George Eliot (55 page)

By the time
Felix Holt
was published, Marian’s celebrity had become a phenomenon in itself, standing between herself and new friendships, as well as transforming those which lingered from the past. Things had not been easy with Sara Hennell since the embarrassment of
Thoughts in Aid of Faith
of 1860 which both Marian and Lewes had found pretentious and dull. Sara’s inscription on Marian’s copy – ‘in grateful remembrance of how much I owed to her during the season of happy intercourse which formed the “German” period of our lives’ – suggests that at one level she accepted that their intimacy belonged to the past. But in other ways she clearly felt that she had the right to comment on Marian’s work as if they were still both struggling writers together. Her remarks on
The Mill
may have been perceptive, but they were not wanted, especially the part where she urged, ‘Go on! – write once more, and give us something … better.’
⁵⁸
Likewise, although she was quite right when she said of Romola’s character that she was ‘pure idealism … you have painted a goddess, and not a woman’, the point was that no one had asked her.
⁵⁹
Most annoying of all was the moment in spring 1862 when Sara mistakenly assumed that a second-rate tale appearing in
Blackwood
’s was Marian’s work. ‘Salem Chapel’, the latest in a series called ‘The Chronicles of Carlingford’, certainly covered familiar George Eliot territory, dealing with the conflicts between Evangelicals, dissenters and High Churchmen in a country town.
But it was written by the hackish churchwoman Mrs Oliphant, whose hazy understanding of dissent showed up in the false tone and many inaccuracies of the piece.

A week after sending off a snappy note to Coventry denying she was the author of ‘Salem Chapel’, Marian repented and wrote a softer letter to Sara, admitting that she could see how the mistake might have been made.
⁶⁰
She had talked so often about the piety of memory and the unimportance of intellectual agreement compared with emotional affiliation that she was determined not to be riled by Sara’s increasingly difficult ways. Rather than sulkily withdrawing from the older woman, Marian merely mildly reminded herself, by means of a letter to Cara, to be patient with Sara’s self-absorption. And while she continued to find Sara’s writing impenetrable – volume one of the new
Present Religion: As a Faith Owing Fellowship with Thought
(1865) was virtually unreadable – Marian had reached the point in her life where she was able quite genuinely to offer tactful support.
⁶¹

The new faces which found their way into Marian’s life were still mainly male. Usually they had been scooped up by Lewes during one of the many breakfasts, lunches and dinners which he now attended in his role as editor. Robert Browning, the poet and politician Richard Monckton Milnes, the constitutionalist Walter Bagehot and the scientist Huxley now supplemented the old circle of Spencer, Pigott and the Congreves. The intimate Saturday evenings had been replaced with Sunday afternoon At Homes, the amateur, musical entertainment with wide-ranging conversation. In time these gatherings became so large that it was impossible for Marian to meet more than a lucky handful of her guests: by 1868 Frederic Harrison was noting wistfully that ‘talking is impossible in your Sunday conversazione’.
⁶²

Clearly the little difficulty of the Leweses not being married no longer mattered. Success had a magic effect on people’s moral scruples. The most blatant change of heart involved the sculptor Thomas Woolner who in 1854 had written an unpleasant letter implying that Marian was a whore. But on bumping into her with Lewes at the Louvre in 1867 he became a fan and a friend, and a regular visitor to the Priory.
⁶³
And W. B. Scott, the man to whom the nasty letter had been written, also renewed his relationship with Lewes and was happy to report that Marian
was ‘the most bland and amiable of plain women, and most excellent in conversation’.
⁶⁴

The experience of living and socialising almost exclusively with men meant that Marian developed an interested understanding of their lives, especially those of the young whom she identified as ‘just the class I care most to influence’.
⁶⁵
Clifford Allbutt, for instance, was a young doctor with whom she stayed in touch even when he moved to his appointment at the Leeds Infirmary. From there he wrote to Marian about his religious doubts and his frustratingly long engagement, and asked her to come with Lewes to see round his hospital.
⁶⁶
The two-day trip in September 1868 suggested many details that would find their way into Lydgate’s story in
Middlemarch
.

