George Eliot (66 page)

Gratified by the way that so many of the tributes from academic and professional scientists had emphasised Lewes’s influence on younger scholars, Marian resolved that the best way to perpetuate his name was to set up a scholarship. After taking soundings mainly from Cambridge men, she designated £5000 to fund the George Henry Lewes Studentship, designed to support a young physiologist at an early stage in his research career. The Studentship was to be held for three years at Cambridge and would provide the kind of access to first-class facilities of which the young Lewes, with his borrowed microscope, had only dreamed. The first appointee, chosen by trustees who included T. H. Huxley and Henry Sidgwick, went on to become a professor and over the decades some of the country’s finest physiologists held the Studentship. With Barbara’s nudging Marian opened the award to female candidates. However, it was not until after the Great War that the first woman was appointed to the George Henry Lewes Studentship.

If coming up with the idea of the Studentship had been a comfort and a kind of pleasure, getting hold of the £5000 to fund it was a painful business. All Marian’s assets, cash as well as bricks and mortar, were in Lewes’s name. To claim them back again she had to go through a complicated and humiliating two-stage process. Lewes’s will of 1859 left the copyright of his
work to his sons and everything else to ‘Mary Ann Evans, Spinster’, who was also the executrix. Beady-eyed Fanny Houghton spotted the will in the paper and was not impressed, first by the tiny amount which Lewes himself left – under £1000 – and then by the fact that the name of Evans was yet again publicly associated with that nasty man: ‘his poor legacy was a farce,’ Fanny wrote to Isaac on 28 January 1881, ‘besides, her name ought not to have been mentioned. The sons should have been made executors.’
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On 16 December 1878 Marian went to court to prove the will, an ordeal which even the usually snipy George Simpson thought she should have been spared.
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But before she could get possession of her own property she had first to change her name by deed to Lewes. In January 1879, witnessed by Charles Lewes and John Cross, Marian legally took the surname she had been using since 1857, but this time combined it with her childhood Christian names. Thus by a long and strange detour she had become, at the age of fifty-nine, ‘Mary Ann Evans Lewes’.

Restarting her personal life took longer. Marian hid away over Christmas and New Year, refusing to see any of the old friends who arrived at the Priory with tender enquiries and thoughtful gifts. She shrank even from the sight of Charles as he worked softly to acknowledge the hundreds of letters which were pouring in.
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Luckily the young man had the sense and sensitivity to understand his stepmother’s need for solitude. In a series of notes and conversations he begged her close friends to be patient and to let her ‘choose her own way and her own time of struggling back to life’.
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Not until she had finished a complete second reading of the fourth volume of
Problems
on 5 January did Marian communicate with the outside world in the form of a letter to Barbara Bodichon. ‘Dearest Barbara,’ she said, ‘I bless you for all your goodness to me, but I am a bruised creature and shrink even from the tenderest touch. As soon as I feel able to see anybody I will see
you
.’
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A month later, and with the Priory pipes burst by the vicious cold, Marian wrote to Georgie Burne-Jones to say that ‘my everlasting winter has set in. You know that, and will be patient with me.’
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Johnny Cross was also told not to pester. He had taken Marian’s comment of 22 January that she would see him ‘some time’ to
mean that she would see him soon. On 30 January she wrote back telling him that she had meant a ‘distant time’.
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At the moment all her energy must be dedicated to finishing Lewes’s work.

But only a week later there were signs that Marian was beginning to thaw. One day she ordered the carriage to be got ready for a drive along the Kilburn Road. Over the next few weeks she gradually ventured further, past the hideous suburbs to something approaching the countryside. There she stopped the carriage, got down and walked alone through the fields.
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On 7 February Marian wrote again to Cross telling him: ‘In a week or two I think I shall want to see you. Sometimes even now I have a longing, but it is immediately counteracted by a fear.’ That fear was the feeling that she might bore him with a ‘grief that can never be healed’.
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But Cross knew all about that terror too, for only nine days after Lewes’s death he had lost his own beloved mother. It was this shared experience of loss which meant that on Sunday, 23 February, John Cross was the first person since Lewes’s death to make a personal call on Marian. Even Herbert Spencer, who presented himself the same day, was turned away.
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This was the breakthrough which Charles Lewes had assured her friends would come. By the end of the following month Marian had seen Spencer, Georgie Burne-Jones and Elma Stuart.

