George Eliot (63 page)

The next summer they went south, this time to Redhill, Surrey. As was usual in those days, they took the whole Priory household with them, including the three servants and the carriage. During the morning writing hours Marian made progress on
Daniel Deronda
, while Lewes worked at the second volume of
Problems of Life and Mind
. In the afternoon they walked or drove through the surrounding countryside.

The following year, 1875, they went north to a house at Rickmansworth. While this may not sound very rural, the beautiful countryside around Denham and Harefield was easily accessible by carriage. But there was no avoiding the usual inconveniences that come from splitting one’s life between two places. Returning home to the Priory on 23 September they found it in a dreadful mess. The decorating they had commissioned was not finished, there was a dreadful smell of paint and the gardener had stolen
Lewes’s cigars.
⁴⁴
Leaving the servants behind to stand guard, they set off for two weeks in Wales.

It was not until the very end of 1876, after years of renting, that the Leweses finally found a permanent country home.
⁴⁵
Or rather, John Cross found it. The Heights at Witley was not far from Mrs Cross’s house at Weybridge, deep in the Surrey countryside, which had become so familiar to the Leweses from their visits over the last few years. It was made from the local red stone, covered in vines, and came attached to nine acres of land. The railway station, with its fast link to London, was only five minutes away.

Careful in so many things, the Leweses were strangely hasty when it came to property. Having paid £5000 for the Heights, they announced themselves disappointed to discover that the kitchen was poky and the plumbing bad. When their architect gave them an estimate of £640 for bringing the place up to scratch or £375 for making it barely adequate, they immediately considered selling. In the end they agreed to make the minimum changes and see how they managed during the coming summer. As it turned out, they did very well. Having moved into so many temporary new homes in the past few years, they were used to negotiating an unreliable water supply, infrequent grocery deliveries and not enough furniture. Within months they had decided that it was ‘ravishing’ and worked to accommodate themselves to its inconveniences.
⁴⁶
Twice a week they got the fishmonger at Waterloo station to send down something for their dinner on the train.

The grand and the good who hung around the Priory were now replaced by more modest callers, like the local vicar. Those who made calls from further afield had been specifically invited. John Blackwood travelled down from town, the Frederic Harrisons came over from his family home near Guildford and Benjamin Jowett, now Master of Balliol, popped in several times during his stay with the Leweses’ neighbours, the Hollands. Even Lewes, with his insatiable weakness for the rich and famous, enjoyed this new and discriminating way of living – ‘so much better than Society! (with a big S),’ he crowed to Cross.
⁴⁷

Most remarkable of all, the Leweses took up lawn tennis. Johnny Cross was a great fan of the game, had taken them to a
match in London and now rigged up a net in the garden at the Heights. Once they’d learned the rules, the rickety sixty-year-olds ran around the court, sweating and laughing. Marian said she had not felt this well for years. Back at the Priory they tried to go on playing, but the garden was not big enough for a court. So Johnny Cross suggested badminton, which had the advantage that on windy days they could play in the drawing-room.

Although she would never take a big trip again, Marian still continued to feed from the new scenes and landscapes which came her way. Immediately after she had corrected the proofs of Book Eight of
Middlemarch
the Leweses set out for Homburg, a fashionable German spa resort. They arrived on 21 September 1872 and proceeded to drink the waters and take the baths. Refreshed and rested, Marian wrote the Finale to
Middlemarch
and sent it off to Edinburgh.

This stay in Homburg is famous for the incident which inspired the powerful opening scene of Marian’s next book,
Daniel Deronda
. In between sipping and splashing, trotting through pine forests and listening to music, the Leweses made several trips to the casino and found themselves unnerved by scenes of feverish play. In particular, Marian noticed a beautiful English girl, Byron’s great-niece, hanging compulsively around the gaming table. Marian told Blackwood, ‘It made me cry to see her young fresh face among the hags and brutally stupid men around her.’
⁴⁸
It is this contrast which Daniel Deronda observes as he watches the cool and dazzling Gwendolen Harlem play the tables at Leubronn, surrounded by the puckered faces of casino
habitués
.

