George Eliot (17 page)

It was not just the Evans clan who tried to matchmake Mary Ann. Although Robert and Isaac were convinced that the Brays were cavalierly indifferent to her marriage prospects, in fact, Cara was quietly working away behind the scenes. In July 1844, returning from a holiday in the Lake District, the Brays took Mary Ann to stay with Cara’s young cousins in Manchester. The two young men, Philip and Frank, escorted the party round the city on a fact-finding mission to see whether Engels’s recently published description of the slums was accurate. It was. Cara wrote in horror to her sister-in-law Rufa, ‘The streets and houses where humans do actually live and breathe there are worse than a book can tell.’
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But this was not her only disappointment. ‘I wish friend Philip would fall in love with her [Mary Ann],’ she
wrote wistfully to her mother a few weeks later, ‘but there certainly were no symptoms of it.’
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But at the party’s next stop, in Liverpool, romance seemed more likely. One of the guests at dinner was William Ballantyne Hodgson, Principal of the Liverpool Mechanics Institute, who was interested in the increasingly popular subjects of mesmerism and clairvoyance. He put Mary Ann in a hypnotic trance, which terrified her, since she was unable to open her eyes ‘and begged him most piteously to do it for her’.
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Hodgson’s concentration on Mary Ann during dinner suggests a definite romantic interest in her. Writing to a friend afterwards he described the evening as ‘Altogether a delightful party’ and admiringly listed the modern and classic languages which the extraordinary Miss Evans was able to read.
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Men like Hodgson, Watts, Brabant and Bray who expressed a fascination with Mary Ann’s mind were used to mixing with clever women. Far from being comfortable with the simpering Angel in the House, the women in their lives were educated, well read and independent-thinking. So it is a clue to Mary Ann’s outstanding intellectual and spiritual radiance that she was so consistently the object of male attention. Indeed, the American poet Emerson, who met her during a visit to Rosehill in July 1848, could only repeat over and over to Charles Bray, ‘That young lady has a calm, serious soul.’
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Hodgson and Emerson came into contact with Mary Ann only briefly. Other men, equally swept up by the exhilaration of talking to a woman whose mind ranged as widely as their own, found their lives profoundly altered by contact with Mary Ann Evans. John Sibree, the elder brother of her pupil Mary, was studying to become an Independent minister at Spring Hill College, Birmingham. Like Sara Hennell, he had made Mary Ann’s acquaintance by proxy, through letters which Mary had written to him while he was at Halle University, describing the drama of the holy war. During one of his holidays from Spring Hill, Sibree finally got to meet the woman about whom he had heard so much. Characteristically, they forged their friendship by reading Greek together and, once Sibree returned to college in Birmingham, the correspondence continued. The letters which Mary Ann wrote to Sibree during the first half of 1848 are unlike any others she was to write during her whole life. As performance-oriented
as ever, she none the less imagines him as a very different audience from Sara Hennell or Maria Lewis. This time she is at pains to show herself as a fun, flirtatious and even daring woman. For instance, Hannah More, whose pious work she had used to recommend to all and sundry, is now dismissed as ‘that most disagreeable of all monsters, a bluestocking – a monster that can only exist in a miserably false state of society, in which a woman with but a smattering of learning or philosophy is classed along with singing mice and card playing pigs’.
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Doubtless Mary Ann was attempting to distance herself from the drab image of a bluestocking, all the while trying to impress Sibree with her references to Handel, Hegel and Disraeli.

