George Eliot (34 page)

As a matter of pride Marian did not let her agony seep into her letters. To Sara she maintained that she was ‘well and calmly happy’ and to Bessie Rayner Parkes she said her mind was ‘deliciously calm and untroubled so far as my own lot is concerned’. She repeated her warning to ‘believe no one’s representations about me, for there is not a
single person
who is in a position to make a true representation’.
⁵⁰
As ever, she told herself – and her correspondents – that she did not give a fig what they thought about her. Yet she remained acutely attuned to every nuance in their letters, getting pettish with Charles Bray when she thought she detected a cool note.
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In the end, Lewes did prove true and Agnes generously straightforward. By mid-April Marian had the undertaking she wanted and Lewes had made the best financial arrangements in the circumstances. On the 18th she went up to town and joined him at lodgings in Bayswater. This may not have been the first time they had described themselves as ‘Mr and Mrs Lewes’, but it was certainly the beginning of what they referred to as their marriage. It worried feminists, then and now, that when Marian Evans went to live with George Henry Lewes she insisted on being known as his ‘wife’ and calling herself ‘Mrs Lewes’. It looked as if Marian Evans, that ‘strong-minded woman’, was cowering behind the formal conventions of suburban womanhood.

In a way she was. Landladies, those sharp-eyed Mrs Grundys who had loomed so large in her adult life, would almost certainly have turned away any couple who announced themselves as Mr Lewes and Miss Evans. But there was a principle at stake too, even if it was one which some found hard to understand. Marian had never been anything but a believer in marriage, a point which she made graphically when she married John Cross at the end of her life. Both through the voice of Feuerbach, and in her own words in the ‘Woman in France’ essay, she had written of the need for a true marriage, which brings a whole man and a whole woman together in voluntary association. What appalled her
about legal marriage was its shackling of men and women who hardly knew one another in relationships that were almost bound to fail. Once love had died the two parties were condemned, like Rochester and Bertha, or Lewes and Agnes, or Goethe and Frederika, to a dreary wasteland where incompatibility turned to indifference or worse. For as long as Marian felt that she and Lewes had a truly moral marriage she would claim the right to be known as Mrs Lewes.

No matter how many times Marian explained her position, some friends continued to refer to her as ‘Miss Evans’. Bessie Rayner Parkes was the worst culprit, her ‘forgetfulness’ a measure of the confusion she felt about her own future. Increasingly absorbed in campaigns to improve education and employment opportunities for single women, Bessie had by now embarked on her half-hearted ten-year engagement to Sam Blackwell. This was also the time when she was receiving bullying letters from her adulterous father warning her to stay away from Miss Evans and her ‘vice’. In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that Bessie started to become anxious about what the institution of marriage meant for women and what it might have in store for her. Writing to her fiancé during the height of the gossip about Marian in the autumn of 1854, she declared with preachy nervousness, ‘Now when we remember the men who form illegal connexions sub rosâ – who do vile & bad things, & keep up a white washed character, I feel more lenient to that little Weimar home than others do.’
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Was this a hint to her fiancé that she would not countenance the kind of marriage which her mother had endured? In any event, the engagement with Blackwell was finally broken off in 1866. The following year, at the age of thirty-seven, she married Louis Belloc, by whom she had a son, Hilaire, and a daughter.

