George Eliot (45 page)

Even once Bracebridge had been forced to give up the idea of Liggins’s authorship by a series of letters from Charles Bray, he clung to the odd theory that Liggins had ‘collected’ the material from which Marian, whom he remembered from a meeting during the Rosehill days, had written her fiction. This in turn led him to make his own blundering investigations into the models for the characters in her books. Most damagingly, he interviewed the garrulous daughter of the Methodist Elizabeth Evans, who claimed that her cousin Marian had often come to Wirksworth in her youth, pumped her mother for stories of the preaching life and had even copied down one of her sermons. As far as the gullible Bracebridge was concerned, this was all the proof needed to show that the tall, calm, fair Dinah Morris was an exact copy of the tiny, noisy, dark Elizabeth Evans.

After another exchange of letters Bracebridge mercifully began to splutter out of steam. On 9 October he wrote: ‘I frankly accept your declaration as the truth, and I shall repeat it, if the contrary is again asserted to me.’
⁶⁴
But the whole business had left Marian with an urgent need to defend her creative practice to the Brays and Sara Hennell. These, after all, were the people to whom she had on several occasions voiced her fear that she did not have a jot of creative talent. In the light of all the excited local gossip,
were they now harbouring suspicions that she had indeed done nothing more than rifle through her earliest memories and change a few names?

Certainly Charles Bray had never seemed to grasp just how offensive Marian found Bracebridge, nor how serious were the implications of his claims. On 19 September Marian had written Bray a long letter trying to explain: ‘I
am
seriously annoyed at Mr Bracebridge’s conduct and letters.’ She cedes that there are two portraits in ‘Clerical Scenes’ – Amos Barton and Buchanan – but that ‘
there is not a single portrait in Adam Bede’
. Determined to redeem herself as a creative artist rather than a journalistic hack, she ends, ‘I do not think you would suspect me of telling falsehoods about my works: but you might imagine there was truth in these statements about
Adam Bede
.’
⁶⁵

Knowing Bray’s leakiness, Marian made it clear that these comments were to go no further. But two weeks later she wrote to Sara explaining the extent to which Dinah Morris was modelled on Elizabeth Evans and this time she may have authorised Sara to use the information as she saw fit. For twenty years later, when Marian’s death started up new chatter about the origins of her art, Sara felt free to send a copy of this 7 October letter to a newspaper. In what amounts to a miniature essay Marian carefully lays out the extent of her contact with her Methodist aunt. There were three meetings in all, during the late 1830s and early 1840s. During one of these Elizabeth Evans told her the story of her epic prison visit, the incident which formed the kernel for the Hetty Sorrel story. This is the extent of Marian’s borrowing. ‘How curious it seems to me that people should think Dinah’s sermon, prayers, and speeches were
copied
– when they were written with hot tears, as they surged up in my own mind!’
⁶⁶

Even now the Brays could be forgiven for wondering if Marian was telling the truth about where her fiction came from. They had been kept in the dark for several months over her relationship with Lewes, as well as the fact that she was successfully writing fiction. And in the months leading up to a difficult evening in June 1859 when she finally revealed to them that she was George Eliot, her manner had been shifty. In October 1858 when Sara had asked which recent pieces in the
Westminster
belonged to her, she had teased, ‘Do not guess at authorship – it is a bad
speculation. I have
not written a word
in the Westminster.’
⁶⁷
Only six months earlier Charles Bray had joked that she must be about to bring out a novel to which she parried by asking when his poem was going to appear, before concluding, ‘Seriously, I wish you would not set false rumours, or any other rumours afloat about me. They are injurious.’
⁶⁸
No one could blame the Brays for being confused. Marian had wanted them to guess that she was writing fiction, and had dropped heavy hints to that effect – a ploy she had also used with Bessie Rayner Parkes when explaining why she was not free to contribute a piece to her newly established
English Woman’s Journal
. Yet when they followed her lead by asking questions about her work, she clammed up and accused them of nosiness.

The actual moment of revelation went horribly wrong. On 20 June the Leweses attended a performance of the
Messiah
at the Crystal Palace and afterwards dined with the Brays and Sara Hennell. A couple of years earlier the Brays had sold Rosehill to John Cash and his wife, the former Mary Sibree, and had joined Sara and her mother at Ivy Cottage, in the grounds of the big house. They had also, perhaps unwisely, bought a house in Sydenham for which they had constant problems finding tenants. On this occasion Sara had come down from Coventry clutching her latest work-in-progress,
Thoughts in Aid of Faith
, keen to get her old friend’s reactions. Mary Ann, however, had her own plans for this meeting, the first she had had with Cara since she had left for Germany with Lewes. She was about to reveal that she was the mysterious author of the new literary hit,
Adam Bede
. In the excitement of the moment, Sara’s dreary manuscript got pushed aside.

