Throughout this tale I have mixed fiction with the detail of real lives in outrageous ways. I have used real names, real documents, existing evidence. And that was always part of my plan. Truth and the imagination are not at odds with each other. This story weaves fictitious characters, both George Eliot’s and my own, into the recorded histories of the writer and her entourage. I wanted fiction and history, as the historian Richard Holmes once put it, speaking of the biographer and his subject, to shake hands across time. I intended to write a Victorian comedy of manners, which had, as all comedy must do, a darker and more sinister set of shadows at the edge. For what would it be like, as a writer, to be forced by someone else, someone in some future time, to spend years in the company of people you invented purely for your own pleasure, and to be answerable to them?
The ambiguity of my relationship to George Eliot is noted in the epigraphs. I have always adored her work with a passion not unlike the one Edith Simcox harboured for the lady herself. I doubt that I would have much liked Marian Evans Lewes. But I would have fallen in love with George Eliot in the 1870s, just as I did one hundred years later, and revered her power, both as a writer and as an intellectual. I began reading her last great books first: Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda and then, in the summer of 1973, Romola. I have read all she wrote many times since then, and I have had the honour of teaching her work to generations of students. But the grain of resentment one writer always feels for another whom she hails as ‘Master’ – and I use that word advisedly – would not dissolve. I have not loved her unchangeably, as Edith did.
My starting point was the coincidence of my name and that of her German publishers. Duncker Verlag of Berlin did and still does exist. I first noticed the connection while I was reading George Eliot’s Journals. She recorded the £30 paid to her by ‘Duncker of Berlin’. Duncker is not an uncommon name in Holland and Germany. At that moment I was merely amused, but then the seed began to grow. If someone who bore my name had been so closely connected to the writer I loved, why should I not take his place? Eliot was as fascinated by the relationship of mentor and disciple as I am, both as a subject for fiction and as a personal drama in the drawing room. It is a relationship that recurs in her novels and one that she cultivated in her personal life. She set herself up as a Great Teacher. I have always been one of her disciples. But it is in the nature of the disciple to question and challenge the Master, even as you fight alongside her throughout your writing life.
I have deliberately written a Neo-Victorian novel that follows the method of John Fowles’s powerfully awful tale, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles’s Victorian narrative is set in 1867; his narrator is a thinly veiled version of Fowles himself, whose character, a pompous sexual know-all, speaks from the patronising distance of the late 1960s. My story follows the last triumphant years of George Eliot’s writing life, from the autumn of 1872 in Homburg through to her death in London in 1880. My narrator, the other voice in this fiction, is a sceptical young woman of Sophie’s age, very firmly based in the present day, that is, in the second decade of the twenty-first century. She has never been as infatuated with George Eliot as I am, and I followed her into the past.
Readers who long to know the truth, in so far as it can ever be known, concerning George Eliot’s life, and who wish to disentangle her facts from my fictions, and indeed from her own, would be wise to read the novels first and then, perhaps, begin to read their way around the vast list of biographical and critical studies that exist. Here are the books that made all the difference to me. I wish to acknowledge that debt and record my thanks. My first biographical port of call was, of course, Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), which I first read in 1976. All critics and scholars studying Eliot’s work have good cause to be grateful to him, even when they disagree with his approach and conclusions, as I do. Haight is the editor of the 9-volume edition of The George Eliot Letters (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1954–55, 1978). Eliot’s first biographer was John Walter Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, 3 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1885). Her Journals are edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnstone: The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Eliot’s contemporary biographers are numerous, and over the years I read Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (London: The Bodley Head, 1975), Jennifer Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987), Ina Taylor, George Eliot: Woman of Contradictions (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). Rosemary Ashton is the witty and scholarly biographer both of G.H. Lewes and of Eliot herself: G. H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and George Eliot: A Life (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996). She gives quite wonderful, persuasive readings of Eliot’s works and sends us all, as readers, straight back to the novels. Kathryn Hughes’s George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1999) is delightfully irreverent, and I learned a great deal from Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans. George Eliot, Her Letters, and Her Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Among the many critical studies of George Eliot’s work, Gillian Beer’s George Eliot (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986) was the one I read and reread, alongside her classic work on Darwin, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). But the documentary source which transformed my understanding of my ‘vindictive little game’ remains Edith Simcox’s Journal, A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox’s Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, eds. Constance M. Fulmer and Margaret E. Barfield (London: Taylor and Francis, 1998). Edith fell deeply and irrevocably in love both with Marian Evans Lewes and with the mind of George Eliot; her journals are devastating in the rawness of the feelings she records. She loved and lost ‘the master mistress of her passion’. She was not writing for publication, and she was there.
France 2014