George Eliot (49 page)

If Charles’s and Thornie’s double failure to excel was galling to Marian, it could at least be redeemed in her letters by stressing Charles’s goodness and Thornie’s likeness to his father. But the third boy, Bertie, offered no such compensation. He was slow and stupid, and not even very good. His letters from Hofwyl are near to illiterate and today he would be diagnosed as dyslexic. Overawed by his new stepmother’s reputation for cleverness, Bertie’s anxiety to impress only made it worse. On 24 August 1859 the fourteen-year-old began babyishly to his father, ‘I take pains to write and to spell. I am writin a letter to Mother about the journey. I am very pleased with the journey indeed. The only big letter that I can not do well is D, it is very difficult to make. I hope Mother will be satsfyed with my letter.’ Two days later, he started the dreadfully anticipated letter with ‘Dear Mother! I hope you will be satisfied with my letter.’
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She probably wasn’t. There was little about Bertie which could be made to flatter a woman anxious to demonstrate her parenting skills to the world. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that the boy was left to cool his heels at Hofwyl for another three years.

The strain of London living, of becoming a
Mutter
at the age of forty, gradually settled itself over Marian’s face. In March 1860 the portrait painter Samuel Laurence, who had lived with the Hunts in the notorious ‘phalanstery’ all those years ago, asked if he might paint her. He had the kind of sadness about him which Marian always interpreted as moral depth, so she cautiously agreed. But nine sittings later the finished portrait appalled Lewes by the tense and melancholic version of Marian it revealed. Refusing to have the picture in Blandford Square, Lewes even put a ban on it leaving Laurence’s studio. A compromise was reached only when an admiring John Blackwood bought the painting to hang in a back room at his Edinburgh office, well away from public view.
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Marian’s own work also reveals her struggling with the new factors in her life. During their stay in Italy Lewes had suggested that her next subject might be Savonarola, the fifteenth-century Florentine priest who had died trying to reform the Church. Determined to protect Marian from the red, swollen eyes which had accompanied the writing of
The Mill
, Lewes had been casting around for a relatively impersonal subject that she might try. Less of an admirer of Scott than Marian, he had always thought that historical romance was a relatively easy genre to master, requiring one only to cram background information about the costume, speech and political events of one’s chosen period.

Although initially fired by Lewes’s suggestion, once home Marian found it impossible to begin. Despite spending hours researching the historical background to Savonarola, the only writing she achieved that summer was a different kind of thing altogether. Set in her familiar turn-of-the-century Midlands landscape, ‘Brother Jacob’ is a novella written in the form of a dry, wry fable. The aptly named David Faux is an unscrupulous, ambitious confectioner who steals his mother’s savings and runs away to the West Indies. Returning a few years later, with the polish of foreign travel upon him, the renamed Edward Freely sets up a fancy pastry shop and becomes a favourite with the local women. Just as he is about to make a highly desirable match to the local squire’s daughter Penny Palfrey, Faux’s idiot brother Jacob arrives and unwittingly unmasks him. Far from being a
wealthy gentleman-merchant, Edward Freely is revealed as a local working lad, a swindler and a thief.

Generations of critics have remarked on the negative, cynical tone of the piece. No one is nice, not even silly Penny Palfrey, whose only dream is to make a goodish marriage and keep up with her sisters. David Faux feels no remorse as he strips his mother of her carefully hoarded golden guineas. Is this how Marian felt about the three careless young men who were spending her capital on their education, without feeling the need to repay her with hard work or success? And when Jacob arrives to remind David of his family obligations, in the process scuppering the advantageous match to Penny, was Marian thinking of Charlie, whose well-meaning, blundering presence had spoiled her ‘dual solitude’?