The letters to Sibree are also unusual in discussing politics. Throughout her life Mary Ann seldom mentioned contemporary events. But in spring 1848, with much of Europe in turmoil, it was impossible not to be drawn in. To those who know her in her mature incarnation as a conservative thinker, Mary Ann’s brash enthusiasm for sudden change comes as a shock. She starts off by using the language of the barricades: ‘decayed monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have a hospital for them, or a sort of Zoological Garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be preserved’. Of Louis Philippe, who with his ‘moustachioed sons’ had recently escaped to Britain, ‘for heaven’s sake preserve me from sentimentalizing over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions of unfed souls and bodies’. Victoria, meanwhile, is ‘our little humbug of a queen’. When it comes to predicting whether revolution will happen in Britain, Mary Ann has already identified her country’s unique capacity for slow constitutional change which, as a mature writer, she would elevate over political solutions. Writing to Sibree, however, she sees this as second-best to the thrill of revolution: ‘There is nothing in our constitution to obstruct the slow progress of
political
reform. This is all we are fit for at present. The social reform which may prepare us for great changes is more and more the object of effort both in Parliament and out of it. But we English are slow crawlers.’
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Whenever Mary Ann engaged with a man intellectually, her emotions were not far behind. The tone of the Sibree letters quickly turned personal. On 8 March 1848 she ticked him off
for writing too formally and asked for some details about his innermost life. ‘Every one talks of himself or herself to me,’ she boastfully claims and demands that he write to her about his religious beliefs. ‘I want you to write me a Confession of Faith – not merely
what
you believe but why you believe it.’
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Sibree had already read Mary Ann’s translation of Strauss and was starting to have his doubts about his calling. The act of marshalling an account of his faith seems to have been the final stage in resolving to abandon the ministry. This was, of course, a massive step for, as Mary Sibree explained decades later to John Cross, ‘the giving up of the ministry to a young man without other resources was no light matter’.
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Just how influential Mary Ann was in Sibree’s decision to give up his orthodox faith is not absolutely clear. Certainly she read the letters which Mrs Sibree and Mary wrote to John during the whole crisis, and she herself enclosed a letter with the former’s correspondence. In this letter she says, ‘You have my hearty and not inexperienced sympathy … I have gone through a trial of the same genus as yours … I sincerely rejoice in the step you have taken – it is an absolutely necessary condition for any true development of your nature.’
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While the Sibrees had been tolerant and understanding when Mary Ann had given up church-going, it was quite a different matter when their own son took a similar course. It is not clear how much they blamed Mary Ann for influencing him, but they certainly felt she played a significant part. From 1848 Mary Ann had fewer meetings with Mary and the German lessons seem to have stopped. When Mary Ann moved to Geneva for eight months in 1849, Mary Sibree asked her to write to her care of Rosehill, presumably because she did not want her parents to know that their friendship was continuing. Mary Ann refused, telling the Brays: ‘Please to give my love to her [Mary] and tell her that I cannot carry on a correspondence with anyone who will not avow it.’ Perhaps she was feeling particularly annoyed with all things Sibree because Mr Sibree senior had just turned up with his brother in Geneva, which Mary Ann thought ‘a piece of impertinent curiosity’, suspecting that they had come to spy on her.
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In the same way that she had been scathing about Brabant, Mary Ann now declared that Mr Sibree, whom she had
once wanted as a substitute father, looked ‘silly’ while his brother was ‘vulgar-looking’.
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She could not get over her hurt that the Sibrees had not given her the total understanding she craved. They were, she said in a later letter, benignly selfish, exhibiting ‘the egotism that eats up all the bread and butter and is ready to die of confusion and distress after having done it’.
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As the John Sibree episode suggests, Mary Ann’s relationships with men during this period were tinder-box affairs. She formed sudden bonds with dramatic results. Either she was thrown out of their house, or they were thrown out of a job. There were tears and headaches, and leeches and embarrassments, which in some cases lasted down the years. She began to despair that anyone would want a peaceful, sustained relationship with her. Often known as Polly, an old Warwickshire form of ‘Mary’, she allowed Sara to make an unflattering pun on her name by changing it again to ‘Pollian’, a play on Apollyon, the monster in Revelation who also makes an appearance in
Pilgrim’s Progress
. It chimed with her growing sense of herself as repulsive and wrong. In October 1846 she wrote an extended fantasy for Charles Bray – surely influenced by her reading of Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
– in which she pictures herself as an old, ugly translator whose only hope now is to form a rational marriage with a dusty old German theologian. ‘The other day as I was sitting in my study, Mary [Sibree] came with a rather risible cast of expression to deliver to me a card, saying that a gentleman was below requesting to see me. The name on the card ran thus – Professor Bücherwurm, Moderig University [Professor Bookworm of Musty University] … ’ The professor then addresses Mary Ann:

