a heart attack. Although he recovered sufficiently to spend the summer at St Andrews, even the gentlest round of golf was now out of the question. At the end of September he had another attack and Marian wrote sweetly to him, ordering him to ‘be a good, good patient and cherish your life wisely’ for the sake of Mrs Blackwood.41 She wrote to her old friend again on 28 October, but he died before he could read her letter. For Marian it was the second bereavement within a year – the third if you count the passing of her ‘Maman’, Madame D’Albert Durade. ‘He will be a heavy loss to me,’ she told Charles Lewes of John Blackwood. ‘He has been bound up with what I most cared for in my life for more than twenty years and his good qualities have made many things easy to me that without him would often have been difficult.’42
Once Marian had done her duty by lunching Eliza and the ‘little Africans’ on 28 April 1879, she was free to leave town for Witley. Sir James Paget arranged for her to be looked after by a local GP and sent her off to the country with the jolly prescription of a pint of champagne a day. Marian arrived at the Heights at the sunny end of May, opening up the house for the first time since she and Lewes had left the previous sad autumn. Once or twice a week Johnny Cross came over by train from Weybridge. Although she seldom mentions his visits in her diary, Marian dropped hints to her correspondents about the ‘devoted friend’ who looked after her every need, just as she had at the beginning of her love affairs with Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes.
Cross’s comforting presence soothed Marian into something approaching a normal life. On 27 May he persuaded her to open the piano again and she played for the first time in months.43 But it was over Dante that they fell in love. To distract himself from his mother’s death, Cross had started to struggle through the Divine Comedy in the original, with Carlyle’s translation as his only guide. When Marian heard she offered to help. Throughout that spring and summer of 1879 she sat with Cross in the summer-house at the Heights, patiently taking him through line by line. For Cross it was a revelation: ‘The divine poet took us into a new world. It was a renovation of life.’44
This was not a meeting of minds of the kind that had made Marian’s relationship with Lewes so rich. She was the teacher and Cross, educated but not agile, stumbled along behind her as best he could. Later he was to describe their relationship to Henry James as being like ‘a carthorse yoked to a racer’.45 Letters from this time have been lost and Cross is inevitably reticent in his Life, so we do not know exactly how companionship deepened into love. It looks, though, as if Cross confided his feelings for Marian some time in August, only to have them embarrassedly pushed away. There followed a couple of difficult months in which Marian withdrew emotionally, plunged into panic by this unexpected declaration. By October, however, she had resolved to meet Cross’s request for emotional intimacy. On the 16th she sent him a love letter – written on black-bordered mourning paper – which still startles by its intensity. We have to go back to the summer of 1852 and those anguished outpourings to Herbert Spencer to find anything similar, although who knows what her correspondence with Lewes, which went to the grave with her, might have revealed.
The letter starts, ‘Best loved and loving one – the sun it shines so cold, so cold, when there are no eyes to look love on me.’ But although Marian uses the lovers’ rapturously intimate ‘thou’, she is sufficiently clear-sighted to refer to the differences between them, starting with the intellectual. ‘Thou dost not know anything of verbs in Hiphil and Hophal or the history of metaphysics or the position of Kepler in science, but thou knowest best things of another sort, such as belong to the manly heart – secrets of lovingness and rectitude’. Marian then proceeds to acknowledge the twenty-year age gap – ‘Consider what thou wast a little time ago in pantaloons and back hair’ – before signing off as ‘thy tender Beatrice’, Dante’s heroine.46
To those who were to ask themselves over the next year ‘how could Marian Evans Lewes fall in love with John Cross?’ one might answer, ‘how could she not?’ From her earliest years she had needed to feel deeply attached to another person, male or female. Before she joined her life to Lewes’s at the age of thirty-four she had charged recklessly after love with Robert Brabant, Herbert Spencer and John Chapman. She had stuck with Lewes because he was the first person able to respond to her demands for an all-consuming, symbiotic attachment. Now that he was gone she felt even more than most bereaved lovers that she was only half a person. It was inevitable that the need to bind herself to another human soul would quickly reassert itself. Some biographers have suggested that the discovery of an old infidelity by Lewes tipped Marian towards accepting Cross as her new lover.47 Even if this is the meaning behind that single-word diary entry ‘Crisis’ for 16 May 1879, Marian needed no such disenchantment with the past before she could love again.
