George Eliot (16 page)

Once the exhilaration of being released from her task had settled, Mary Ann was in a position to assess the Strauss experience. Despite her dedication, a strain of ambivalence runs through her comments about the whole business of translation. It was, when all was said and done, not original or creative work, but ‘trifling’ stuff. She resented having had to worry about whether or not Parkes would come through with the money for something which was ‘not important enough to demand the sacrifice of one’s whole soul’.
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Even at this stage Mary Ann knew that she wanted to be something more than a mediator of other people’s words, although in later life she told a correspondent that at this point she stayed with translation because she felt that it was all she could do well.
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Although she had completed three substantial translations by the time she started to write fiction, she never drew attention to the fact and would have been quite happy for her involvement in them to have remained little known.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of Strauss her loftiness concealed considerable pride in her achievement. She was pleased with Charles Wicksteed’s review in the
Prospective Review
praising the ‘faithful, elegant, and scholarlike translation’.
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And when an
old school friend approached her for advice about how she might earn her living as a translator, Mary Ann was quick to defend her own patch. Although she conceded that Miss Bradley Jenkins was clever, she poured scorn on her assumption that ‘she could sit from morn till noon, from noon till dewy eve, translating German or French without feeling the least fatigue’.
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It was one thing for Mary Ann Evans to think translation beneath her, quite another for an old classmate to assume she could do the same thing just as well.

One important legacy of the Strauss years was the deepening of Mary Ann’s friendship with Sara Hennell. They had first met by proxy, during those difficult months of the holy war in the spring of 1842. From Cara, Mary Ann had heard all about her clever elder sister who had worked as a governess to the Bonham Carter family. Sara, meanwhile, followed the trials of Cara’s interesting young neighbour through the letters she regularly received from Rosehill. The two women were finally introduced that summer, when Sara spent one of her many holidays in Coventry. Six weeks of music and talk laid the foundations of a friendship which would become the most important of both women’s lives for the next few years.

In many ways Sara Hennell was a clever, sophisticated version of that first governess in Mary Ann’s life, Maria Lewis. While Miss Lewis worked in the house of a Midlands clergyman, Miss Hennell had taught the daughters of a wealthy, cultured Unitarian Liberal MP. Instead of a relationship with her employers marked by resentment and insecurity, Sara Hennell was treated respectfully, enjoying the friendship of her eldest pupil long after she had ceased to teach her. While Maria Lewis’s notions of good behaviour were provincial and old-fashioned, Sara Hennell was used to fitting gracefully into life in the best circles. Most significantly, while Miss Lewis remained narrowly Evangelical, Sara Hennell set out from the Unitarianism of her childhood to explore and expand her faith through careful study of the new biblical criticism. She followed her brother Charles into print, publishing several books on theology throughout her long life.

When Mary Ann handed the letters she had so abruptly demanded back from Maria Lewis to Sara, she was signposting
the similarities in the position the two women occupied in her life. Like Maria, Sara was located at a convenient distance, available for holiday visits and intense correspondence, but not the tedium and messiness of everyday contact. Mary Ann’s letters to Sara are less self-enclosed than those to Maria, but still there is a sense that she uses them as a way of exploring her own thoughts rather than as a means of exchanging ideas and feelings. One of the first letters she writes to Sara is the important reassessment of the lesson learned during the holy war, in which she elevates the community of feeling over the hair-splitting of intellectual debate. Throughout the correspondence it is Sara’s job to provide an informed listening ear rather than a provocative intervention in her young friend’s flow of thought. It is the idea of Sara, rather than Sara herself, which becomes the enabling force.

Mary Ann was guiltily aware of the narcissism running through her correspondence and indeed, the first few letters to Sara recall the early ones to Maria Lewis in their anxiety about appearing egotistical. ‘An unfortunate lady wrote a note, one page of which contained thirty I’s. I dare not count mine lest they should equal hers in number.’
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However, after a tentative start in which Mary Ann struggled to find a voice to speak to the Sara whom she held in her mind’s eye, the correspondence started to flow. Within a year, Mary Ann was addressing Sara as ‘
Liebe Gemahlinn’, ‘Cara Sposa
’ and ‘Beloved Achates’ – all terms which claimed her as something more than a friend.