On 30 April Bessie defied her father’s ban and called on the Leweses. The next day Marian wrote to her – by way of Barbara Leigh Smith – with a reminder to send any letters ‘care of G. H. Lewes Esq’. But a year later Bessie was still addressing Marian by her maiden name, for which she received a sharp rebuke: ‘Your address to me as
Miss Evans
was unfortunate, as I am not known under that name here. We find it indispensable to our comfort that I should bear Mr. Lewes’s name while we occupy
lodgings, and we are now with so excellent a woman that any cause of removal would be a misfortune. If you have occasion to write to me again, please to bear this in mind.’
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Part of Bessie’s reluctance to acknowledge Marian’s ‘marriage’ came from the scandalous things she had heard about Lewes from her father. It was not until her close friend Barbara Leigh Smith spent some time with the couple a year later that Bessie really began to accept the arrangement. In August 1856 Barbara joined Lewes and Marian for a few days at Tenby where they were on an extended holiday. She had come to see Marian and at this point merely tolerated Lewes, whom she considered in that snobbish way of which the Victorian avant-garde were quite capable to be not quite a ‘gentleman’. She left Wales, however, with a completely different view, writing to Bessie, ‘I do wish, my dear, that you would revise your view of Lewes. I have quite revised mine. Like you, I thought him an extremely sensual man. Marian tells me that in their intimate marital relationship he is unsensual, extremely considerate. His manner to her is delightful. It is plain to me that he makes her extremely happy.’
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Although Bessie’s and Barbara’s visits went well, Marian was far from relaxed when the rest of her friends made that first symbolic call to see the new Mrs Lewes. For women like Rufa Hennell, widowed in 1850 and not to remarry until 1857, it was a bold decision. For the mid-Victorians sin, especially female sexual sin, was a contaminating mist, which could envelop bystanders who got too close. Marian was flummoxed to see Rufa on 28 April, but blamed her panic lamely on a lack of fresh air: ‘I was so stupified and heated by having sat in-doors writing all day, that she must have carried away anything but a charming image of me.’
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Charles Bray’s visit was even more tense. He did not come and see the Leweses until 10 July, by which time they had moved to accommodation in East Sheen, near Richmond. It was the first time that he had ever seen them together and he probably felt as odd about it as they did. Knowing how much Bray disliked Lewes, Marian was clearly terrified that he would try to make mischief. A short while before, she had written to him begging him not to repeat a cutting remark she had made about Lewes two or three years earlier.
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Bray refrained from such obvious
tactics during his visit, but when he found Marian taking her ‘husband’s’ side in yet another argument about phrenology he dressed up his jealousy as high-minded disappointment. Lewes was down with a cold and a face abscess, and so unable to work his distracting magic on what sounds like a leaden evening. Writing a few days later to Bray, Marian excused ‘the fact of my having been ill as some apology for the very imperfect companionship and entertainment I gave you’.
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When Sara Hennell came to visit in early September the fates were equally unhelpful. She called without warning and found the Leweses out on a river trip.
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Perhaps this was part of a bridge-building exercise by the Hennell sisters, because around the same time as Sara’s letter explaining about the aborted visit came one from Cara, framed as a query about what Marian wanted done with some bed linen stored at Rosehill. Cara was too conscientious a woman simply to drop her objections to Marian’s relationship. This was the first Marian had heard from her since Weimar. But although she seems to have repeated her disapproval in her letter, there was something about it that made Marian sense she would be open to a reply. On 4 September Marian sat down and wrote the most cogent and considered statement of her actions to date. She reassures Cara that ‘if there is any one action or relation of my life which is and always has been profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr Lewes … Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties do
not
act as I have done – they obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.’ The haughty, martyrish tone which had given so much offence over the past year is now gone. Instead, Marian dwells with gratitude on the love she has received from Cara: ‘I think not one of the endless words and deeds of kindness and forbearance you have ever shewn me has vanished from my memory.’
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The letter – sweet, dignified – got Cara and Marian writing again, although it would be another four years before they met. Both sides remained jumpy. Only four months later, at New Year 1856, Marian wrote to Charles Bray to tell him how humiliated she felt by the fact that an invitation to visit Rosehill had been issued by him alone.

The rudeness of the note suggests Marian’s hypersensitivity about how she was treated and the roots of her growing social isolation. Ever attentive to the slightest snub, she made it a rule never to accept invitations from even her most well-meaning friends. There was a danger that she might visit their home only to find some fellow guest or high-minded servant taking offence. Even the most fleeting contact with an acquaintance in the street ran the risk of a cold shoulder. For that reason Marian barely went to London: during her first year in south-west London she made the journey only a couple of times, giving the awful smokiness as her reason for staying away. Any errands or business was done by Lewes, who made a weekly trip to see Agnes and the children at Bedford Place.