John Cross struck Marian’s friends as unsuitable, but then so had Lewes. By the time the little man had died it was hard to remember just how horrified liberal spirits like Barbara and Bessie had been by the idea of their Marian shackled to a shady rake. Cross’s private life, by contrast, was unimpeachable. He was that rare thing, a forty-year-old bachelor without a ‘past’. There were no former wives or illegitimate children waiting to ambush this new relationship. While he was not especially clever, he had a gentleman’s education and a genuine interest in music and literature. He might not be able to jump from Hiphil to Kepler, but nor did he crack risqué jokes or elbow himself to the front of your attention. Tall, with a neatly trimmed beard, Cross was exactly that kind of dignified, eligible presence which Marian’s friends had longed for her to find twenty-five years ago.
More baffling altogether is why Cross fell in love with Marian. As far as we know, he had not loved any other woman in this way before. He was not a man driven by strong sexual needs: apart from (and possibly as well as) the eight months of his marriage to Marian, he remained celibate until the end of his long life in 1924. Nor did he need her money, having both capital and income of his own. The obvious answer is that he had just lost his adored mother and was looking for a replacement. Marian was twenty years older, had long called him ‘nephew’, and by her own admission delighted in playing mother–teacher to young men.
Just because Marian and Cross came together out of pressing emotional needs does not mean that the relationship was not productive for both of them. Knowing that Cross loved her allowed Marian to begin to move through the stages of bereavement. By the time the first anniversary of Lewes’s death came round she was able to write, ‘I spent the day in the room where I passed through the first three months. I read his letters, and packed them together, to be buried with me.’48
At this point Marian was still poised between wanting to move ahead and guilt about being able to do so: she goes on to speculate whether she will be dead by the time the second anniversary comes round. This worry that she might be dishonouring Lewes’s memory by becoming attached to someone else is there, too, in the poem on ‘Remembrance’ by Emily Brontë, which she copied into her diary a couple of weeks later.
Sweet love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee
while the world’s tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure but cannot do thee wrong!
That Christmas, 1879, Marian stayed alone at the Priory. The letter she wrote on Christmas Eve to Cross, who was visiting his sister in Lincolnshire, shows how much she had come to depend on him. She asks whether he will be back in time to have dinner with her on Tuesday and, if not, Wednesday, then shares an intimate joke by signing herself ‘Your obliged ex-shareholder of A and C Gaslight and Coke’ in reference to some shares he had recently sold for her.49
Publicly Marian was not so keen to acknowledge Cross as her lover. Although Sundays at the Priory restarted in a small way, it was Charles and not Cross who took on Lewes’s old duties as master of ceremonies. The new couple steered clear of concert halls, too, preferring art galleries where there were no sharp-eyed audience members waiting with a sketch pad.