Eliot’s early biographers, from her husband John Cross right down to Gordon Haight in the 1960s, felt uncomfortable with the language of sexual affection the two women used to one another. Cross simply left out the offending passages, while Haight anxiously explained them away in terms of contemporary conventions of female friendship. In fact, the language in the letters exceeds that used by even the closest women friends during the period. ‘This letter is only to tell you how sweet the genuine words of love in your letter to Cara have been to my soul. That you should really wish for me is a thought which I keep by me as a little cud to chew now and then,’ writes Mary Ann on 15 November 1847.
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Eighteen months later Mary Ann is teasing Sara with the idea that she may have been unfaithful. ‘I have
given you a sad excuse for flirtation, but I have not been beyond seas long enough to make it lawful for you to take a new husband – therefore I come back to you with all a husband’s privileges and command you to love me … I sometimes talk to you in my soul as lovingly as Solomon’s Song.’
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By the autumn of 1842 it was already a joke in the Bray – Hennell circle that Mary Ann fell in love with everyone she met. At twenty-three she was still searching for that intense maternal love which her own mother had been unable to provide at the crucial stage in her development. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, neither Watts nor Brabant had been in a position to give her the kind of replacement mothering she craved. Both had backed off with differing degrees of grace. Sara Hennell, however, was in an altogether different position. Single and living with her mother, she was emotionally free to enter into an intense and absorbing relationship. Seven years older to the week than Mary Ann, she was young enough to seem a contemporary in the way that Maria Lewis never had, yet sufficiently mature to take on the role of mentor and nurturer.

The erotic language which Mary Ann used is a signal of the insecurity she felt about just how much Sara really loved her. By playing with ideas of possession, fidelity, flirtation and jealousy, she was both expressing and containing her fear that Sara might abandon her, just as Isaac Evans, Francis Watts, Robert Brabant and Robert Evans had all done. Yet by the time she was using analogies to Solomon’s Song in 1849 – the most explicitly erotic section of the Old Testament – she was already less dependent on the relationship. This echoed the pattern with Maria Lewis: it was at the point when Mary Ann wanted to leave the friendship that her declarations of love became most extravagant.

The reasons for the drift apart were familiar too. If Mary Ann was the one who used the language of love, it was Sara whose feelings stood the test of time. Unattached to any man except her brother, Sara’s devotion to Mary Ann did not wax and wane every time an interesting diversion appeared. Mary Ann, by contrast, used her relationship with Sara as a small child would her mother – as a secure emotional base from which to explore the world. Five years into the friendship the discrepancy in the amount the women needed one another started to show. Just like
Maria Lewis, Sara expressed her insecurity about the strength of Mary Ann’s attachment in governessy comments about the inappropriateness of her behaviour with the opposite sex. ‘Poor little Miss Hennell’, reported Edith Simcox in 1885, ‘apparently always disapproved of Marian for depending so much on the arm of man.’
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Hand in hand with this emotional estrangement there went an intellectual one. In July 1848, during a season in which all Europe was in revolt against the old ways, Mary Ann wrote to Sara defending her new regard for the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand. From her tone it is clear that she felt or knew that Sara would disapprove of her reading authors whose names were synonymous with sexual freedom and political revolt. ‘I wish you thoroughly to understand that the writers who have most profoundly influenced me … are not in the least oracles to me … For instance it would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were to stun me with proofs that Rousseau’s view of life, religion, and government are miserably erroneous.’ The point was, she maintained, that it was Rousseau’s art which had made her look at the world in quite a different way, sending ‘that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has awakened me to new perceptions’.
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George Sand had an even more wretched personal reputation than Rousseau in Britain. A woman who dressed as a man and lived apart from her husband stood out in comparison with Elizabeth Gaskell and even the eccentric Brontës. Mary Ann, who as a novelist would become known as ‘the English George Sand’, worked hard to reassure Sara that she was not about to take the original as her model. ‘I should never dream of going to her writings as a moral code or text-book.’ What excited her, she said, was that, like Rousseau, Sand was able ‘to delineate human passion and its results’.
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Both these French writers might lead irregular lives and be indifferent literary stylists, but their ability to see characters truly and whole moved her with a sense of what the novel might achieve.