Then there was Emanuel Deutsch, a prodigiously clever young German working at the British Museum whose expertise in Jewish history and culture sustained Marian’s growing interest in the subject. He was to give Marian lessons in Hebrew and his tragically short life suggested some of the details for Mordecai, the scholar-saint in
Daniel Deronda
, Marian’s last novel.

Another young man who played a part in shaping George Eliot’s legacy was Oscar Browning, fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and a master at Eton until he was dismissed for making sexual advances to the boys. Chatty and adoring, he invited Lewes and Marian to the school in June 1867 to row on the river and watch a cricket match.
⁶⁷
When Marian remarked how much she liked one of his chairs, he arranged to have a copy made and sent to her. His gossipy biography of George Eliot in 1890 was one of the major sources of the rumour about Lewes’s infidelity.

Naturally there were times when Marian missed women. One day in 1864 when Bessie Rayner Parkes took a friend along to the Priory, she had found Marian marooned in a sea of masculinity: ‘It
was
so sad to see Marian sitting alone with four men when we entered the room. Isa and I brought in quite a wholesome atmosphere of womanhood and I read in Marian’s expressive face that she felt it.’
⁶⁸
Gradually, though, brave women were beginning to make overtures. In May 1867 Lewes had introduced Marian to Lady Amberley at the first of the Positivist lectures given by Richard Congreve. Lady Amberley had immediately
issued an invitation to lunch, but was told that this was ‘against rules’.
⁶⁹
Instead, she visited the Priory soon afterwards, slightly panicky as to what the correct ‘etiquette’ might turn out to be.
⁷⁰
After a slow start, Marian came to like the young woman and in time two of Lady Amberley’s sisters, equally lively and well-married, also became regular callers at the Priory.

Although these three Stanley girls all invited Marian to their homes, she continued in her old practice of turning them down. With other women, though, she was learning to be more flexible. It was around now that she met two young people who were to become, in time, her keenest disciples. At this stage they were simply restless young married women drawn to Mrs Lewes’s wise and empathic manner. There was Nina Lehmann, daughter of Lewes’s old Edinburgh friend Robert Chambers. Marian sometimes visited the Highgate home which Nina shared with her cultured industrialist German husband, Frederick, for an evening of music and well-informed talk. When Nina was sent to Pau for her health in 1867, the Leweses stopped off for two days on their way to Spain. Nina was in seventh heaven, writing rapturously to her husband, ‘I think she loves me – we are sworn friends. What a sweet, mild, womanly presence hers is – so soothing, too, and
elevating
above all.’
⁷¹
Another young woman who had the distinction of home visits from George Eliot was Georgiana Burne-Jones, wife of the painter, Edward. Marian was so enchanted with Georgie’s knowledge of art and allied matters that she and Lewes frequently arrived at the young couple’s house in Fulham, bearing gifts for their children like doting grandparents.

As Marian’s celebrity grew it was not snubbing but mobbing which posed the greater threat. Even in obscure corners of the Continent there was no guarantee that earnest fans might not suddenly descend. During a stay in Granada in February 1867 where they had gone after seeing Nina Lehmann in Pau, Lewes had abandoned his usual precaution of scribbling his name illegibly in the hotel register with the result that ‘it was whispered round at once who we were, and the attention of the guests was flattering but boring’. One enthusiastic American lady in the throng, whom Lewes could not help noticing was ‘very pretty’, claimed that she regarded
Romola
as her Bible, and begged for
an autograph.
⁷²
For Marian, who even in her unknown years had chosen to eat hotel dinners in her own room to avoid strangers’ glances, it was all becoming an ordeal.

This new expansiveness in Marian’s private life sent echoes through her work. The hermit years at Richmond, Wandsworth and even Blandford Square had produced novels which sprang from the deepest parts of her memory and psyche, untouched by anything happening around her. But with the opening up of the Priory years, Marian’s work became more susceptible to immediate influence.
Felix Holt
, as we have seen, was written partly in response to the events leading up to the 1867 Second Reform Act. Its successor,
The Spanish Gypsy
, owed its genesis to two of the many new friendships which were breaking in upon the Leweses’ dual solitude.