Deep processes within Marian’s psyche were being stirred. Although she returned to preparatory work on what would eventually become
Romola
, her imagination remained deep in the Midlands landscape. At the end of August she was telling Blackwood that although she planned to write a ‘historical romance’ set in Florence, she intended first to produce ‘another English story’.
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Two months later she noted in her journal that she had started on that story, which had ‘thrust itself between me and the other book I was meditating. It is “Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe”.’
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Only five days after the dreaded move to central London she had escaped in her imagination to ‘the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England’.
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The idea of
Silas Marner
forcing itself upon Marian – cutting across the sluggish, elusive
Romola
– suggests something of its immediacy and power. Less than half the length of
Adam Bede
and
The Mill
, it tells its story with economy and pace. Mindful of the way in which the first part of
The Mill
had run away with her, Marian kept her characters and plot under close control, at one point even considering telling the tale in verse. Each element of the story is disciplined and integrated. Romance is balanced by realism, allegory is conveyed through naturalistic detail, individual characters carry symbolic weight.

The ‘millet-seed of thought’ around which the book grew had its roots deep in Marian’s memory.
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She told Blackwood that
she had always retained a ‘childish recollection of a man with a stoop and expression of face that led her to think that he was an alien from his fellows’.
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Marner is indeed alienated, both from his original community, a religious sect in an unnamed northern city, and from the village of Raveloe where he has since settled. Tolerated because he is a hard and necessary worker, Marner makes no effort to integrate with his new neighbours: ‘he invited no comer to step across his door-sill, and he never strolled into the village to drink a pint at the Rainbow, or to gossip at the wheelwright’s’.
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Memories of the false accusation of theft which led to his expulsion from the Lantern Yard religious community mean that he is unwilling to trust again. Instead, he devotes his energy to his work, sitting at his cottage loom for hours on end. His only pleasure comes from counting the golden coins amassed through years of labour and saving.

Silas’s story begs to be read in terms of Marian’s own situation. Ostracised by her family, remote from her neighbours, she believed herself to be the victim of just that kind of unfair accusation which had ended with Marner being driven out of Lantern Yard. Like the weaver, she too had spent the last five years bent close over her work, earning good money for hard, skilled labour. During the very week that she started the novel she recorded with obvious satisfaction in her journal that she had ‘invested £2000 in East Indies Stock, and expect shortly to invest another £2000, so that with my other money, we have enough in any case to keep us from beggary’.
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Marner is devastated when his little store of gold disappears – stolen by Dunstan Cass, the Squire’s reprobate younger son. But within a few weeks a substitute magically appears in his cottage in the form of a baby girl whose hair is so golden that for a moment the short-sighted Marner thinks that his money has been restored to him. In time he learns to care for the child and, as a mark of the way in which she has revived his atrophied affections, he gives her the name ‘Eppie’ in memory of his long-dead sister and mother. The daily duties of father/motherhood draw Marner towards his Raveloe neighbours who, after a sceptical start, are happy to help him raise the child as his own. Marian links Wordsworth’s insistence on the importance of childhood memory with
Feuerbach’s stress on the human divine to rehabilitate Marner as a good, feeling man.

Like Marner, Marian had been obliged to take on the rearing of someone else’s children at the age of forty. She too had exchanged some of her hard-earned and carefully managed money for the gamble of parenthood. Now she too was being drawn back towards the ‘family’ community. At the end of 1860 she met Lewes’s mother for the first time.
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The reason for the long standoff is not clear: although Mrs Willim remained on affectionate terms with Agnes, there is nothing to suggest that she disapproved of her son’s new partner. Her own ‘marriage’, to Lewes’s father John Lee Lewes, had never been legalised and from the little we know of her she was an intelligent, tolerant woman. Perhaps the permanently angry Captain Willim, with whom she was once again living, had refused until now to let the infamous George Eliot into his house.
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Whatever the reason for the delay, the initial meeting with Mrs Willim seems to have gone well, and the two women began to build a relationship based on liking and respect. When
Silas Marner
was published in the spring of 1861 the only presentation copy Marian requested from Blackwoods went to Mrs Willim.
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If Marian’s experience of early family expulsion followed by acceptance in middle age suggested Silas’s story, other aspects of her life show through in other strands. Nancy Lammeter, who is married to Eppie’s natural father Godfrey Cass, remains involuntarily childless. At the symbolic level, this is Cass’s punishment for denying that he has previously been married and fathered a child. As Marian moved beyond her fertile years was she also pondering the fact that she had been denied her own child because of Lewes’s messy married life? And was it of her own tortured, self-critical nature she was thinking when she described the effect of childlessness on Nancy?

