George Eliot (40 page)

On 15 March 1857 Marian and Lewes set out for the Scilly Isles. He needed to do more ‘naturalising’ for the second part of ‘Sea-Side Studies’, and her fiction work – she was just winding up ‘Mr Gilfil’ and about to begin ‘Janet’s Repentance’ – was portable. Marian recorded a careful account of their journey in her journal. The coach trip from Plymouth to Truro gave her a chance to cast her increasingly disciplined naturalist’s eye over her fellow travellers – a local lad who ate buns, an old sailor who was ‘a natural gentleman’, ‘a pretentious, vulgar young man with smart clothes, dirty nails, and original information in physiology’. She noted, too, details of the social and geographic landscape, including the way the clay industry changed the colour of the water around St Austell and the precise history of a ‘fine church tower’.
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For eight wet, windy days they were stuck in Penzance before travelling to St Mary’s, Scilly, on 26 March 1857 where they took rooms at the Post Office. The creeky shoreline was a perfect hunting-ground for the zoophytes, molluscs and annelids which Lewes had come to study at close quarters. In between expeditions to the rock pools Marian worked on ‘Mr Gilfil’, finishing the Epilogue out of doors on a sunny April morning.

After a seven-week stay Marian and Lewes moved on to the second stage of their island holiday. On 11 May they left for Jersey, where Lewes had spent a short but significant part of his
boyhood, learning French and spending evenings ‘of perfect bliss’ at the theatre.
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Inevitably it all seemed smaller and rattier than he remembered. But it must have been interesting for Marian to see the place which was the nearest thing to ‘home’ for the rootless Lewes.

Childhood and family ties were in any case at the front of Marian’s mind now. While in Scilly she had received a letter from Warwickshire telling her that Chrissey’s family had been struck by typhus.
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One little girl, Fanny, had died on 26 March and another, Katy, and Chrissey herself were seriously ill. The letter had actually been written by Sarah Evans, on behalf of her husband who hated putting pen to paper. By 16 April, having heard nothing for over a fortnight, Marian wrote to Isaac begging for more news. Assuming Chrissey was now out of danger, Marian asked him to advance fifteen pounds out of her six-monthly income to pay for a holiday so that her sister could get away from ‘that fever-infected place’.
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Isaac wrote back immediately saying that Chrissey had taken a turn for the worse and was now gravely ill. Unfortunately he does not seem to have bothered to let Marian know when the danger had passed. It was from Fanny that she eventually got the news a fortnight later that both Chrissey and Katy had pulled through.
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The fact that Marian had felt bold enough to ask Isaac to advance fifteen pounds from her income, when two years previously he had told her that he was unable to accommodate even her reasonable request that she be paid on time, suggests a new confidence in the circumstances of her own life. By the end of 1857 she would have earned £443 for
Scenes of Clerical Life
in both magazine and book form. In the last analysis, if Isaac insisted on retaining control over her life by refusing to arrange an advance, Marian was in a position to send Chrissey the fifteen pounds direct.

There were other reasons why Marian felt brave enough to tell her family about her personal situation. Her happiness with Lewes was deepening and becoming more secure. The unarticulated fear that he might one day leave had receded. The birth of another child to Agnes by Thornton Hunt on 21 May made it more unlikely than ever that the marriage would ever be mended. There was no one in the world, except perhaps the three teenage
boys at Hofwyl, who was still unaware of their father’s relationship with Marian. And even they would not be kept in the dark for much longer. Over the next year Lewes began to drop Miss Evans’s name into the conversation when he visited the boys. By July 1858 he was bringing them presents from his mysterious new friend.

Five days after the arrival of Agnes’s new and final baby, a girl called Mildred, Marian wrote to both Isaac and Fanny explaining her situation. Or rather, she hinted at it in language which, to the contemporary reader, seems coded and confusing. Indeed, in the letter to Isaac it sounds as if Marian is saying she is married in the ordinary, orthodox way. This suggests that, despite her disclaimer in the first sentence that Isaac would be ‘surprized’ to hear her news, she guessed that he was already aware of her general situation, even if he did not know all the details. She carefully avoids using the word ‘marriage’ in her letter, reporting instead that she has ‘changed my name’ and has ‘someone to take care of me in the world’. She refers to Lewes as her ‘husband’ and describes him as being ‘occupied entirely with scientific and learned pursuits’.
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In the same envelope Marian enclosed a letter to Fanny, explaining that she was not sure of her full address in Leamington. Written in a more intimate, sisterly tone, the contents are just as confusing.

It is hard to know what Fanny Houghton made of this. Her response has not survived, although we know that it was prompt. Marian gave her ‘a thousand thanks’ for it and seems to have been relieved by the content, for her next letter is full of tender concern. She advises on cheap places on the Continent that might be good for Henry Houghton’s health and asks Fanny to put gentle pressure on Isaac to advance the fifteen pounds for Chrissey’s holiday.
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It is just possible that Fanny may have failed to understand that Marian was announcing a cohabitation rather than a formal marriage. On the other hand, this was the woman who back in the 1840s had read the Higher Criticism and confided to her half-sister that she shared her doubts about the literal interpretation of the Bible. It seems unlikely that such a shrewd, modern mind would not have put two and two together. But whatever the reason behind Fanny’s initially generous reaction to her sister’s news, it changed sharply once she had been spoken to by Isaac. Only a fortnight later Fanny wrote breaking off all contact with Marian.

