Creators (17 page)

But the outstanding example of plainness fostering genius and leading to fulfillment is George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880). She was almost grotesquely plain, while radiating intelligence, wit, and laughter, at any rate as a young woman; later she became more solemn.
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But no man ever proposed to her until after she made herself rich and famous. Her father was an estate agent, like Wordsworth’s, and was mean, especially to her: after she nursed him devotedly for years, all he left her was £2,000 in trust, enough to produce an income of £90 a year but not enough to live on even then. She faced what she called the “horrible disgrace of spinsterhood” and, in order to remain respectable, lived with the family of her unpleasant, disapproving elder brother, Isaac, and spent her time in plain sewing, playing the piano, and reading to
her nephews and nieces in a household of conventional religious and social observance which was to her stiffeningly narrow. Marian (as she called herself after about 1851) was not a forceful character, being shy and painfully conscious of her homely appearance, and still more of her powerlessness in a man’s world. But she was not without courage and self-knowledge, and knew that, given the smallest chance, she could make a living in the world. Having acquired a good knowledge of German, French, and Italian, she chose translation as her best entry into the world of letters, broke with her father over religion, went to London, and set herself up in lodgings there. Her translations of important German books, such as David Friedrich Strauss’s
Life of Jesus
, were warmly received, and she established herself at the
Westminster Review
, a well-regarded liberal publication, where she soon made herself indispensable. In effect, she became its editor, though the nominal title, and salary, naturally went to a man.
¹⁰

Marian Evans was a highly emotional, not to say amorous woman, and if she could have married a man of anything approaching her own intelligence, she might have been perfectly happy, given birth to many children, and never written a novel. The trouble was that she was neither pretty nor handsome. Frederick Locker wrote: “Her countenance was equine. Her head had been intended for a much larger woman. Her garments concealed her outline, they gave her a waist like a milestone.” Jane Carlyle observed: “She looks Propriety personified. Oh, so
slow
!” Evans fell in love repeatedly—for example with Herbert Spencer, to us a fusty, flyblown figure; founder of that pseudoscience sociology; writer of now unreadable books; and celebrated chiefly for his curious saying, “A proficiency at billiards is a sure sign of a misspent youth.” Spencer, despite his personal faults, evidently attracted clever women; he also inspired a passion in Beatrix Potter (later Webb), who was not only brilliant in intellect but beautiful and rich. Evans worshipped him, and she wrote him a remarkable and shameless letter, in effect a proposal of marriage:

It must have taken great courage to compose, and still more to send, this letter, which inspired great terror in the recipient. Evans went on:

However, Spencer was unresponsive, as he was to Beatrix Potter later. He never married, though he once shared a house with two maiden ladies, eventually quarreling with both of them.

If Marian Evans had induced Spencer to marry her, the likelihood is that she would not have become a writer of fiction, of which he strongly disapproved. Denied marriage, she moved in an overwhelmingly masculine society. She was often the only woman present at dinners and meetings for public intellectual or cultural purposes, for instance a gathering at 142 Strand in May 1852, presided over by Dickens, to protest against the booksellers’ cartel. Given her ardent temperament, it was inevitable that she would sooner or later become the mistress of a literary man, and this happened in 1854 when her choice fell on G. H. Lewes, a miscellaneous writer of wide gifts but no genius. He had been married for many years, to a woman who took lovers and had children by them (one of her lovers was Thornton Hunt, Leigh Hunt’s son), but for legal reasons could not divorce her. He and Evans lived together, and she then called herself Mrs. Lewes, until his death. Her brother Isaac
forbade her family to have any further contact with her, and for a time she felt spurned and isolated, though she was at home in the largely male society of literary-journalistic London.