At the end of the visit, Lewes returned Sara’s manuscript to her, together with negative comments about the ‘decided disapprobation’ which both he and Marian felt for its laborious attempt to extract a framework for faith in the context of unbelief.
⁶⁹
Sara was hugely hurt, crying on the way home in the train because she had not had her much-anticipated chance to go through her work with Mary Ann herself. Charles Bray, who had never liked Sara very much anyway, wrote conspiratorially to Mary Ann the next day: ‘I know you would not have grudged the half hour she wanted, although I am quite of opinion, no
good could have come of it.
I don’t believe she can do better
and if she likes to amuse herself and spend her money in publishing, she can afford it and she does no one any harm and it may attract some
half-doz
congenial minds.’
⁷⁰

But before she received this letter, Marian had already written to Sara apologising for the way in which her own exciting news had hijacked their meeting. She regretted ‘that the blundering efforts we have made towards mutual understanding have only made a new veil between us’. Then she continues, ‘Dear Sara, believe that I shall think of you and your work much, and that my ear and heart are more open for the future because I feel I have not done what a better spirit would have made me do in the past.’
⁷¹

If Sara had been under the illusion that her friendship with Mary Ann was under pressure only from the geographical distance between them, she was now obliged to recognise that there were fundamental forces keeping them apart. The letter she wrote acknowledging that something had changed for ever was graceful, touching and sad: ‘I have been fancying you, as ten years ago, still interested in what we then conversed together upon … I see now that I have lost the only reader in whom I felt confident in having secure sympathy with the
subject
(not with
me)
whom I most gratefully believe – believed in – that she has floated beyond me in another sphere, and I remain gazing at the glory into which she has departed, wistfully and very lonely.’
⁷²

With Herbert Spencer there was no need to fudge. On 12 October 1856 he had stopped off in London during one of those interminable health-boosting Continental trips. According to Spencer’s version – designed, as always to give him the leading role – he had again suggested that Marian should try her hand at fiction, only to be told that she had already started on ‘Amos Barton’. Although Marian’s decision to confide in Spencer seems to have been spontaneous, it was judicious. A man who habitually gave so little of himself away could be trusted with other people’s closest secrets. But after two years of absolute discretion Spencer found himself in a difficult position. During dinner with the Leweses on 5 November 1858 he revealed that the newly elevated ‘Dr’ John Chapman had asked him ‘point blank’ if Marian had written
Scenes
.
⁷³
Spencer’s fastidiousness about not spreading the
rumour also meant that he found it hard to lie to an old associate. In any case, as he later explained in his autobiography, ‘I have so little control over my features that a vocal “No” would have been inevitably accompanied by a facial “Yes”.’
⁷⁴

Lewes and Marian were furious at what they saw as Spencer’s treachery. They waved away his scruples with their favourite precedent, that of Scott who had denied being the author of the Waverley novels and justified himself later by saying it was akin to claiming the right to stay silent in court. Years later Marian was to distance herself from such blatant dishonesty by claiming that she had no idea that Lewes had issued categoric denials on her behalf. In the highly strung state in which the Leweses now approached anything to do with the incognito issue, Spencer’s inability to see things their way appeared as deliberate mischief-making. When Pug arrived from Blackwood, Marian theatrically declared that the creature had come ‘to fill up the void left by false and narrow-hearted friends’.
⁷⁵

It would have been difficult for Spencer to give Chapman a categoric denial, since the good doctor was clearly confident about his hunch. Like the Coventry trio, he had noticed that Marian had done no journalism over the past eighteen months. Despite the fact that he had sent her an extra five pounds for her marvellous essay on Young, she had ceased to suggest new topics for the
Westminster
. Chapman was familiar enough with her finances to know that she needed to get money from somewhere and his mind naturally turned to fiction, especially
Scenes of Clerical Life
with their Warwickshire settings around which she had guided him during that crucial visit to Rosehill during which they had agreed to abandon their affair. The moment Spencer had left after dropping his bombshell on 5 November, Marian sat down and wrote to her old lover:

This must have given Chapman an uncustomary pause for thought, since he did not reply for nearly two months. Although Marian had told her journal on 30 November that she did not intend to have anything more to do with him, she none the less responded to his letter when it eventually arrived, if only to give herself the pleasure of saying ‘it does not seem likely that further letter-writing would advance our mutual understanding’.
⁷⁷
Being elevated to the status of a professional man had not changed Chapman’s most basic emotional responses. The idea that Marian was not available to him was hugely exciting, and he begged for the chance to come to Wandsworth and explain his behaviour. But she refused, saying coldly that she was far too busy moving house.

This was enough to whip up Chapman into a frenzy. By February he was writing again, this time hinting that he knew she was George Eliot. This was serious stuff and drew an immediate response from Lewes:

Now that there was no point in courting the Leweses, Chapman exploited his privileged information for all it was worth. Still
involved with the
Westminster
, he inserted a paragraph at the end of a long review of
Adam Bede
in April 1859, which nudged and winked the reader towards the idea that George Eliot must surely be a woman.
⁷⁹

The fact that Lewes had done exactly the same thing in 1847 to Charlotte Brontë, virtually telling readers of his review of
Jane Eyre
that Currer Bell was a woman, did not mean that there was any mercy for Chapman. Henceforward he was
persona non grata
, although he was clumsy enough not to have realised the extent of his disgrace. Nine months later he wrote, with breath-taking cheek, to ask whether he could reprint Marian’s five big
Westminster
essays in book form, sharing the profits with her. ‘Squashed that idea,’ Lewes reported briskly in his journal.
⁸⁰

In the Leweses’ brooding state, Spencer’s determination to stick to his principles seemed like a gleeful attempt to undermine them. An unhappy visit in March 1859 ended with Lewes telling his journal that ‘jealousy, too patent, and too unequivocal, of our success, acting on his own bitterness at non-success, has of late cooled him visibly’.
⁸¹
Yet only six months later Spencer managed to redeem himself in the only way which worked with Marian, by writing a letter praising her work. He declared that he had read
Adam Bede
‘with laughter and tears and without criticism. Knowing as you do how constitutionally I am given to faultfinding, you will know what this means.’
⁸²