By now, Cross was pressing Marian to become his wife. Initially reluctant, she was gradually coming round to the idea. After years of not being married and wanting it badly, it felt sweet to have the choice. There is a story that once the engagement had been agreed Marian took a young girl’s delight in preparing her trousseau. She was spotted in the swankiest shops being measured and fitted for the elaborate new wardrobe which every bride was assumed to need. Nothing could be more unlike the furtive rush for Germany in 1854 when she and Lewes left with little more than the clothes they stood up in. Nasty-minded gossips, naturally, thought the results of her shopping spree pathetic. According to Mrs Lionel Tennyson, who met the couple at dinner shortly after their return from honeymoon, Marian’s new clothes were obviously designed ‘to show her slenderness, yet hiding the squareness of age’. No amount of high fashion, sneered the young Mrs Tennyson, could disguise the fact that a rickety woman of sixty was marrying a sporty man of forty.50
Having turned down Cross’s proposal twice, by March 1880 Marian was again considering the situation. What may finally have tipped her in his favour was a weekend spent in Weybridge at the end of the month. Marian had always loved families, or at least the idea of them, and the thought of becoming part of Cross’s close clan was a great inducement. Writing to Eleanor Cross a few days after the marriage had been agreed, Marian said sweetly that she was longing to be called ‘sister’ again, a name she had not heard ‘for so many, many years’.51 On 9 April Marian called in Sir James Paget to ask whether her health could stand the excitement of such a dramatic change of regime. He must have dealt with her worries optimistically, for that night she wrote in her diary, ‘My marriage decided’.52
In her letter to Eleanor Cross of 13 April Marian admitted, ‘I quail a little in facing what has to be gone through – the hurting of many whom I care for.’53 She was perfectly aware that many of the people who had an investment in the George Eliot story would be angry and disappointed if it turned out to have a different ending from the one they had imagined. That story involved a woman of integrity enduring social ostracisim for the sake of a moral principle. Different groups had filled in the details in different ways. Feminists like Clementia Taylor and Bessie Belloc were keen to see in Marian’s decision to live with Lewes a rejection of legal marriage on the grounds that it was oppressive to women. Positivists like the Harrisons and the Congreves subscribed to the idea of perpetual widowhood, and wanted to see Marian spending the rest of her days dedicated to the memory of Lewes. Sentimental romantics, meanwhile, liked the idea of a love affair, which had started so scandalously, enduring exclusively beyond the grave. For all three groups the thought that Marian Lewes might get married within eighteen months of her beloved’s death ran counter to everything they wanted for her and for themselves.
So it was hardly surprising that for the second time in her life Marian chose to start her new partnership with an unannounced dash to the Continent. She was particularly worried about the reaction of those devoted women friends who had been able to accept and honour Lewes as the very first worshipper, but might have a problem with a Johnny-come-lately like Cross. Thus she resorted to the strategy she had used when she was frightened of telling the Brays about her plan to go off with Lewes – she dropped hints. In a letter to Elma Stuart on 23 April she asked ‘whether your love and trust in me will suffice to satisfy you that, when I act in a way which is thoroughly unexpected there are reasons which justify my action, though the reasons may not be evident to you’?54 Georgie Burne-Jones likewise got an oblique nudge. When Marian called upon her that same day she seemed, remembered Georgie, ‘loth to go, and as if there was something that she would have said, yet did not’. With what must surely be post hoc insight, Georgie adds that Marian sighed wearily on that occasion: ‘I am so tired of being set on a pedestal and expected to vent wisdom.’55
Even telling Charlie Lewes was an ordeal. It looks as if Marian sent Cross over to Hampstead to break the news. As it turned out, she need not have worried. Charlie was as generous a man as his late father. He rushed over to St John’s Wood for a long interview with his stepmother and pronounced himself delighted with the new arrangement. He had no doubt that his father would have wanted her to be happy and he was probably relieved at the prospect of being able to shift more of the responsibility for the old lady on to Cross. His own life was busier than ever, with a recent promotion at the Post Office, a growing sideline in journalism and a family of three to juggle. Even the most conscientious of young men must have longed for more time of his own.
