My Life in Middlemarch (24 page)

She regarded Lewes’s union with Agnes as luckless and helpless, and thought of her own relation to him as a true marriage—as characterized by Feuerbach, whose words she had translated in 1854: “A marriage which is not spontaneously concluded, spontaneously willed, self-sufficing, is not a true marriage, and therefore not a truly moral marriage.” The evident contentment with and commitment to each other of Eliot and Lewes struck some observers as unbearably smug, including Eliza Lynn Linton, who in her memoir of literary London wrote nastily of “the pretence of a sanctioned union” between them. Other early commentators did not quite know how to square Eliot’s pseudomarriage with her clearly deserved reputation for moral seriousness. Some sought to
argue, implausibly, that Lewes has been the ruin of her creativity, rather than the making of it. Writing a few years after her death, John G. Lord disapproved of Lewes’s living “in open defiance of the seventh Commandment and the social customs of England,” and called the union an “unfortunate connection, which saddened the whole subsequent life of Miss Evans, and tinged all her writings with the gall of her soul.”

In Lord’s view, the gall-tinged
Middlemarch
was more faulty than any of her earlier novels—“It has a miserable plot; it has many tedious chapters, and too many figures, and too much theorizing on social science,” he complained. A reader need not agree with this questionable assessment to believe that the moral quandary Eliot faced in deciding to live with Lewes did inform her fictional preoccupations. The heroines of
The Mill on the Floss
and
Romola
and
Daniel Deronda
are all profoundly concerned with determining the limits of commitment, to a spouse or to one’s own sense of self. In
Middlemarch,
the question of marital renunciation preoccupies not just Dorothea and Lydgate, but other characters, too. One of the book’s most indelible episodes is that in which Harriet Bulstrode, the banker’s wife, learns from her brother about her husband’s proliferating deceptions and possible crimes. She withdraws to her room, where she removes her jewelry and her fancy, decorated cap and puts on a black gown, all in preparation for descending the stairs and embracing his shame and humiliation as her own—deliberately choosing to embody the fidelity that characterizes a true marriage, in spite of her husband’s transgressions.

Eliot knew what renunciation was—she essentially gave up her ties to her family in order to be with Lewes. But there is no
evidence to suggest that there was a knot of sadness and gall at the heart of her relation with Lewes. She was joyful in Weimar, and while her first pitch of happiness might not have been sustained among the mundane woes of headache and toothache, her joy in Lewes did not abate. “In my private lot I am unspeakably happy, loving and beloved,” she wrote in her diary at the end of 1870, almost twenty years after their first meeting. Beyond youth when they met, Eliot and Lewes seem to have been one of those enviable pairs who appreciate each other only more as they grow older together, for reasons she hinted at in an essay she wrote about Madame de Sablé, the seventeenth-century salonnière. She wrote it while on her unconventional honeymoon in Weimar, discovering her power of learning renewed. “It is undeniable, that unions formed in the maturity of thought and feeling, and grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more intelligent sympathy with men,” she wrote. She makes late love sound irresistibly romantic—different from young love, but no less appealing and considerably more satisfying.

Eliot uses a quotation from the apocryphal Book of Tobit to introduce a late chapter of
Middlemarch
: “Mercifully grant that we may grow aged together,” she writes, and the line is worth remembering. I like to think of Eliot and Lewes growing together as they aged, remembering their beginnings. Sometimes, Eliot once told a friend, they would talk fondly of their early years together, when they were poor. (In fact, Lewes urged Eliot to write fiction not just as a matter of artistic fulfillment, but because he reckoned it would be a more effective means than journalism to pay the bills—which in those days it was.) Eliot told her friend that they
laughed at all their troubles, with Lewes, in his theatrical way, exaggerating for comic effect the extent of the troubles that Eliot had endured. In
Middlemarch,
Lydgate has a belated inkling of what this kind of married life might be like: “He was beginning now to imagine how two creatures who loved each other, and had a stock of thoughts in common, might laugh over their shabby furniture, and their calculations how far they could afford butter and eggs.”

The laughter—like Lewes’s kiss for her first effort at fiction—is crucial. A compensation of getting older is an increasing ability to recognize the comedy of human relations, which can be obscured by the tempests of youthful emotion. Even stormy, passionate Ladislaw later comes to see the element of comedy in his desperate noncourtship of Dorothea—something Eliot shows the reader by offering a glimpse of him, mature and middle-aged, telling their love’s origin story.

It happens during that charged meeting with which Book Six begins, at the moment when Dorothea tells Ladislaw that she expects him to be gone from Middlemarch a long while. “Will never quite knew how it was that he saved himself from falling down at her feet, when the ‘long while’ came forth with its gentle tremor,” Eliot writes. That touch of melodrama is quietly modified by the next sentence, however: “He used to say that the horrible hue and surface of her crape dress was most likely the sufficient controlling force.” Dorothea is wearing elaborate mourning clothes in the prevailing fashion—“her dress was an experiment in the utmost laying on of crape,” Eliot writes—which remind Ladislaw of how inappropriate it would be to woo her. But I hear in that sentence
the note of ironical retrospection that can be achieved when one is not yet merely contemplative, but still half-passionate, and still capable of the power of learning.