Staying at Homburg gave Marian the chance to absorb a new kind of speedy cash-culture which she had not encountered before. Buzzing around the casino and the concert hall, the hotel lounges and the elaborate carriages was a promiscuous mix of Irish aristocracy, German public men, English manufacturers and retired stage people. They were everything that virtuous characters from an Eliot novel should not be: rootless, restless, detached from ‘the piety of memory’ which would have kept them anchored to a stable set of values.

Homburg clearly fascinated Marian, for the next summer she returned to gather more material for
Daniel Deronda
. By this time
her focus had shifted from the casino to the synagogue. She was researching the Jewish part of her story now and wanted to find locations where Daniel Deronda could excavate his family origins. In Frankfurt the Leweses made a point of staying until Friday evening so that they could attend the service at the synagogue, just like Deronda. In Mainz, too, they went to the service, where Lewes recorded that they were ‘delighted with the singing’.
⁴⁹

As a young woman Marian had displayed the casual anti-semitism of her time and class, making the usual nasty remarks about Disraeli. Over time, though, her interest in the history of Christianity had gradually educated her about Judaism too. But the idea of Jewish nationalism – specifically the idea of a Jewish homeland – was something which she had encountered only recently, through her young friend and Hebrew teacher, Emanuel Deutsch. Impressed by his impassioned scholarship, Marian was carried along by Deutsch’s ecstatic reaction to his first visit to Palestine in the spring of 1869. So it was sad to learn shortly afterwards that Deutsch had begun to suffer from the cancer that would kill him four years later. As he lay dying, Marian visited him several times in his lodgings and wrote to him – addressing him as ‘My Dear Rabbi’ – urging him not to commit suicide: ‘Remember,’ she warned, ‘it has happened to many to be glad they did not commit suicide, though they once ran for the final leap, or as Mary Wollstonecraft did, wetted their garments well in the rain hoping to sink better when they plunged.’
⁵⁰
It was this cloak-wetting device which Marian was to give to the character of Mirah Lapidoth, who is rescued from her intended plunge into the Thames by the passing Daniel Deronda. News of Deutsch’s death – during a second trip to the East – came in May 1873, just as Marian was planning her book in detail. Much of Deutsch’s circumstances, especially his combination of learning, poverty and ill-health, found its way into the character of Mordecai.

Marian had supplemented Deutsch’s informative talks with her usual detailed reading. ‘In the mornings’, she wrote to Emilia Pattison, ‘my dwelling is among the tombs, farther back than the times of the Medici.’
⁵¹
Frederic Harrison was consulted about the legal implications of the plot and Leslie Stephen provided
details about the Cambridge scholarship for which Deronda competes.

But there was another kind of research to be done. Marian had decided to set the English strand of the book in a part of the countryside unfamiliar to her, in that county which Thomas Hardy had recently designated ‘Wessex’. In October 1874 she and Lewes set off for Salisbury to try to find exactly the right location for Offendene and Topping Abbey, the homes of Gwendolen Harleth and Sir Hugo Mallinger. The villages around the city failed to catch her imagination, so a few days later they made a second trip, this time to Wiltshire. A tour around the great country estates and a trip through Savernake Forest provided Marian with exactly what she was looking for and she returned home with a clear visual sense of the great estates of this affluent landscape, so different from the small manor farms of her native Warwickshire.

It did not follow that the writing came easily. Marian’s despair with
Daniel Deronda
was as great as it had been with any of her other books. Indeed, this point of comparison became a comfort, for on Christmas Day 1875 she wrote in her journal, ‘I see on looking back … that I really was in worse health and suffered equal depression about Romola – and so far as I have recorded, the same thing seems to be true of Middlemarch.’
⁵²
She became obsessed with the idea that the world was over-flowing with pointless books to which she had no wish to add. She was still engaged with public events through her daily reading of
The Times
, and the idea of writing an unnecessary novel came to seem like a kind of sin. She spoke constantly of the need for writers to recognise when they had nothing more to say. Continuing to publish indiscriminately was, she maintained, ‘like an eminent clergyman’s spoiling his reputation by lapses and neutralizing all the good he did before’.
⁵³
She told Clifford Allbutt that she relied on Lewes to tell her whenever her writing was not up to scratch and should be thrown away.
⁵⁴
This is odd, because never once in twenty-five years did Lewes tell Marian that her work was anything other than brilliant. If he had said what he really felt on many occasions, she would never have written a word of fiction.