On the eve of the wedding Marian wrote to Cara, Barbara, Georgie and William Blackwood breaking the news. In all four letters she stressed many of the same points. First, that Lewes had known and loved Cross for years. Second, that Cross had money of his own and so, by implication, was no fortune-hunter. Third, that she would continue to support the Lewes clan. To Georgie Burne-Jones in particular Marian sounded like a wise Eliot narrator when she added, ‘Explanations for these crises, which seem sudden though they are slowly dimly prepared, are impossible. I can only ask you and your husband to imagine and interpret according to your deep experience and loving kindness.’56
There remains a puzzle about what happened to these difficult letters. From her honeymoon in Venice Marian writes to Charles about the ‘inexplicable failure of the letter I wrote to some of my friends, letters intended to reach them on the morning of my marriage’. She wonders if the coachman Burkin forgot them, but given that the letter to Barbara Bodichon turned up in a drawer at the Priory seven weeks later, it may be that Marian had unconsciously sabotaged the communication herself.57
On 6 May at 10.15, Marian Evans Lewes was led up the aisle by Charles Lewes to marry John Walter Cross in front of a tiny congregation made up of the groom’s family. There was still one more surprise for those who read about it later in the papers. The service was held not at the Leweses’ unofficial parish church of Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, but at the Anglican church of St George’s Hanover Square, in the heart of the West End. Here was another blow for those who had always seen Marian Lewes as incapable of hypocrisy. For an agnostic to get married in church was, said Dr Richard Congreve as tactfully as he knew how, ‘rather a queer step’.58 If she could not subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, then how could she repeat words which she did not believe in front of witnesses?
By the time London got the chance to argue these points the new Mr and Mrs Cross were safely on their honeymoon journey through France and Italy. As the letters of congratulation poured into the Priory, Charles sifted, bundled and forwarded the most important ones to the appropriate Poste Restante. Cara, in contrast to her angrily muted response of twenty-five years ago, was careful to write immediately and say that she was delighted: ‘it is a comfort to know that you have now one to protect and cherish you.’59 Charles Bray, whose differences with Lewes over phrenology had made friendship impossible, saw the chance to make a new beginning. At the end of the year he wrote asking Marian for details about her new husband’s skull, to which she was able to respond lightly, ‘I think you would be satisfied with his coronal arch which finishes a figure six feet high. If his head does not indicate fine moral qualities, it must be phrenology that is in fault.’60
Georgie Burne-Jones dashed off a letter the moment she received Marian’s, but did not send it for six weeks. Instead she ruminated, hoping, she explained subsequently, to find ‘more and brighter words’ to send.61 But those words did not come, buried under a blanket of resentment that Marian had not confided in her. So Georgie decided to send the original note, together with a plea to ‘Give me time – this was the one “change” I was unprepared for – but that is my own fault – I have no right to impute to my friends what they do not claim’.62
Barbara typically was not offended by the non-arrival of Marian’s news-bearing letter. She had in the meantime read about the marriage in the papers and dashed off a generous response:
My dear I hope and I think you will [be] happy.
Tell Johnny Cross I should have done exactly what he has done if you would have let me and I had been a man.
You see I know all love is so different that I do not see it unnatural to love in new ways – not to be unfaithful to any memory.
If I knew Mr. Lewes he would be glad as I am that you have [a] new friend.63
Both Edith Simcox and Clementia Taylor took the news, broken by Charles in person, surprisingly well. Since both loved Marian unconditionally, they wanted whatever made her happy. Edith, in any case, had recently become ‘much mellowed’ as a result of finding a focus for her passionate energy on the London School Board.64 She enclosed a thoughtful note for John Cross in her longer letter of congratulations to her Madonna.
It was, in the end, only Maria Congreve who found it hard to be happy. This may have been because she followed her husband in upholding the importance of ‘perpetual widowhood’, but also because of all Marian’s circle her devotion went back the furthest, to the Coventry where they had both been girls forty years before. On the eve of the marriage Marian had written to tell her that Charles Lewes would soon be calling with some remarkable news. Charles’s reluctance to report back to his stepmother suggests that the subsequent interview was emotional and difficult.65 Three weeks later Maria finally managed a ‘loving though brief’ letter, which was forwarded to an anxious Marian in Milan. On 10 June, by now writing from Venice, Marian attempted to explain to Maria why she had not confided the news sooner and in person. She said what she had said to other friends, that the marriage had only been decided a fortnight before it happened. This was technically true, although it had been a real possibility for well over six months. While to various people Marian had given the excuse that a bout of flu had stopped her spreading the news, to Maria she maintained that it was sensitivity to the fact that the Congreves’ niece Emily had recently been widowed that stopped her being fully frank.66
All the same, this was not the most important correspondence which Marian embarked upon now. She had received a letter, dated 17 May, from Griff House:
My dear Sister
I have much pleasure in availing myself of the present opportunity to break the long silence which has existed between us, by offering our united and sincere congratulations to you and Mr Cross.