It comes as no surprise that it was now that both Marian and Lewes began the practice of referring to George Eliot’s novels as babies. In July 1859 Lewes told Blackwood that Mrs Lewes is about ‘to rock the cradle of the new “little stranger” with fresh maternal vigour’. A month after becoming a full-time stepmother Marian reported to the publisher that she was ‘naturally jealous for “The Mill” which is my youngest child’.
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Blackwood’s aversion to the darkness in Marian’s work was amplified by the knowledge that his brother, the Major, was dying. Certainly he found the first 100 pages of
Silas Marner
‘very sad, almost oppressive’.
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Marian responded with reassurances that the tale was not meant to be gloomy ‘since it sets – or is intended to set – in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural human relations. The Nemesis is a very mild one.’
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The next instalment of the manuscript went some way towards mollifying Blackwood, although he joked that he had been hoping for the appearance of a good-hearted clergyman ‘but I suppose you had not a good one at hand as
sometimes
happens in this life’.
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The critics liked it too. The scenes in the Rainbow Inn where the villagers bicker and gossip in broad dialect drew praise from those who hoped that this marked a return to the high days of Mrs Poyser. Several flattering comparisons were made with Shakespeare’s crowd scenes. Mudie took 3000 copies, and the twelve-shilling edition sold 8000 copies in all, bringing Marian a very handsome £1600.

Once the proofs were read, the Leweses set off again for Italy. The Blandford Square house was left in the capable hands of Charlie, who proved to be a natural housekeeper, supervising the hanging of curtains and the washing of Marian’s favourite summer frock, as well as worrying about the welfare of the servants Amelia and Grace.
Silas Marner
had been the most trouble-free of all her books, and this time Marian had no need to rest and recuperate. She was returning to Florence to continue the
research for her historical romance begun the previous summer. The Leweses travelled via Paris, Avignon and Pisa to Florence, where they set to work in the libraries, museums and galleries gathering material about the life and times of Savonarola. Lewes’s help was invaluable, not just as an enthusiastic sketcher of historical costumes, but as a note-taker in those places where women were not admitted, such as parts of the San Marco monastery. They made contact again with Tom Trollope, the Florence-based British historian and novelist who had been a knowledgeable guide to local history and culture during their fortnight’s visit the previous year. It was his idea that they should stay on into early June to travel to the hillside monasteries at La Vernia and Camaldoli. During the journey an incident occurred which shows how far Marian had moved emotionally since her overwrought early womanhood. At one point her horse fell on the edge of a precipice, turning Lewes ‘very sick and faint from the shock’, but leaving her ‘neither hurt nor shaken’.
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It was only fifteen years earlier that she had crossed the Alps screaming with terror, convinced that her mount was about to pitch her into oblivion.

Unfortunately, this new-found equanimity did not extend to her writing. Returning to London on 14 June, having first visited Bertie at Hofwyl, Marian and Lewes were plunged into the most agonising period of what had become their joint career. Swamped by the heavy fruits of the Florentine research, Marian could not find the imaginative spark which would turn a mountain of documentary detail into a living, breathing world. In desperation she read historical novels by Scott and Bulwer-Lytton to see how they had managed it, but her only conclusion was that she still did not know enough. Instead of beginning to write, she waded through Gibbon, Michelet, Montalembert, Machiavelli, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Finding the faithful London Library inadequate for her purposes, she now applied for a ticket at the British Museum, trudging up to Bloomsbury to check the last detail on Florentine dress.
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There was a false start to the writing on 7 October, followed by several sets of revised outlines and schedules. By Christmas there was still no opening chapter, only constant journal references to the ‘depression on the probability or improbability of my achieving the work I wish to do’. Plagued by headaches, she paced with Lewes every day around Regent’s
Park ‘brooding, producing little’. On one occasion things were so bad that she ‘almost resolved to give up my Italian novel’.
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