Things changed radically when she became a successful novelist. In this regard, Lewes proved invaluable. He recognized her talent for fiction the moment he saw “Amos Barton,” the first tale in what became
Scenes of Clerical Life
. In November 1856, he sent it to the publisher John Blackwood in Edinburgh; and the
Scenes
as a whole were published (in 1858) with sufficient success to encourage her to write a full-length novel. This was
Adam Bede
, published in 1859 and an immediate best seller, with 10,000 copies sold in the first year alone. Then and after, she benefited both from Blackwood’s generosity and from Lewes’s business acumen. The manuscript of
Adam Bede
, in the British Library, is headed by the words “To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this MS of a work which could never have been written but for the happiness which his love has conferred on my life.” In fact, though, she was experiencing depression at this time, brought on by Isaac’s cruel behavior and by the death (from tuberculosis) of her sister Chris-sey, whom she had not been allowed to see.

Still, she worked through the sadness by writing her superb autobiographical novel
The Mill on the Floss
, exorcising her grief by describing herself as the delightful but tragic Maggie Tulliver and Isaac as Tom Tulliver, though Tom is characterized by love and warmth which Isaac lacked, and which reflect the author’s greatness of spirit. This beautiful and poignant tale, one of the finest novels ever written, became Queen Victoria’s favorite, and that of many of her subjects. (It sold 4,600 copies on the first four days of publication.) There followed, in steady succession,
Silas Marner
,
Romola
,
Felix Holt
, and
Middlemarch
(1872), the last a commercial and critical success of a high order, bringing George Eliot acclaim as the successor to Charles Dickens, who had died in 1870. By now she was rich, and the tables were turned. She was increasingly recognized not only as a storyteller of extraordinary gifts but as a moral mentor of formidable power. Polite society, far from shunning, queued up at her door and was often refused admittance. By the 1870s the Leweses’ drawing room was known as one of the most exclusive. Moreover, Eliot’s fame was global.
Romola
, set in
Renaissance Italy, was overresearched and was not enthusiastically received in England, but it was read and revered throughout continental Europe. And
Daniel Deronda
, set in the Jewish diaspora, was enormously influential among emancipated Jews, then emerging from the ghettos and taking a leading part in intellectual and cultural life. Indeed this book became one of the formative documents of the new Zionism, which emerged in the 1890s in the wake of the Dreyfus case and was the first decisive step in the creation of Israel. There was a spirit of high seriousness about George Eliot to which Dickens and Thackeray never aspired. Among the Europeans, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, even Hugo never managed to strike the same philosophical note of seerlike wisdom. (Eliot was well described, by Leslie Stephen, as the “Mercian Sybil.”) Only Tolstoy is a comparable figure.
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It is a pity that Marian Evans had to go down in literary history saddled with a masculine pseudonym. However, her pen name was not so degrading as “George Sand,” which dated from Aurore Dudevant’s collaboration with Jules Sandeau; in fact, Dudevant wrote first as “Jules Sand.” In Evans’s case, the pseudonym was adopted because of the difficulties raised by her liaison with Lewes, and was a horrible burden to her, particularly since a nonentity called Joseph Jiggins was identified in the gossip columns as the real George Eliot and for many years obstinately refused to disavow the falsehood. By the time her work was published, in the 1850s, it was no longer necessary, as a rule, for a woman novelist to write under a man’s name. Actually, Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth had written under their own names half a century earlier. Jane Austen, once she attached any name at all to her writings, insisted on her own. Mrs. Gaskell used her own name from the start, though before the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act, her earnings were appropriated by the Rev. Mr. Gaskell (“‘Look, my dear,’ she told him, ‘see what Mr Dickens [then editing
Household Words
] has sent me for my little story, a cheque for a hundred pounds!’ ‘So he has,’ her husband replied, taking the cheque and complacently putting it into his waistcoat pocket.”) It is true that the Brontës, whose work was first published in the 1840s, used the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, deliberately concealing their sex. But that tiresome practice was by then unusual and needless;
and George Eliot was a victim of prejudice rather than convention.
¹³

It is instructive to compare Eliot with Jane Austen. Eliot achieved astonishing success and fame in her own lifetime, whereas Austen, though she did become known, was still comparatively obscure at the time of her death. Sales of Austen’s books did not overtake Eliot’s until the middle of the twentieth century, though they now far surpass Eliot’s; indeed, today Austen is more widely read than even Dickens, at any rate in the English-speaking world. Eliot was in every way a better-read and more fully educated woman than Austen, fluent in languages, knowledgeable in history, theology, and philosophy; a woman able to argue, on almost any serious subject, with any man in Europe. Austen, by contrast, was educated perhaps adequately (for her sex and station) but certainly not well; was well-read only in novels; was a poor speller; and professed the lowest possible opinion of her qualifications to launch herself in literature.