The letter was signed ‘Your affectionate brother Isaac P Evans’.67
Marian wrote back delightedly, ‘it was a great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones.’68 In fact, Isaac’s letter was not unprompted. Marian, made optimistic by the brief note of condolence she had received on Lewes’s death from Isaac’s wife Sarah, had made a point of asking Vincent Holbeche, the family solicitor, to let her brother know the news about her marriage. She could justify this to herself on the grounds that Isaac was still in charge of sending her income from their father’s estate and so needed to know her change of name and legal status. In practice, though, this was a way of making a cautious overture, while reminding Isaac that it was he who had first chosen to communicate by solicitor. She signed her letter ‘Always your affectionate Sister, Mary Ann Cross’.
Letters which the Crosses wrote as they travelled through Paris, Lyons, Grenoble, Milan and Verona suggest that the honeymoon was going well. Marian clearly enjoyed the novelty of having ‘Sisters’ to correspond with and felt no awkwardness in telling Charles about the good time she was having in places she had previously visited with his father. Being married, and being married to Cross, delighted her: ‘we seem to love each other better than we did when we set out,’ she told Florence Cross from Milan on 25 May.69 Back in October 1879, just as she was deciding to accept Cross as a lover, she had told Elma that after a year of celibacy she feared her heart was drying up, ‘so that one has to act by rule without the tide of love to carry one’. Now she was able to write to Maria Congreve touchingly, ‘I seem to have recovered the loving sympathy that I was in danger of losing.’70
The only sign that something might be wrong comes in a letter of 6 June when Marian mentions that Cross had lost so much weight that his clothes were hanging off him. While she liked his new appearance, she told his youngest brother ominously, ‘I hope it will not turn out to be disadvantageous in any other way.’71 Later Cross’s sisters revealed to Edith Simcox that Johnny had set out on the honeymoon utterly ‘worn and ill’. They put this down to the fact that Marian had badgered him into continuing his ordinary business until the very eve of the marriage, in order not to arouse suspicion.72
Several years later, rumours of Cross’s depressive nature began to trickle out. Some said that one of his brothers was mad and that it ran in the family. Barbara Bodichon told Edith Simcox that by the time Cross met Marian he had already had at least one breakdown. His sisters, talking also to the rapt Edith, hinted that Johnny had always had a tendency to get het up under pressure.73 Whatever the exact strains which were playing on him now, the fact is that on 16 June John Cross jumped from the hotel bedroom which he and Marian were sharing on Venice’s Grand Canal. The gondoliers, who had spent the last two weeks ferrying the honeymoon couple around churches, palaces and art galleries, now rushed to fish the English signor out of the water.
Writing up the incident two years later in George Eliot’s Life, on a page defensively headed ‘Dangers of Venice’, Cross put his unspecified ‘illness’ – no mention of the desperate leap – down to an unlikely combination of bad drains, the heat and a lack of regular physical exercise, presumably lawn tennis.74 Marian’s contemporary diary, meanwhile, reflects the seriousness of the incident by falling into virtual silence. During the days following the 16th her entries become terse and businesslike, recording the arrival of doctors, the prescribing of chloral and the sending of a telegram to Willie Cross asking him to come at once.
