George Eliot (58 page)

Marian was particularly drawn to young people who were already involved in a family structure into which she could be incorporated as an honorary senior member. She enjoyed the idea that she and Lewes were ‘grandparents’ to a host of her friends’ children, especially Philip and Margaret Burne-Jones. Another household where she fitted in easily belonged to the Cross family. Lewes had first been introduced to the widow Mrs
William Cross by Herbert Spencer when they stopped off at Weybridge during a walking tour in October 1867. Eighteen months later the Leweses were in Rome when they bumped into Mrs Cross, her eldest daughter Mrs Bullock and her son, the twenty-nine-year-old banker John Walter Cross. Back in Britain the friendship flourished, partly because both the Leweses and the Crosses spent a lot of time in Surrey and partly because the Cross clan fulfilled the crucial criterion that it ‘worshipped’ the work of George Eliot. Marian and Lewes spent New Year’s Day 1872 in Weybridge being made a fuss of by their new friends, and the following September they celebrated Marian’s finishing of
Middlemarch
by visiting the family on the country estate, Six Mile Bottom, near Newmarket, recently inherited by Mrs Cross’s son-in-law, Henry Bullock-Hall. Exhausted by the past year’s tight writing schedule, which, Marian confided to Mrs Cross, was ‘a sort of nightmare in which I have been scrambling on the slippery bank of a pool, just keeping my head above water’, she plunged into reviving country conversations about livestock and crops.
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Tantalisingly, John Cross was present during this weekend, along with several of his sisters, but there is no suggestion that he had caught Mrs Lewes’s eye as a future lover. At this point she was more entranced with the family as a whole, and it was now that she started to call Johnny ‘nephew’.

In any case Marian’s interest in young men was in the process of being superseded by her involvement with young women. Much has been written and even more hinted about Marian’s friendships with the group of girls who hung around her during the last decade of her life. These relationships were certainly intense, but to pronounce on whether or not they were ‘lesbian’ is to impose a sensibility which belongs to the late twentieth century. Certainly some Victorian women had physical relationships with other women, even more organised their emotional lives around best friends and sisters, while others combined marriage to a man they loved with enduring friendships with other women. But it would be anachronistic to describe any of these situations as ‘lesbian’ (or not) because lesbianism had not been defined in the way we understand it today. Certainly Harriet Martineau lived lovingly and jealously with her niece, Henry James’s sister Alice had what was described as a ‘Boston marriage’
with a woman friend, and Barbara Bodichon’s sister Annie, also known as Nanny, set up home in Rome with a fellow female artist.

Likewise, the conventions of language and tone which Victorian women observed in their friendships with one another might suggest to us meanings that were never intended. Women frequently used the language of love – calling each other ‘darling’ and ‘dearest’ and swearing undying loyalty – without wishing to express more than warm affection. On other occasions they used phrases which hinted at an attachment which perhaps neither fully understood. For instance, how are we to read those professions of love between Sara Hennell and her ‘unfaithful husband’ Mary Ann Evans during the 1840s? As a submerged ‘lesbian’ enchantment or as a metaphor for the strength of the platonic love between them? The impossibility of knowing suggests the futility of trying to guess.

It is certainly true that those young women who developed a passion for Marian were either enduringly single or stuck in a disappointing marriage. Just like Marian herself, they had an ‘unused stock’ of feelings which were looking for expression. For instance, Georgiana Burne-Jones’s feelings for Marian Lewes grew more intense as her husband’s interest in her waned, reaching a climax when he started an affair with another woman. In June 1870 Georgie arranged to take the children to Whitby to coincide with the Leweses’ arrival in the resort following a tour of health-giving Cromer and Harrogate. Over the two weeks of sandy walks and dinner discussions that followed, Georgie, minus Edward, developed a passionate attachment to Marian. Her first letter to the Priory on Marian’s return to town suggests how profoundly she had been moved:

Another of Marian’s honorary daughters was Emilia Pattison, the much younger wife of the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. Like Georgie, Emilia was unhappy with her husband, a man whose vast learning and advanced years made many think that he must be the model for Edward Casaubon. There were certain details about Emilia’s intense Anglo-Catholic adolescence which found their way into the description of the Evangelical Dorothea Brooke, including a propensity to fast and to pray spontaneously for the souls of the astonished poor. Following the successful visit to Lincoln College in 1870, the friendship deepened and Marian started to fall naturally into calling Emilia ‘Daughter’, and signing herself ‘
Madre’
.

But Georgie’s and Emilia’s sentimental devotion was nothing compared with that of Elma Stuart, a soldier’s widow living in Dinan, France, with her small son. She initially wrote to Marian in January 1872, enclosing an oak book-slide which she had carved herself. It was the first of a stream of presents which arrived at the Priory over the years. There were other examples of the dextrous Elma’s craft – an elaborately carved table, mirror and writing board – as well as the more conventional sweets and photographs. Mrs Stuart was obsessed with Marian’s physical comfort – as was Marian – and put a great deal of time and energy into designing knickers, shirts and slippers which might suit her beloved’s increasingly fragile body. But it was the accompanying letters which capped anything that had gone before. The first one set the tone: ‘What for years, you have been to me, how you have comforted my sorrows, peopled my loneliness, added to my happiness, and bettered in every way my whole nature, you can never know.’
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Over the next few years Mrs Stuart offered, among many other things, to be Marian’s servant and kiss the hem of her garment. On Marian’s death she booked the plot next to her beloved’s grave in Highgate so that she could be sure of lying alongside her. The headstone, erected in 1903, was
boastfully devoted, describing Mrs Stuart as one ‘whom for 8½ blessed years George Eliot called by the sweet name of “Daughter”’.
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Lewes was not threatened by these intense attachments between Marian and other, younger women. He saw the effect which their adoration had on her shaky confidence and was happy to encourage them to keep writing and visiting. This, of course, ran counter to his declared strategy of not allowing Marian to see or hear anything about her work. In practice, he increasingly allowed anyone whose reaction Marian found pleasing to have controlled access to her. Undiscriminating gush still offended her by its failure to see the difference between her own work and the run-of-the-mill pot-boiler. But these new young female fans gave her the kind of response she wanted, an intensely personal testimony to the way their own lives had been morally uplifted by their encounters with Romola, Fedalma or Esther Lyon.