Even with Lewes’s constant encouragement and Blackwood’s background murmurings, the progress on
Daniel Deronda
was
tortuous. When William Blackwood visited on 21 April 1875, he made the reasonable blunder of asking if he might take away the first part of the manuscript, and was shocked by Marian’s response. He told his uncle, ‘if you had seen her face of horror and fright and meek expression you would have been startled. It was one of the most striking scenes I have ever seen and for a minute or two she would not speak. She seemed just to tremble at the idea of the M.S. being taken from her as if it were her baby.’
⁵⁵
Over the months that followed, both the Leweses became fixated with the physical safety of the new manuscript. Lewes was reluctant to trust it to the post and together they made the Blackwoods promise that it would be kept in a fire-proof safe in Edinburgh. These worries were not unreasonable in a time before carbon copies, photo-copiers or floppy discs. But the possibility of losing a manuscript had never struck them quite so acutely before. One explanation is that there was a part of Marian which did indeed believe that
Deronda
did not deserve to be published, that it was one of the many ‘heap of books’ which should never have seen the light of day.

There is a curious coda to all this. In 1878 Marian gave Alexander Main permission to publish
The George Eliot Birthday Book
.
⁵⁶
This consisted of a diary illustrated by quotations from Eliot’s work in which one entered the birthdays of friends and relatives. It was kitsch and crass and, unlike
Witty, Wise and Tender Sayings
, did not come at a time when Marian’s spirits needed particular boosting. Given her horror of ‘literary trash’, it was an odd thing to do.

In March 1874 Marian broke off her preparatory reading for
Daniel Deronda
, which she had originally conceived as a play, to prepare a volume of collected poetry. Most of the pieces had been published previously in magazines but others, like the ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets and ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’, now appeared in print for the first time. It went without saying that Blackwood would be the publisher, although this sort of ponderous material was not to his taste. Enclosed with the proofs he sent a note, entirely without irony, asking ‘if you have any lighter pieces written before the sense of what a great author should do for mankind came so strongly upon you’.
⁵⁷
But she
did not, and
The Legend of Fubal, and Other Poems
, which appeared that May, was her one and only collection of verse.

Blackwood was also far from keen on Lewes’s new work,
Problems of Life and Mind
. Back in January 1873 he had said that he had ‘no hesitation in agreeing to publish the work’ and waved away Lewes’s uncharacteristically delicate doubts about whether its atheistic underpinnings would prove personally offensive to him.
⁵⁸
But when Blackwood actually read the manuscript the following May he changed his mind. On the 24th he wrote to Lewes: ‘I am sorry to say your book grates upon me more than I expected … I knew quite well that I should not agree with you but I did not expect that the difference between us would have been very wide.’
⁵⁹
Fifteen years previously, when dealing with the vacillating publisher Bonn over Marian’s translation of Spinoza’s
Ethics
, Lewes had flown into a rage. Now he knew better. Although irritated by the waste of time, he sent a polite note to Blackwood telling him not to worry and briskly arranged to have the book published by Trubner & Co.

This was an uncharacteristically jerky movement by Blackwood, who usually managed to avoid these kinds of scrapes. But he too was ageing and ailing, and his touch may have been deserting him. Still, he valiantly tried to play the part expected of him when it became clear in the spring of 1875 that Marian was jumpy about her new ‘big book’,
Daniel Deronda
. On 22 April he wrote to tell her gently: ‘I have seen that depression on you before at periods when other authors would have been crowing and flapping their wings without the solid reason which I am sure you have for doing so.’
⁶⁰
He then reminded her of that day years before when he took away the manuscript of
Adam Bede
and started reading it greedily on the way home to Edinburgh. By tactfully recalling a former triumph, Blackwood nudged Marian into giving him the first part of
Daniel Deronda
when he called for lunch on 18 May.