Mary Ann then describes herself as responding: ‘I thought it possible we might come to terms, always provided he acceded to my irrevocable conditions. “For you must know, learned Professor,” I said, “that I require nothing more in a husband than to save me from the horrific disgrace of spinster-hood and to take me out of England.”’
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Professor Bookworm is clearly based on that German professor of theology to whom Mary Ann had already given up two years of her life, D. F. Strauss. And although she could not have known it at the time, it was Strauss who would, by a twisted turn of events, rescue Mary Ann from spinsterhood. In the meantime, however, it was another crisis altogether that would take her out of England.

B
Y THE END
of the 1840s, that most stormy of decades for Britain, life had been transformed for nearly everyone in Mary Ann’s circle. Unsettled by the revolutions in Europe, John Sibree had rebelled against his family culture, thrown over the ministry and opted for the precarious teaching and translating career of the self-supporting intellectual. The Brays’ silk business was under pressure from cheap foreign imports and Rosehill would never again be run with such expansive ease. Meanwhile Chrissey, the meek and mild Evans girl who had left little impression on anyone, had been quietly sinking into chronic poverty and ill-health. Unlike her canny businessmen brothers, the gentlemanly Dr Clarke was not good with money. During the middle decades of the century medicine was busy pulling away from its roots in the apothecary shop and fashioning itself into a profession. Improved training and practice was one way of doing it. Living like a gentleman was another. No longer content to be seen as a clever servant, the physician – doctor now ran an ‘establishment’, which rivalled that of his well-heeled patients. His front door was opened by a maid, his dinner served on fine china and his rounds made on a good horse. In practice, however, the cost of maintaining a
conspicuously prosperous establishment often proved too much for an income that was far from secure. Just as Lydgate in
Middle-march
discovers that his natural inclination to live well cannot be supported from the fees he receives as a doctor newly arrived in the area, so Edward Clarke was increasingly unable to balance the books.

By 1842 the situation was so grim that Dr Clarke was forced to raise money by selling a house which had been left to his wife by her Uncle Evarard. Robert Evans, still playing his role as money lender to the feckless gentry, gave his son-in-law £250 for the Attleborough property and, a few months later, advanced him another £800 on loan to help move the whole family to Barford, near Warwick, for a new start.
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But still it was not enough. Within three years Clarke was bankrupt and the whole family decamped in panic to Bird Grove. From this low point it recovered neither its health nor prosperity. Dr Clarke died in 1852, leaving six surviving children. Chrissey was left to do her ineffectual best, scrabbling around for cheap schooling and apprenticeships, and at one point even considering moving the household out to Australia.
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In 1859, worn out by her own fertility and bad luck, Chrissey died at the age of forty-five.

Although Mary Ann continued to hunger for romantic love, her elder sister’s example offered a stern warning about its consequences. Gritty Moss, Mr Tulliver’s sister in
The Mill on the Floss
, is surely based on Chrissey. Described originally as ‘a patient, loosely-hung, child-producing woman’,
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Mrs Moss has the hopeless look of someone defeated by too many babies and a husband who never manages to get into profit. As a married woman Chrissey had no rights to her own property – it was Edward Clarke, after all, who sold her house back to her father. If she was unfaithful, her husband could divorce her. If he had a lover, she was obliged to stay put. Whatever the reasons for a legal separation – and there were only a handful each year, among those wealthy and smart enough not to care what other people thought – the children automatically belonged to their father. Chrissey, as far as anyone knows, had no desire to end her marriage to Edward Clarke. But she had probably never wanted to give birth to nine children, a financial and physical strain that almost certainly hastened her death: her childless sister lived to sixty-one, her brother to
seventy-four. Despite being married to a doctor, Chrissey seems to have had no access to the contraceptive knowledge that, only ten years later, would allow Mary Ann and Lewes to make the decision not to bring illegitimate children into the world.