The sniggering explanation, and the one that naturally endured in the Athenaeum and the Garrick, was that Cross was so overwhelmed by having to make physical love to an ugly old woman that he preferred death to intercourse. It was a line of reasoning which reprised all those old jokes from 1854 about Marian being a nymphomaniac whose incontinent lusts broke through every legal and social constraint. In the original 1854 rumour Lewes had been viewed as Marian’s partner in crime, a man whose urge to sexual misconduct was matched only by her own. In the 1880 version Cross was cast as the naïve virgin, and perhaps even unacknowledged homosexual, chased around the bed by a hideous, lascivious woman demanding sex. There may have been a grain of truth in this. Marian’s marriage with Lewes had been fully sexual. Her writing demonstrates a deep understanding of the power of sex in relations between men and women. It was a subject which interested her. At the age of sixty and in fragile health, she was unlikely to have anticipated a huge amount of sexual activity with her new husband, but with the rigours of the honeymoon journey perhaps she assumed that a little gentle love-making might ensue.
Why was Cross so horrified at this prospect? Perhaps he had always taken it for granted that the marriage was to be celibate. Or maybe he thought the exact opposite but found, when it came to it, that he could not bear to have sex with a woman whom he thought of as his aunt or his mother. Or perhaps it was the fact that he described his wife as ‘my ideal’, which made sex with her impossible.75
We shall never know the answers to these questions. Two days after the fateful leap Willie Cross arrived in Venice to try to calm his agitated brother. Five days on and John Cross was deemed well enough to travel. The honeymoon trio set off by gentle stages to Verona, Innsbruck, Munich and Wildbad. By now it was 8 July and Cross had rallied sufficiently in the brisk German climate for it to seem safe for Willie Cross to set out for home. The bride and groom spent a further two weeks on the Continent before travelling slowly back to Britain.
They went straight to Witley where they began a summer of gentle entertaining as if nothing had happened. Marian relished all the little rituals attached to being newly married. Having spent twenty years telling everyone how much she hated making social calls, she threw herself into visiting her husband’s three married sisters who lived at some distance. Sharp-eyed and sour-tongued observers noted that she was not always at ease on these occasions. According to Mrs (later Lady) Jebb, who met her at dinner at Six Mile Bottom:
There was not a person in the drawing-room, Mr Cross included, whose mother she might not have been, and I thought she herself felt depressed at the knowledge that nothing could make her young again . . . She adores her husband, and it seemed to me it hurt her a little to have him talk so much to me. It made her, in her pain, slightly irritated and snappish, which I did not mind, feeling that what troubled her was beyond remedy. He may forget the twenty years’ difference between them, but she never can.76
A few weeks later Marian had more to worry about than younger women chatting to her husband. In mid-September she was again suffering from kidney trouble. A trip to Brighton did not produce much improvement and by the third week of October she was in enough pain to justify calling down Dr Andrew Clark from London. By the end of November she had returned to town. But she did not go to the Priory. Before the marriage it had been arranged that she and Cross would share a new home at 4 Cheyne Walk, on Chelsea Embankment. Ever since their return to Witley in July Cross had been up to town at least once a week to supervise refurbishments and make arrangements for the transfer of furniture and books from the Priory. The fact that the temporary housekeeper installed at Cheyne Walk turned out to have a fondness for gin had not made the whole business any smoother. After four bridging days in a hotel in the Gloucester Road, the Crosses finally moved into their new home on 3 December.77
The next day, a Saturday, they went to a concert at St James Hall. It was the first public appearance of George Eliot and her new husband, and doubtless there was some nudging and surreptitious sketching. The following week seems to have been a happy one, although Cross responded to the stress of moving house with that common protest, a cold. The next Saturday the new couple went again to St James and in the evening Marian played some of the music they had heard on the piano. The following day, the 19th, Herbert Spencer and Edith Simcox both called by appointment. Spencer thought Marian looked tired; Edith cut her visit short when her beloved confessed that she had the beginnings of a sore throat.78