Throughout the whole sad winter of 1878–9 Edith Simcox had been hovering in the wings. Her diary shows her making almost daily visits to the Priory, oblivious to the dreadful weather. She was not, of course, allowed to see Marian, but she became on increasingly good terms with the servants who clucked over her wet clothes and wondered at her devotion. In the closing days of Lewes’s life she had sent little notes of enquiry up to the house, only to be told by Brett, the parlourmaid, that there was no change and little hope. On the last day, the 30th, Edith paced up and down in front of the gates. At one point she saw ‘a carriage like a doctor’s’ draw up and two men get out. For twenty minutes she stood in a dream, struck by the way in which passers-by continued their ordinary lives while she waited, trembling, for the fateful news. When the doctors eventually reappeared she rushed towards them and asked if there was no hope. ‘A tall man,
probably Sir James Paget, answered kindly: “None: he is dying – dying quickly.”’
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If Edith fantasised that grief would tear down Marian’s defences and allow her to rush in and comfort her beloved, she was disappointed. Until the momentous 12 April when she was finally admitted to the Priory drawing-room, she had to make do with briefings on her beloved’s progress from Gertrude Lewes in Hampstead and Eleanor Cross in Weybridge. The Priory servants were also useful sources of information, happy to let Edith hang around and pick up scraps of gossip. On one occasion she bumped into Johnny Cross doing the same thing and hoped that Brett would pass on to Marian news of ‘our meeting as friends’.
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Yet despite her over-identification with the Lewes household, Edith retained some of the good sense and brisk authority that belonged to her other, active life. When she heard that the Priory cook had been gossiping to the neighbours about Mrs Lewes’s howls of grief, she hinted to Brett that it would be a good idea if everyone tried ‘not to be too communicative’ in future.
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Aside from working steadily on
Problems of Life and Mind
throughout the first half of 1879, Marian found other ways of staying close to Lewes. She went through his papers, reread Goethe and visited the grave in Highgate where she discussed plans with the gardener for planting ivy and jessamine. On at least two occasions she became so lost in mental conversations with ‘my lost darling’ that, despite her scepticism about all things supernatural, she really believed she saw his ghost.
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Back in some kind of circulation, Marian began to discover just how much of her life had previously been screened and sorted by Lewes. The business side of things continued to be taken care of by Johnny, who advised her efficiently and unobtrusively on her investments. But when it came to the small change of friends and family, she found herself besieged by requests to which she was not sure how to respond. On 21 April Lewes’s nephew Vivian came and asked for £100. She gave him fifty pounds, but he returned it the next morning with a covering letter ‘confessing his error’. Bessie Belloc, personally wealthy, wanted £500, probably for a pet feminist cause.
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Unprotected by Lewes’s twinkly but firm shield, there was a danger that Marian could be seen as a soft touch. On 22 April she dashed
off a panicky note to John Cross at his city office begging him to come at once and advise her.
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He arrived that same evening and a letter turning down Bessie’s request was sent shortly afterwards.

But the greatest impertinence came from a new source. Until now Bertie Lewes’s widow, Eliza, had been happy to stay in Natal with her two children, living off the £200 which Lewes sent annually. But Eliza was a calculating woman and her father-in-law’s death panicked her into wanting to strengthen her connection with Marian who, after all, was the source of the crucial £200. So without waiting to be asked she bundled little Marian and George on to a boat and headed for Britain, arriving on 28 April. They were collected by Charles and taken to stay in Hampstead. Marian visited them the next day and brought them back to the Priory for lunch. Tensions emerged immediately. The ‘little Africans’ were rude and rough, especially in contrast to their small London cousins. Eliza missed the deference of colonial life and launched into a tirade against the rudeness of the British working class. More alarming still, she clearly thought that she was going to be invited to live at the Priory. Marian quickly put her right in a ‘painful letter’ written on the 29th.
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Despite constantly threatening to return home to Natal, Eliza never did. Supported by Marian’s money and great name she stayed in Britain, moving from place to place until she found some kind of tetchy stability in Brighton.