Chrissey’s marriage was one of several which Mary Ann scrutinised as she approached her late twenties, those last-chance courtship years for a woman in the mid-nineteenth century. There were the Brays, with their advanced attitudes to sexual arrangements and sufficient money to support Mrs Gray and her brood of bastards. There was married, childless Fanny, who had time and energy to read the new higher criticism, but felt obliged to keep her opinions to herself. There were Isaac and Sarah, conventionally married and busy bringing up their four children to take their place among the professional classes. None of these were agonisingly miserable matches, but they were all compromised by wavering sexual attraction, intellectual incompatibility, or force of habit. Certainly none matched Mary Ann’s ideal of a true meeting of hearts and minds.

The fault, she concluded like many before and since, lay not with individual human failing, but with the institution of marriage itself. While marriages in Britain were not arranged in the literal sense, young middle-class people were often pressured by their families into engagements with people they barely knew. ‘How terrible it must be’, Mary Sibree remembered Mary Ann saying, ‘to find one’s self tied to a being whose limitations you could see and must know were such as to prevent your ever being understood!’ Far happier, Mary Ann concluded, was the Continental arrangement of dissolving marriages once affection had died.
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These remarks, recalled in hindsight by Mary Sibree for John Cross, are suspiciously prophetic. Within fifteen years of making them, Mary Ann Evans was to become a notorious victim of Britain’s stringent divorce laws. But although Sibree probably polished up her tale for posterity, the ‘problem’ of marriage was a subject which engaged Mary Ann from the moment she first became aware of the competing pressures of family, personal and religious law. Her impulsive courtship of the picture restorer in the spring of 1845 had shown her how easy it was to rush into a marriage that would suit no one except the people who had
arranged it, in this case her half-sister Fanny Houghton. During the holy war she had learned painfully that obedience and revolt in relation to an external law mattered far less than adherence to a complex inner truth.

In June 1848, during a dismal holiday with her failing father in St Leonards-on-Sea, Mary Ann clawed out a few hours to read the just-published
Jane Eyre
. As she sat huddled in a cold hotel, the book threw a sharp beam of light on to her own situation. Speaking of Rochester’s commitment to care for his mad wife, Mary Ann declared in a letter to Charles Bray: ‘All self-sacrifice is good – but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man’s soul and body to a putrefying carcase.’
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She was quite aware that she, too, was chained soul and body to a putrefying carcass. But the difference between her situation and Rochester’s was that her chains were made not of an abstract law but the living, loving ties of human affection.

If conventional marriage looked increasingly unappealing and unlikely, the problem still remained of how Mary Ann was to live once her father died. Isaac’s continuing grumblings about the ‘selfishness’ of her single state suggested that he was never going to want her at Griff. The Clarkes could not support themselves, let alone an extra mouth. The last time the subject had come up, during the holy war, governessing in Leamington had emerged as a grim possibility. Fortunately, since then new and more appealing options had presented themselves. In April 1845 Mary Ann met Harriet Martineau, whose sister-in-law was a cousin of Cara’s.
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Martineau belonged to a tiny band of early-Victorian women who supported themselves through high-quality journalism and authorship. Born into the thriving nexus of Norwich Unitarianism she had received a good education by the standards of the day. Too deaf to follow her sisters into governessing when the family business failed, she started in print by writing the hugely successful
Tales of Political Economy
, moral fables that explained the virtues of free trade in simple terms, which the uncertainly literate would understand. From there she was to expand her range to include, by the time of her death in 1876, autobiography, fiction and an embarrassingly emphatic endorsement of mesmerism (hypnosis) as a cure for all kinds of
ills. Although as a jobbing journalist Martineau’s work appeared all over the place, she was most closely linked with the
Westminster Review
, the periodical founded by James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in 1824 to espouse the hard, happiness-driven philosophy of utilitarianism.