Over the next three days Marian’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Fighting off the throat infection put pressure on a system already weakened by kidney disease. By Wednesday lunch-time the situation was grave. Marian spent the afternoon slipping in and out of consciousness: ‘I listened to her breathing, hoping it was curing sleep,’ explained John Cross in a letter the next day to Elma Stuart, ‘but it was death coming on.’ When Dr Clark arrived at 6 p.m. he listened to the patient’s chest with a stethoscope and told Cross that her heart was giving way. Just at that moment Marian confirmed the diagnosis by whispering to Cross that she had a ‘great pain in the left side’. These were the last words she ever spoke. By 10 p.m. George Eliot was dead. Cross, battered by the ‘frightful suddenness’, could only mutter, ‘And I am left alone in this new House we meant to be so happy in.’79
At George Eliot’s funeral on 29 December at Highgate Cemetery there was a face among the chief mourners that no one could quite place. It belonged to a tall man past sixty, with strong, stern features and a slight stoop. Isaac Evans had come to pay his respects to the sister whom he so physically resembled and had not seen for nearly thirty years. Without any apparent embarrassment he took his place in the coaches that collected at Cheyne Walk, ready to follow the hearse across London to Highgate Cemetery. One wonders what on earth he had to say to his fellow chief mourners John Cross and Charles Lewes. Did he mention or explain his long estrangement from the woman they had come to bury? Or did he confine himself to a few bland, grave remarks? Did he still feel ashamed to be associated with the sister who had brought their shared surname into such disrepute? Or was he flushed with pride as he watched the great, the good and the adoring ordinary surge forward to mourn the little girl with whom he had once fished in the brown canal?
The service was once again conducted by Dr Thomas Sadler along Unitarian lines. ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’ was, inevitably, quoted during the sermon. At the end of it the coffin, covered with white flowers, was carried out to the cemetery and buried in a grave touching upon Lewes’s. The birth date on the coffin was given as 1820, not 1819. Since her thirties and possibly before, Marian had knocked a year off her age. Cross and Charles seem to have been unaware of the little deception and Isaac, presumably, was too gallant to say anything.
The delay between George Eliot’s death and funeral is not explained simply by Christmas intervening. John Cross, elevated now to Chief Worshipper, wanted his wife buried in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. In the general run of things there would have been no problem about her joining Shakespeare, Dr Johnson and Dickens, all of whom are remembered there. But right from the start it was clear that Dean Stanley, although a personal friend of the Leweses, would find it difficult to sanction a place for a woman who for so long had ignored the sanctity of marriage and expressed doubts about the literal truth of Christianity. It was a position which various friends and admirers of the Leweses, including T. H. Huxley, understood. Others like Herbert Spencer, Edward Burne-Jones and Henry Sidgwick felt that George Eliot should take her rightful place among the great men of English letters and wrote to tell the Dean so.
One of this latter group, John Tyndall, informed Stanley in a letter written on Christmas Day that he had been told – by Cross, presumably – that it was ‘the expressed wish of George Eliot to be buried in Westminster Abbey’.80 If this is true, then it is yet another twist in the tale of the oddly principled yet pragmatic life of Marian Lewes. Ever since she had been cast off for going to live with Lewes, she had proudly rejected any attempts to re-integrate her back into the heart of society. Princesses had been made to wait their turn; peeresses had their invitations to dinner rejected; foreigners heavy with decorations were told that a meeting was impossible. But now, after death, Marian Lewes was hinting that she was not immune to the pleasures of celebrity after all.
But society turned her down. A few days after Christmas it was clear that permission was not going to be granted for burial at the Abbey and Cross quietly dropped the campaign. This was Marian’s worst nightmare come to life. She had dared, as she had never done before, to reach out to the Establishment and ask to be given her rightful place. And the Establishment had snubbed her, just as she had always been terrified that a fellow dinner guest or knowing shopkeeper might turn his or her back and walk away.
In the end, it seems fitting that Marian Evans Lewes should have been buried next to George Henry Lewes, the man who had made her life possible. The great and the good might not have wanted her in their midst, but there was one man, a little ridiculous but totally loving, who contrived to reach out to her in death as he had always done in life.