Women were drawn to Marian for the same reasons as men. Just as Mrs Ponsonby said, George Eliot seemed to understand how to live a good life in a godless universe. And then there was her famous empathy which, as Georgie Burne-Jones had discovered in Whitby, encouraged people to give up their most intimate secrets. It would be naive to suggest that as Marian leaned eagerly towards some young man or woman, drawing out their inner life, she was consciously trawling material for her next set of characters. By now she was far beyond lifting people from real life and transplanting them into her books. But the understanding of human frailty which at this very moment was feeding her construction of Dorothea, Lydgate and Rosamond was also at work in the drawing-room of the Priory. Her great skill, as young Mary Arnold had noted, was to listen intently to what she was being told, leaving the speaker feeling that, for once, she had been properly heard. A decade before Freud and a century before the counselling boom, Marian Lewes had stumbled upon the power of attentive listening.

There were other things which Marian offered specifically to women who found themselves both excited and confused by the intensifying debate around ‘The Woman Question’. Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, Emily Faithful, Bessie Rayner Parkes and their many friends were beginning to see results for their
years of dedicated work. Throughout the fifties and sixties they had campaigned for better schools and jobs for women, and set up a whole range of initiatives, from Girton College to the
English Woman’s Journal
and an all-women printing business. Now others were beginning to listen: in 1869, following his failure to get women included in the franchise, the mighty John Stuart Mill published his influential
The Subjection of Women;
the following year Barbara’s dream was realised when the Married Women’s Property Act went through. For the group known as the ‘Langham Place Ladies’, after their headquarters, these were triumphs. But for many other middle-class women the issues were less clear. They might feel restricted in their marriages and frustrated by their lack of publicly recognised achievements, but that did not mean they necessarily wanted to go down the path laid out by liberal trail blazers like Barbara Bodichon. For these women Marian Lewes offered an alternative model of educated, effective womanhood. Unlike Barbara and Bessie, she had not been raised in the tradition of Bentham and the Mills. She did not trust the free market to deliver solutions to cultural and historic tangles. In January 1871, with obvious approbation she quoted the story of a woman who had taken back her drunken husband again and again ‘and at last nursed and watched him into penitence and decency’. This for Marian was not ‘mere animal constancy. It is duty and human pity.’
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While Barbara had worked hard for nearly twenty years to ensure that such a woman need not be shackled to her husband, Marian saw something admirable in the fact that she had stayed.

When Marian started to write
Middlemarch
at the beginning of 1869 she was already steeped in the medical history which feeds the background to the book. From her recollections of Chrissey’s husband Edward Clarke, she knew all about the difficulties faced by a ‘gentleman’ entering what was still as much a trade as a profession. From Lewes’s ward-walking days as a medical student in the 1830s she got information about basic anatomy, the pathologies of prevalent illnesses including typhoid and cholera, not to mention the scare stories about the infamous Burke and Hare. For the details he was not able to supply she had a host of other sources close at hand. Gertrude Lewes had material
about her grandfather, the illustrious medical reformer Thomas Southwood Smith, which fitted nicely with the profile Marian wanted for her hero Tertius Lydgate. Dr Clifford Allbutt was able to answer questions about the organisation and practice of provincial hospitals, which Maria Congreve, daughter of a doctor, supplemented with more research. In addition, Marian did her usual detailed reading on all aspects of the development of medicine.

More than any of Marian’s previous books
Middlemarch
was concerned with national political and economic life. While in
Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss
and
Silas Mamer
Eliot mentions high grain prices, the far-away French War and the Emancipation of Catholics, the communities she writes about remain aloof from wider political and commercial pressures. In
Felix Holt
we take a step towards the larger world, as the conflicts surrounding the Great Reform Bill are explored through their impact on one provincial community. But while Eliot had famously maintained in
Felix Holt
that there is no individual life which is not shaped by wider circumstance, it is in
Middlemarch
that she shows this process fully at work.

This wider grasp of the relationship between town and country, province and metropolis, country and state was fed by Marian’s continued growing interest in politics and political history. The very week after finishing
Felix Holt
she had gone to the Houses of Parliament to hear the debate over Abyssinia – something which it would be hard to imagine her doing five years earlier.
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The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 had her devouring
The Times
and the
Daily News
in a way which, given her previous indifference to newspapers, even she found strange.
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Marian had started out on the side of the Prussians, warrior guardians of that German culture which had fed and shaped so much of her life. But as the extent of Junker cruelty became clear, especially during the siege of Paris in December 1870, she began to feel increasing sympathy with the French and a general abhorrence of the brutalising effects of the war. Never noted for her political insight, Marian made an extraordinarily prophetic remark to Sara Hennell on 12 August 1870 when she declared, ‘We have entered into the period which will be marked in future historical charts as “The period of German ascendency”.’
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