During the height of her friendship with Sara Hennell – 1843 to 1848 – there was no room in Mary Ann’s life for another significant emotional attachment. Not that that stopped her family
trying to find her suitable suitors. The ‘problem’ of Mary Ann’s singleness continued to rumble on, with Isaac always ready to hint that she was being selfish by remaining a drain on her family’s resources. Even the sensible Fanny Houghton, her half-sister, was keen to introduce Mary Ann to potential partners. In March 1845 she told Mary Ann about a young picture restorer working on the big house at Baginton, who she thought might be suitable. A meeting was arranged and, true to form, within two days Mary Ann was bewitched, believing the boy to be ‘the most interesting young man she had seen and superior to all the rest of mankind’. On the third day the young man made an informal proposal through Mr Houghton saying ‘she was the most fascinating creature he had ever beheld, that if it were not too presumptuous to hope etc. etc., a person of such superior excellence and powers of mind’. Turning down a definite engagement, Mary Ann none the less gave permission for him to write. Cara describes the girl as ‘brimful of happiness; – though she said she had not fallen in love with him yet, but admired his character so much that she was sure she should’.
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This was the first time that Mary Ann had been involved with a man who was available and who returned her feelings. The fact that both Francis Watts and Robert Brabant were older and married had allowed her to express intense longing, safe in the knowledge that no commitment would be required of her. With the young picture restorer it was different. Now that real emotional engagement was on offer, Mary Ann backed off. In the few days following her return from Baginton she was racked with dreadful headaches, which only leeches could relieve. By the time the young man appeared at Foleshill she had decided that he wouldn’t do at all ‘owing to his great agitation, from youth – or something or other’, reported Cara vaguely to Sara. The next day Mary Ann ‘made up her mind that she could never love or respect him enough to marry him and that it would involve too great a sacrifice of her mind and pursuits’.
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However, Mary Ann did not get any relief from giving the young man her decision, especially when her letter ending the affair crossed with his to Mr Evans asking for permission to marry her. All she felt was enormous guilt at having led him on. She toyed with the idea of starting the relationship up again. ‘Not
that she cares much for him,’ reported Cara, ‘but she is so grieved to have wounded his feelings.’
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But there may have been more to it than that. On 21 April, three weeks after what was supposed to be her final decision, Mary Ann is writing to Martha Jackson about the relationship as if it may continue. ‘What should you say to my becoming a wife?… I did meditate an engagement, but I have determined, whether wisely or not I cannot tell, to defer it, at least for the present.’
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Although Mary Ann had no real interest in this particular man, she was enjoying the experience of being the courted one, the adored. An offer of marriage, no matter how unsuitable, brought her into the fold of ordinary, lovable women.

To Sara, however, she gives a very different version of events. A letter written two weeks before the one to Martha Jackson speaks as though the relationship is well and truly a thing of the past. ‘I have now dismissed it from my mind, and only keep it recorded in my book of reference, article
“Precipitancy, ill effects of”
.’ She ends by confirming that her first allegiance is to Sara whose ‘true Gemahlinn’ or wife she is, which ‘means that I have no loves but those that you can share with me – intellectual and religious loves’.
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At this relatively early stage in their friendship Mary Ann was anxious not to alienate Sara by any suggestion of ‘infidelity’. At the age of twenty-five her emotional allegiance was still to an unavailable partner, a woman. It would be nearly another decade before she would risk falling in love – this time lastingly – with an almost available man.