George Eliot (37 page)

Marian takes up the story: ‘one morning [in Tenby] as I was lying in bed, thinking what should be the subject of my first
story, my thoughts merged themselves into a dreamy doze, and I imagined myself writing a story of which the tide was – “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”.’ Excited, she woke herself properly and immediately told Lewes of her idea. ‘He said “O, what a capital title!” and from that time I had settled in my mind that this should be my first story.’
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H
AVING WAITED FIFTEEN
years to start writing fiction, it was excruciating to have to put it off for three weeks longer. But back home in Richmond there was a big pile of
Westminster Review
work waiting for Marian. In theory she should have been able to get through it quickly, since the house was empty, Lewes having left almost immediately for Switzerland with the boys. But as usual when she felt abandoned, especially in favour of Lewes’s family, she fell ill. Agonising face-ache was first diagnosed as neuralgia, then as an impacted wisdom tooth which, with the help of two doses of chloroform, was eventually removed. Exhausted with pain, Marian begged Chapman to let her off the ‘odious article’ she had agreed to produce for the October 1856 issue on top of her usual ‘Belles Lettres’ commitment.
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But Chapman was having none of it. In the past eighteen months his attitude to her contributions had changed tack from lukewarm to wildly enthusiastic. As the
Westminster
increasingly lost its way, Marian’s articles were emerging as one of its most dependable
features. Once again, John Chapman needed Marian Evans more than she needed him.

Far from being a pointless detour, the ‘odious’ piece turned out to be highly relevant. ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ is a cutting critique of the stream of trashy fiction written by women, which glutted the book market during the middle decades of the century.
²
Working through this material allowed Marian to think carefully about the kind of writing she wanted to avoid. By showing what a novel should
not
be, she was setting out a literary manifesto for her style of fiction.

She starts by considering what she calls ‘the mind-and-millinery species’ of novel. The heroine, usually an heiress if not a peeress, is always ‘the ideal woman in feelings, faculties and flounces’.
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Pretty, witty and wise, she dispenses good advice and
bons mots
to a circle of adoring men. Marian deftly takes apart
Compensation
, a recent addition to the genre, in which a four-year-old frames perfect pieties, while his mother tackles the Bible in Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit. All this against a jumbled plot of Italian mistresses, deathbed conversions and poisoning attempts on old ladies.

Another kind of silly novel produced by lady novelists, mostly of High Church leanings, is the ‘oracular species’.
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Impatiently waving aside any obligation to depict real life, the writer of the oracular species prefers to tackle the big philosophical questions: ‘the ability of a lady novelist to describe actual life and her fellowmen, is in inverse proportion to her confident eloquence about God and the other world’.
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Knotty problems like the existence of evil are unravelled against a background of high melodrama, usually involving a long-lost brother, not to mention a mad gypsy. Once again, the heroine is sparklingly clever and given to spouting bad theology at the drop of a lace handkerchief.

But it was a third category of fiction, the ‘white neck-cloth’ species, which particularly annoyed Marian. These novels were infused with the Evangelical sensibility which she had espoused so earnestly as a girl. In effect, they were love stories for serious-minded Christians, ‘in which the vicissitudes of the tender passion are sanctified by saving views of Regeneration and the Atonement’.
⁶
It was their patent inaccuracy which jarred – instead of setting the story among the lower and lower middle classes
where Evangelicalism flourished, these novels contained as many baronets and fancy carriages as any High Church title. Marian’s first and most urgent obligation as a novelist would be to restore Evangelicalism to where it properly belonged, among the shopkeepers and artisans of urban Britain.