What Austen had, however, was a gift or characteristic more important than any other qualification: the creative spirit. The record shows that, from her earliest years, as soon as she could read properly and write fluently, she had an urge—it would not be too strong to say a compulsion—to create. It expressed itself in verse and prose, but in either form in the telling of stories on paper, stories that had almost certainly begun as fireside tales, told to her siblings or just to herself. It is hard to think of any author who had this compulsion in such a natural, strong, undiluted form.

Jane was the second-youngest child in a large family (originally ten) mainly of boys: she and her elder sister, Cassandra, were the only girls. Jane was small, dark, sparkling, always laughing, full of jokes and inventiveness, superbly observant from a very early age, and as she grew older increasingly sharp. The remark about herself most to be treasured, for it goes to the heart of her creative personality, is: “Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.” Austen grasped, as a mere girl, that human beings and their daily behavior were a source of endless laughter, as they kept themselves afloat, bobbing on the waves of existence. As the daughter of a country rector, whose profession automatically designated him a gentleman, and
with family connections which, in a few cases, were almost grand, she was a member of England’s social pride, its hugely extensive middle class, whose higher reaches merged imperceptibly with the gentry, with glimpses even of the nobility. This position gave her an admirable perch from which to observe a wide spectrum of society; and her connections gave her an occasional opportunity to stay at houses considerably more affluent than her own (and to attend dances not easy of admission). So, in her birdlike way, she was able to hop to twigs much higher up the tree, and take in the activities and twitter there too. Indeed, I calculate that her social position, both in its strengths and in its precariousness, was exactly such as to give her the best and most extensive materials for novels of gentle social satire.
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That apart, Jane’s background was not such as to make a literary career easy. For one thing, she never had a room of her own. It is true that when her father was an active clergyman, with a vicarage, she and Cassandra were able, despite the large size of the family, to share a sitting room of their own—a sparsely furnished but spacious attic, where Cassandra, a budding artist, drew and made watercolors and Jane scribbled. This space was a rare privilege. It appears in
Mansfield Park
, when the young Fanny is given an unoccupied attic room by her kind cousin, Edmund, and allowed to make it her own, for reading and writing in all the comforts of privacy. To a sensitive and imaginative creature like Jane Austen, privacy was one of the keenest of blessings; and she shows it operating in Fanny’s case, but then being cruelly withdrawn in the second half of the book: Fanny declines what seems to be a suitable marriage to Henry Crawford and then is sentenced to a term with her natural family in Portsmouth and has to endure the squalor, noise, narrowness, and, above all, total lack of privacy of a lower-middle-class home. The fact that Austen shared her own precious sitting room with her sister was no drawback. One of the greatest advantages she enjoyed, from early childhood, till her death, was the love and intimate friendship of Cassandra. Their mother said that Jane wanted to share everything with her elder sister, “So that if Cassandra were to have her head taken off Jane would want to lose hers too.” Their closeness and their ability to share secrets and ideas was probably the single most important factor in Jane’s life, and the
one most helpful to the development of her skills. She knew it: hence the contrast she draws, in the most personal of her novels,
Persuasion
, between her own good fortune and the sadness of poor Anne Elliot, who can share nothing with her sisters—the haughty, unfeeling Elizabeth and the petty, selfish Mary. The shared upstairs room at the rectory, with Cassandra always available to consult, help, share jokes, and judge childish writings, was the real nursery of one of the finest talents in English literature.