John Blackwood had been so struck by the beauty of the Heights, when he first saw it in June 1877, that he told Marian that ‘something should be born here’.
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A couple of surviving fragments of projected novels from this time suggest that Marian thought so too. One scrap is nothing more than a list of names for characters drawing heavily on her stay in Geneva in 1849. The second is a sketch for a novel set in Midlands England during the time of the Napoleonic War. Neither plan came to anything.
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Now nearing sixty, Marian did not have the emotional or physical strength to embark on another big novel. Her journal review for the year shows her doubtful about whether she should attempt any more writing at all. ‘Many conceptions of works to be carried out present themselves,’ she wrote, ‘but confidence in my own fitness
to complete them worthily is all the more wanting because it is reasonable to argue that I must have already done my best.’
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As it turned out, Marian did think it worthwhile pushing on, although not along the lines that Blackwood had imagined for her. Over that last difficult summer when Lewes was dying she wrote the sixteen essays that make up
Impressions of Theophrastus Such
. The last piece of business Lewes carried out at the end of November had been to send the manuscript off to Edinburgh.
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Certainly not a novel,
Impressions
purports to be a series of essays and character sketches by Theophrastus Such, a Herbert Spencer-ish kind of bachelor who declares, ‘the person I love best has never loved me, or known that I love her’.
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They form an immensely dense, intricate piece of work, which literary scholars find fascinating because it seems to show Eliot anticipating many of the themes and debates of literary Modernism. The allusive title,
Impressions of Theophrastus Such
, for instance, points to the impossibility of defining intellectual origins or charting the point where an artistic influence becomes a borrowing. The first essay, ‘Looking Inward’, explores the shifting nature of consciousness and the fictionality of autobiography.
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As this suggests, these are not easy essays to read. Their punning references to other, earlier texts meant that they were unlikely to be understood, let alone enjoyed, by any but a highly educated élite.

George Eliot’s turning away from her usual broad readership excited dismay among the newspaper critics.
The Times
, for instance, admitted that
Impressions
was ‘emphatically a work of genius’, but worried that it put a ‘serious strain on the facilities’ of the reader.
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The tendency which had been there in the ‘Jewish’ half of
Daniel Deronda
to ignore the likely interests of the British reading public was seen again in the final essay of
Impressions
, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ This piece returns to the question of how the Jews can develop an identity in exile that honours the inherited traditions that sustain cultural difference, without falling into sectarianism and bigotry.
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As Theophrastus’s discussion develops, it becomes clear that he is talking about other kinds of exile too, including his own. In the second essay of the collection, ‘Looking Backwards’, he has described his rural Midlands childhood in rapturous detail. Biographers of George Eliot have long used this lyrical description
of ‘the tiled roof of cottage and homestead’, ‘the long cow-shed’ and ‘the broad-shouldered barns’ to pad out the scanty details of Mary Anne Evans’s childhood. According to Theophrastus, the memories of these ‘childish loves’ have become vital to him over the intervening years during which he has lived the urban, disconnected life of the modern intellectual, eventually settling in a fretful London ‘half sleepless with eager thought and strife’.
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As Marian sat in the garden of the Heights in a county far removed from her own, she too pondered the power of early memory to give her a continuing sense of belonging to a particular community, while still leaving her free to experience the complexity and anonymous freedoms of the modern world. In all her seven novels she had never suggested that the way forward was to return to an imaginary past. Indeed, she makes it clear that this would not be possible. Her Midlands landscapes are always developing, albeit slowly.
Middlemarch
has the railway, Hayslope its Methodists. Or, as Theophrastus puts it in ‘Looking Backwards’: ‘our midland plains have never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me; yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of worldwide change, some new direction of human labour has wrought itself into what one may call the speech of the landscape’.
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