The poem had a laborious gestation and, just like
Romola
, was at one point put aside for an English novel,
Felix Holt
. The twisted turn of events started in February 1863 when an old friend of Lewes, Theodore Martin, brought his wife to the Priory. Marian was delighted with Helen Faucit, whom fifteen years earlier Lewes had tagged ‘the finest tragic actress on our stage’, and decided that she would like to write a play for her.
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The Martins, in turn, showed Marian a charming portrait of Helen by Frederic Burton which, in a roundabout way, led to Burton both painting Marian and accompanying the Leweses on holiday to Italy in May 1864. It was while the trio was visiting the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice that Marian was struck by an
Annunciation
, possibly by Titian, which gave her the idea of writing about a young woman chosen from the ranks of ordinary womanhood to ‘fulfil a great destiny’.
⁷⁴
Once home she became convinced that the only setting which would do was that of Spain in the 1490s when the struggle between the ruling Catholics and the Moors was at its height.

From the start the omens were not good. Just as with
Romola
, Marian over-researched herself into imaginative paralysis. Reading up on Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
did not provide that important spark, not even with Lewes plugging away in parallel on
Don Quixote
. The journal entries make depressing reading. After an agonising few months on the first two acts, Marian started
‘sticking in the mud continuously’ and found herself plunging in ‘a swamp of miseries’. Act Three was disrupted by Christmas 1864, Act Four could not be resuscitated even by a ten-day trip to Paris and by the middle of February even the usually upbeat Lewes had to admit that the play wasn’t working. On the 21st of the month Marian recorded in her journal that he had ‘taken my drama away from me’.
⁷⁵

The next two years were taken up with
Felix Holt
, which appeared in June 1866. Marian and Lewes did their usual thing of escaping immediately to the Continent to avoid having to confront the book’s fate directly. While they toured Germany and the Low Countries, John Blackwood oversaw slow sales (another effect of the difficult economic situation) and came to terms with the idea that for the first time he was going to lose money on a George Eliot novel. The reviews, though, were sufficiently positive to make everyone involved feel that Marian Lewes’s return to her original publishers had been a success: ‘I do not know that I ever saw a Novel received with a more universal acclaim,’ wrote Blackwood in his old, admiring way.
⁷⁶
At the end of the year he offered Marian £1000 for the copyright of all the novels, with the intention of bringing them out in a sixpenny series complete with illustrations.
⁷⁷

Six days later, on 27 December, the Leweses set off on another trip, this time to the South of France. Inevitably Lewes had found the
Fortnightly
commitment too draining and had asked Trollope to release him. Ostensibly the trip was for the sake of his health, but during a walk on the beach at Biarritz Marian confided that she hoped they might press on to Spain where she could research the background for her abandoned play which she was now considering recasting as a poem. For two frail middle-aged people they did very well, travelling by rackety diligence and cold trains through San Sebastian, Barcelona, Granada and Seville. This was the pleasurable part of research, the drinking in of random sights, sounds and impressions which would eventually have to be worked up into a picture of a life very different from anything Marian had written about before. Having decided that her heroine’s ‘great destiny’ would be to lead the gypsies in their fight against the Moors, Marian was keen to spend time absorbing the gypsy culture, carefully observing one family troop as they
danced and sang. She also occupied herself with the more usual examples of high Western culture, viewing the paintings in the Prado in Madrid, and wandering through the magnificent cathedral in Seville.
⁷⁸

Having been told that her new work was connected with Spain, Blackwood was naturally hungry for details: ‘is it a Romance?’ he asked.
⁷⁹
Her reply from Granada can hardly have thrilled him: ‘The work connected with Spain is not a Romance. It is – prepare your fortitude – it is – a poem.’
⁸⁰
As it turned out, Blackwood did indeed need fortitude, because the poem was not completed for another year, on 29 April 1868. The usual mix of depression and headache stopped Marian pushing ahead on her return to London in the middle of March 1867. This time it was not just a question of getting the historical detail right, or bringing the characters to life, but of turning what had started off as a prose drama into a dramatic poem. The end result was, inevitably, an odd mix of narrative and dialogue, mainly blank verse but with some linking passages of prose and lyric.