In some ways Martineau was not an attractive role model for Mary Ann, being plain, gauche and gossipy. Her deafness required her to carry a large ear trumpet which she used to control and inhibit others. If she grew bored with a conversation, she withdrew the trumpet and started to shout over the top of the unfortunate speaker. Hans Christian Andersen, who once met her at a garden party in London, was so exhausted by the experience that he had to go and lie down afterwards. Her old-maidish respectability ran alongside a prurient interest in other people’s doings, creating a nasty tendency to bad-mouth. Years later, at the height of the scandal over Mary Ann’s elopement with Lewes, Martineau whipped herself up into a frenzy of disapproval. She even started a strange, self-aggrandising rumour that Mary Ann had written her an insulting letter prior to leaving for the Continent.
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That Mary Ann did not expose Martineau as a meddling fantasist in 1854 and continued to express admiration and even affection for her until her death twenty years later says a great deal about the debt she believed she owed her. More than any other woman in early-Victorian Britain, Martineau’s example pointed the way out of dependent provincial spinsterhood.

It was with Martineau’s example in mind that Mary Ann started to write articles for the
Coventry Herald
in October 1846. Charles Bray had bought the radical paper during the previous summer as a platform in his continuing battle with the city’s ruling Tories. Mary Ann’s laboured and lame pieces did not contribute much to the struggle. The most interesting thing about the series of loose, rambling essays entitled ‘Poetry and Prose from the Notebook of An Eccentric’
⁸
which appeared from December is her use of the form to which she was to return only at the very end of her life. Like
Impressions of Theophrastus Such
, published in 1879, ‘Poetry and Prose’ purports to be the jottings of a middle-aged man and, in this first attempt, comes over as implausible and dull. The reviews she wrote for the paper were
much more successful, building on real interests and knowledge. The first, which appeared in October 1846, was a cogent commentary on three books by the French historians Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet.
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Mary Ann’s journalism, and the reading which informed the best of it, had to be fitted around her increasingly heavy duties as a sick-nurse. Just as her mother had used her ill-health to send Mary Ann away from the family home, her father now used his frailty to bind her to it. Evans still loathed the Brays for their hijacking of his clever, respectable little girl into unorthodoxy. Jealous and resentful of Mary Ann’s continued attachment to Rosehill, he tried everything in his power to turn her attention back towards him. The most spectacular skirmish came in October 1845, when Mary Ann was due to accompany the Brays and Sara Hennell to Scotland. This promised to be a particularly exciting trip, since the plan was to tour Scott country, exploring the landscape long branded into her imagination from repeated readings of the Waverley novels. But from the start Robert was determined that she should not go. He put forward the desperate argument that Chrissey’s and Edward’s arrival at Bird Grove, following their final bankruptcy, required her presence. In the end Charles Bray intervened, stressing how much Mary Ann needed a change of scene to lift her health and spirits.
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Reluctantly, Evans agreed, but on the evening following her departure he fell from his horse and broke a leg. Isaac dispatched a letter to Glasgow telling Mary Ann to come home immediately. Luckily it missed her and the party toured Greenock, Glasgow, Loch Lomond and Stirling, blithely unaware of the drama unfolding in Warwickshire. When the letter finally caught up with Mary Ann in Edinburgh, she wanted to set out immediately and alone. Bray talked her into staying another day and the whole party went to visit Scott’s grand castle home in Abbotsford. The next day, 28 October, they all set out for home, travelling via Birmingham.

Robert Evans lived on for another grim three and a half years. At times, Mary Ann feared she was going mad with the strain of looking after him. He was not a man who said thank you, believing that his youngest daughter’s care and attention was his natural due. He was often grumpy and always demanding, want
ing her to read or play the piano or just talk. During the ghastly visit to St Leonards-on-Sea in May – June 1848, Mary Ann reported to the Brays that her father made ‘not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour’.
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Trapped on the out-of-season south coast, she tried to stretch out the days with ‘very trivial doings … spread over a large space’, to the point where one featureless day merged drearily into the next.
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The result was the kind of depression she had not experienced since the years of intense isolation at Griff. Spoofing Scott, she wrote to Charles Bray from the dismal guest-house that ‘my present address is Grief Castle, on the river of Gloom, in the valley of Dolour’.
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Without other people to reflect her back to herself – Robert Evans’s hungry demands only made her feel invisible – she felt herself on the brink of a terrifying disintegration. In a desperate letter to Sara, she cried out, ‘I feel a sort of madness growing upon me.’
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