The essay finishes with a clarification of Marian’s position. She is not opposed to female novelists in principle. Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell aka Charlotte Brontë and Mrs Gaskell have all produced work which is far from ‘silly’. But the fact that novel writing requires no formal qualifications has meant that women of little education and vast pretensions have been encouraged to try their hands, with dire results. As for that old chestnut about women being forced into writing fiction out of financial necessity, Marian will have none of it: ‘Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we believe there are three women who write from vanity.’ Then, surely thinking of her own situation, she continues sternly: ‘and besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy fact of working for one’s bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature is not likely to have been produced under such circumstances’.
⁷

Just as in her essay on Madame de Sablé, Marian is making a plea for her kind of writer. Fiction should be left to the handful of women who have been educated alongside men, yet who retain a particularly female capacity for observation and empathy. Their motivation is not the desire to show off or keep themselves busy, but the sober (and, in fact, hard to reconcile) combination of financial need and deeply held vocation. In short, fiction should be written by women like Marian Lewes.

‘Silly Novels’ went off to Chapman on 12 September. But even now Marian was not free to start on her fiction. It took another week before the ‘Belles Lettres’ contribution was finally dispatched. A crucial punctuation point had been reached, which Lewes acknowledged by taking Marian up to town on a rare trip to the theatre. It was on 23 September, according to her journal, that she finally ‘Began to write “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”, which I hope to make one of a series called “Scenes of Clerical Life”’.
⁸

The way Marian framed her intentions is telling. Not sure if she could sustain the dramatic tension necessary for a full-blown
novel, she opted for a piece of descriptive writing, something which she already knew she could do. If it turned out well she would extend the work by adding other self-contained ‘Scenes’ until she had a manuscript approaching the length of a full-length novel. The unity would come not through the plot but by planting references in the first story – ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’ – which would feature in subsequent tales, setting up threads of connection between the episodes.

Lewes was not surprised that the first part of ‘Amos Barton’ went well. He had always known that Marian could do description and he was delighted to discover that dialogue came easily to her too. Unlike the heroines of the ‘Silly Novels’, her characters spoke in rhythms that sounded real. Instead of long, unlikely monologues, there was authentic-sounding exchange in broad Warwickshire dialect. But it was still not clear whether she could do drama. The crunch point came after a couple of weeks when she reached the climax of her story, the point where Amos Barton collapses in anguish beside the deathbed of Milly, the meek wife whom he has taken for granted. Lewes went up to town to give Marian a chance to work undisturbed on the crucial scene. When he returned she read out what she had produced and, according to her journal, ‘We both cried over it, and then he came up to me and kissed me, saying, “I think your pathos is better than your fun”.’
⁹
George Eliot had been born.

The character of Amos Barton was based on John Gwyther, the local curate during Marian’s Evangelical years at Griff. Shepperton church with its ‘intelligent eye’ of a clock is easily identified as Chilvers Coton church.
¹⁰
The ‘College’ where Barton visits the paupers was the workhouse which Marian could see from the attic window. Gwyther had just the right kind of clumsy earnestness to appeal to the teenage Mary Ann Evans. An enthusiastic Evangelical, he had set about purging the parish of its lax devotional habits. This entailed scrapping old hymn tunes in favour of the up-to-date versions favoured by nonconformists, opposing old country customs like the wakes and coming down hard on minor lapses of honesty among the local servant population. In short, Gwyther displayed all the disdain for the tenacity of local custom which the adult Marian had identified in her article on ‘The Natural History of German Life’ as the reason why politi
cal or social reform imposed from outside was bound to fail.

The switch in the young Mary Ann’s attitude to Mr Gwyther and his reforming ways probably came during the holy war. Gwyther may have been one of the clergymen who was wheeled in to try and make her change her mind, and his third-rate brain – notwithstanding the fact that it had trundled through Cambridge – would have been no match for hers. But she may also have been disillusioned by the scandal circulating about his private life. Although the details are not clear, it seems that Gwyther had become over-friendly with a raffish newcomer to the parish who styled herself a ‘Countess’ and enjoyed a suspiciously close relationship with a man who was supposed to be her father, but whom gossiping tongues set down as a lover. The disillusioned Mary Ann may have found it hard to see how she was supposed to accept moral guidance – not to mention the eternal damnation which Evangelicals were so keen on handing out – from a man whose own conduct would not stand up to scrutiny.