For the same reason Marian shunned her neighbours in Park Shot, Richmond, to which they had moved in October 1855. Her letters and journals never mention the kind of casual socialising that was supposed to be one of the great advantages of this new kind of semi-rural living. There was no bumping into a friendly face in the park, no gossiping in a shop. Terrified of the cut which would follow once rumour got around of her ‘unfortunate position’ Marian kept herself to herself, avoiding all but the most necessary and anonymous contact with others.

What started as a protective strategy became, over time, a preferred option. Once Marian became famous through her writing and her irregular relationship achieved some kind of respectability through its longevity, she began to receive an increasing number of invitations – to dinner, to the theatre, to parties. But still she refused, proudly insisting that people had to come to her. This reached its apogee with the Sunday afternoons at the Priory from the late 1860s, that salon-type arrangement which
Marian had praised in her essay ‘Woman in France’. By this time she had reached iconic status and every week twenty or more men – and it was mainly men – filed into the drawing-room for an audience. It was an arrangement which suited her psychologically. By controlling whom she came into contact with, Lewes ensured that no snigger, snub or critical remark ever reached her ears to upset her frail equilibrium.

Later there would be criticism that Marian’s by now self-imposed isolation led her to become cut off from the feedback which would have disciplined her work, stopping her falling into the self-indulgence of
Romola
and
The Spanish Gypsy
. But at this stage in her career it had the opposite effect, allowing her to concentrate all her energies on her writing. The creative drought which had hit in Germany, perhaps as a result of too many invitations to dinner, disappeared. Now under pressure to earn money to support Agnes Lewes, Marian found a new energy for her work. Chapman had written to her at Dover, offering the ‘Belles Lettres’ section of the magazine. Although the twelve pounds a quarter were extremely welcome, the benefits were far more than financial. Over the next two years Marian read and reviewed 166 books, which amounted to an intensive course in contemporary literature, particularly fiction. In the process she noticed what worked and what did not, what she liked and what seemed stale and contrived. As her desire to write fiction pushed further to the front of her mind, she started to think seriously about the kind of novel she wanted to write. Thus when she read
Westward Ho!
, Charles Kingsley’s Elizabethan romance, she warmed to the bold, vivid adventure, but hated the bossy, priggish narrator who sounded like a parson giving a sermon. Kingsley had a nasty habit of pulling at the reader’s sleeve, telling her whom to like, and whom to reject as utterly awful: ‘he can never trust to the impression that the scene itself will make on you, but, true to his cloth, must always “improve the occasion”,’ wrote Marian in the review which appeared in the July 1855 edition.
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It was this nursery-rhyme morality which Marian also objected to in Geraldine Jewsbury’s
Constance Herbert
. Here the three good-as-gold heroines renounce marriage because they fear passing on the strain of inherited madness which snakes through their family. But over time it becomes clear that in each case the fiancé
they gave up was a bad lot anyway. In her review Marian railed against this ‘notion that duty looks stern, but all the while has her hand full of sugar-plums, with which she will reward us by and by’.
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This plea for fiction which represented life as it is, not life as it ought to be, continued in the articles which Marian wrote for the
Leader
. In the eighteen months following her return from the Continent she wrote thirty-one articles for the weekly, for which she got about a guinea apiece. Control of the magazine had passed from Lewes and Hunt – who had left to edit the
Telegraph
– to Edward Pigott, a delightful man who visited the new couple on their holiday in Tenby and was one of the few friends of Lewes to write John Cross a letter of congratulation when he married Marian. Pigott was happy to let Marian write a piece on Goethe as a pre-publication puff for Lewes’s forthcoming biography. She chose to write a piece defending the detached stance Goethe takes in
Wilhelm Meister
towards his characters, a practice which was customarily viewed as ‘destitute of moral bias’. Unlike Kingsley and Jewsbury, Goethe lets his people work out their own destiny, rewarding them with neither torment nor bliss, but with a mixed bag of indifferent outcomes. And this, points out Marian, is not only because life has a way of dishing out deserts randomly but because it is impossible, truly, to know who is good or bad. ‘Everywhere he [Goethe] brings us into the presence of living, generous humanity – mixed and erring, and self-deluding,’ she explains with obvious approval, ‘but saved from utter corruption by the salt of some noble impulse, some disinterested effort, some beam of good nature, even though grotesque or homely.’
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