Isaac’s response was slower than Fanny’s and when it eventually arrived, on 9 June, the reason for the delay became clear. The letter came not from Isaac himself but from Vincent Holbeche, the family solicitor, who lost no time in explaining the situation. ‘I have had an interview with your Brother in consequence of your letter to him announcing your marriage. He is so much hurt at your not having previously made some communication to him as to your intention and prospects that he cannot make up his mind to write, feeling that he could not do so in a Brotherly Spirit.’
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Holbeche then proceeds, ominously, ‘Permit me to ask when and where you were married’ before asking for details about Lewes’s address so that the payment of her income to his bank account might go through smoothly.

Marian replied immediately to Holbeche. In a tone of proud disinterestedness she says that she quite understands Isaac’s reasons for using an intermediary – if her feelings were equally hostile she would have had to do the same. Of her alliance with Lewes she explains that ‘Our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond. He is at present unable to contract a legal marriage, because, though long deprived of his first wife by her misconduct, he is not legally divorced.’
Marian then explains that although she has been Lewes’s ‘wife’ for nearly three years, she has not told her family before because ‘knowing that their views of life differ in many respects from my own, I wished not to give them unnecessary pain’. She then carefully makes the point that her decision to keep her relationship with Lewes secret had nothing to do with self-interest.

If her tone sounds hard and defensive, Marian makes it clear that her feelings towards Holbeche himself are warm. She finishes by telling him how grateful she has always been for the way he intervened when her father was making his will. Instead of being given household goods like her sisters, she received £100 cash, which helped tide her over that difficult first year. ‘I daresay you have forgotten the circumstances, but I have always remembered gratefully that instance of thoughtfulness on my behalf, and am glad to have an opportunity of acknowledging it.’
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A month after sending off the momentous letter to Holbeche Marian wrote to Sara Hennell saying, ‘I dare say I shall never have any further correspondence with my brother, which will be a great relief to me.’
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She was right. Although Holbeche forwarded the letter, Isaac never replied. Not until Marian lawfully married John Cross in 1880 did he break his silence by writing to congratulate her. Yet behind the scenes Isaac remained deeply engaged with his sister, instructing Fanny and Chrissey to have nothing more to do with her. Both women, although older than Isaac, immediately complied. Chrissey one can understand: she was dependent on Isaac’s grudging patronage, if not his actual charity. But the response of brisk, clever Fanny, a prosperous married woman and only a half-sister, remains a disappointment to this day.

Chrissey’s compliance with Isaac came as a shock to Marian,
who only a few days earlier had confidently predicted to Sara Hennell: ‘I do not think Chrissey will give up correspondence with me in any case, and that is the point I most care about, as I shall still be able to help her as far as my means will allow.’ Chrissey stayed silent until two years later when she knew she was dying. In late February 1859 she wrote to Marian, expressing her regret for ‘having ceased to write and neglected one who under all circumstances was kind to me and mine’.
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Marian intimated that she was prepared to go to Warwickshire, but Chrissey responded in a few pencilled words that she did not think she was strong enough to bear the excitement of seeing her estranged sister. By 15 March she was dead. The whole scrappy coda upset Marian intensely. Lewes, normally the most generous of men, confided in his journal that he almost wished Chrissey had not made this last stab at contact, because it came just when Marian had more or less become resigned to the silence.

The split with Isaac was the final ‘divorce’ of the ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets. The whole incident had been a reprise of the holy war, played out in the next generation down. Isaac Evans might not yet have the stature of Robert Evans but at the age of forty he had assumed the duty of upholding the law of the father. Fifteen years before, Isaac had accused Mary Ann of being a drain on her family because she refused to find a husband. Now she had found one and he was telling her it was the wrong sort. She had put off the confrontation for a long time because she knew the trouble it would bring. In early 1856, just before the departure to Ilfracombe and Tenby on the holiday that was to see her start her career as a fiction writer, she had written a short piece for the 29 March edition of the
Leader
on a new edition of Sophocles’s
Antigone.
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Antigone is a strong woman who defies King Creon because she wants to give a proper burial to her brother Polynices who has been declared a traitor. The conflict is set up between the rules of the state and the necessity to honour private needs. Isaac had started as Polynices, the brother whom Antigone will die for, the brother of the early sonnets, the young Tom Tulliver whom Maggie trots after like a pony. But over time he had transmuted into Creon, the critical, conventional voice – of George Combe, of Harriet Martineau, of the adult Tom Tulliver.

The effect of this final divorce from her family was to bind Marian more closely than ever to Lewes. Strangely, she counted this time as one of her happiest. In her usual end-of-year journal assessment for 1857 she wrote:

The decision to reveal the true identity of ‘George Eliot’ to Blackwood in February 1858 came because Marian and Lewes were about to leave for a twelve-week trip to Germany. Until now, Blackwood’s correspondence with his new author had been sent care of Lewes, even during the Islands holiday. But to suggest that Eliot also happened to be spending ‘his’ summer in Germany with Lewes would be straining credibility to breaking point.