The outline of Mr Gwyther’s life, including the death of his wife in childbirth, was reworked by Marian and given to the character of Amos Barton. Barton is exactly the kind of clergyman who is absent from the ‘white neck-cloth’ species of high-toned Evangelical romance novel. He is middle-aged and shabby, with a nasty tendency to sniff. His spelling is bad, his punctuation worse. ‘It was not in his nature to be superlative in anything; unless, indeed, he was superlatively middling, the quintessential extract of mediocrity.’
¹¹
The narrator of the story understands that his readers might like a more conventionally attractive hero and is quick to point out that this, unfortunately, is not how life is. ‘Depend upon it,’ the (apparently) male narrator says to his lady reader, ‘you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.’
¹²
If this story is not to the reader’s taste, the narrator suggests that she try one of the many new novels – the ‘Silly Novels’ of the
Westminster
essay – which are packed with ‘ermine tippets, adultery, and murder’.
¹³

In ‘Amos Barton’ Marian’s recollections of the village culture of her childhood are brought into focus through the lens of current
preoccupations. She hits off the tone of village gossip perfectly. The local farmer and his wife, Mr and Mrs Hackit, the doctor, Mr Pilgrim, and Mrs Patten, ‘a childless old lady, who had got rich chiefly by the negative process of spending nothing’, gather in the evening to chew the fat over Barton’s odd modernising ideas and his put-upon wife Milly.
¹⁴
In what would be the first of many choric scenes in Eliot’s novels written in broad Midlands dialect, Mrs Patten gets indignant at Barton’s nosiness about the state of her soul: ‘I’ve never been a sinner.’
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Mrs Hackit, who some critics have suggested is based on Marian’s mother, meanwhile, declares, ‘How nice … [Mrs Barton] keeps her children!… – six children, and another a-coming. I don’t know how they make both ends meet.’
¹⁶

But what seems like a generally benign scrutiny of their spiritual leader quickly turns to something sharper once the widowed Countess moves into the parish with her brother Mr Bridmain. Glamorous, vain and self-publicising, Caroline Czerlaski plays the part of Evangelical gentlewoman to perfection. She pouts at the low church attendance, flatters Amos that he is a great preacher and hints that she has the power to advance his career. She patronises simple, kind-hearted Milly with lavish compliments, which she clearly doesn’t mean. While Amos blushes and bridles at this unaccustomed attention, his colleagues and parishioners feel increasingly uneasy. The neighbouring clergy dislike the way Czerlaski fawns over Barton, while the village chorus is convinced that there must be something unsavoury about her relationship with her ‘brother’.

Marian’s description of the Shepperton rumour machine draws on her experience of being the subject of intense gossip in her own village, literary London. Within weeks of her leaving for the Continent with Lewes in July 1854, stories were circulating about how she had lured him away from his family, not to mention the peculiar invention of the ‘insulting’ letter which she was supposed to have written to Harriet Martineau.
¹⁷
In the same way, Shepperton gossips manage to construct a story about the Countess and her relationship with both her brother and Barton, which is far more lurid than the actual ordinary truth.

The Countess, as it turns out, really is a Countess – albeit one who began life as a governess. And her brother Mr Bridmain is
indeed her half-brother who made his fortune doing nothing more disreputable than working his way up to a partnership in a silk business. Naturally, speculation reaches fever pitch when the Countess moves into the vicarage. Bridmain has decided to marry his half-sister’s maid and Caroline Czerlaski declares herself too humiliated to remain under his roof. As is often the way in life, the story seems to say, it is petty vanity rather than grand passion which powers life’s tragedies. For the Countess’s arrival means extra strain for the already stretched Barton household with its six small children, one on the way and a harassed maid-of-all-work. The Countess lies in bed until ten and takes a separate breakfast at eleven. She monopolises the pregnant Milly’s attention, diverting her from the daily round of household tasks. She insists on Nanny, the maid, running around after her small, greedy lapdog. It is this final imposition which proves to be the tinder box. Ordered to get some extra milk for the dog, Nanny explodes in a hail of home truths to which the Countess responds by flouncing out of the Bartons’ life for ever.
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