U
PON
her death in 1880, Eliot bequeathed all but one of her manuscripts to the British Library. (The exception is
Scenes of Clerical Life,
which Blackwood kept for himself, and which ended up at the Morgan Library in New York.) One late summer’s day I went to the manuscripts reading room at the British Library to view
Middlemarch,
which is kept there under high security.

A librarian handed me the first volume in its blue storage box, and I took it to a well-lit blond-wood carrel nearby. Opening the box, I gently lifted out the volume, which was bound in oxblood-colored leather with gold lettering on its spine. I carefully settled it into a book rest that was equipped with a gray padded cushion, like something you might optimistically purchase at an airport store before an overnight flight, and turned the pages of the manuscript, reading the by now familiar words.

A wide margin had been left on the side of the page for corrections, which were few, but illuminating. I read Dorothea’s letter to Casaubon accepting his marriage proposal. “I am very grateful to you for thinking me worthy to be your wife,” Eliot had written, before amending the line with a poignant shift in register: “I am very grateful to you for loving me, and thinking me worthy to be your wife.” In chapter 9, when Ladislaw makes his first appearance, strolling in the gardens at Lowick with a sketchbook, Eliot had initially described him as having “light curls”; she had
afterward inserted the word “brown,” beginning to give color to her creation, whose lightness had been established from the start.

And at the very beginning of the manuscript was a dedication, written in violet ink. “To my dear Husband George Henry Lewes, in this nineteenth year of our blessed union,” it read, and was dated December 1872, the month in which the final volume of
Middlemarch
was published. As I read the inscription, I felt as Annie Fields did when Lewes drew back the curtain from the bookshelf at the Priory—privileged to come within the orbit of their endearing intimacy. After finishing her own novel Eliot moved on to other things, principally reading Lewes’s manuscript. “It is a holiday to sit with one’s feet at the fire reading one’s husband’s writing—at least when, like mine, he allows me to differ from him,” she told Francis Pattison in a letter. “I flourish on this pasture very well, and he too is in tolerably good condition,” she wrote. “I hope we are not the happiest people in the world, but we must be among the happiest.”

Lewes died just six years later, in November 1878, at the age of sixty-one. Eliot was devastated. At first, she shut herself away, howling with grief, wishing that she, too, could die; she did not even attend his funeral, in Highgate Cemetery. Her diary for the period contains little but fragmentary quotations about loss from Shakespeare, Heine, Goethe. “Weary and heavy laden,” she wrote. “Head miserable and heart bruised.” When she felt able to work the only thing she wanted to do was to prepare for publication Lewes’s unfinished
Problems of Life and Mind
—the act of devotion that Dorothea could not bring herself to perform for Casaubon. She sorted his papers. “Wrote memories, and lived with him
all day,” she wrote that January. “Read in his diary 1874—‘Wrote verses to Polly—Wrote verses on Polly.’ ” Those verses have not survived: perhaps she packed them up with the letters he wrote to her, which were buried with her upon her own death.

But her extremity of grief abated, and after it did so, she did something that almost all observers have considered even more shocking than eloping to Weimar. Seventeen months after Lewes’s death she married John Walter Cross, a family friend and their financial adviser, who was twenty years younger than she. They had first met in Rome in the spring of 1869, and later Cross recalled his impressions of her then: the low, earnest, musical voice, the abundant auburn-brown hair, the kindly gray-blue eyes, constantly changing in expression. A woman’s hands can betray her age more than any other feature, but Cross remembered hers as remarkable: finely formed, and so thin as to seem translucent.

Cross, whom Lewes and Eliot had long addressed as “nephew,” had been one of the few friends admitted during the first weeks of her widowhood. He, too, had recently been bereaved, his mother dying only ten days after Lewes. Within a few months, they began to read Dante together. She saw him often at Witley, in Surrey, where she and Lewes had bought a country house just two years earlier. In London they visited the National Gallery and the British Museum together. “This constant association engrossed me completely,” Cross later wrote. “A bond of mutual dependence had been formed between us.” The quality of Eliot’s dependence is shown in a letter she sent Cross less than a year after Lewes’s death. “Through everything else, dear tender one, there is the blessing of trusting in thy goodness,” she wrote. “Thou dost not know anything of verbs in Hiphil and Hophal or the history of
metaphysics or the position of Kepler in science, but thou knowest best things of another sort, such as belong to the manly heart—secrets of lovingness and rectitude.”

She told almost no one of her impending marriage, only issuing a few vague warnings. “When I act in a way which is thoroughly unexpected there are reasons which justify my action, though the reasons may not be evident to you,” she wrote to one friend. After the wedding, which took place on the sixth of May at St. George’s, Hanover Square, she wrote brief notes to a few intimates, but offered no explanation of her actions. “I can only ask you and your husband to imagine and interpret according to your deep experience and loving kindness,” she wrote to one friend. In
Middlemarch,
Celia asks Dorothea to explain how she fell in love with Ladislaw. “No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know,” Dorothea replies. Eliot asked her friends to extend to her the imaginative sympathy with which her books were charged, and which they sought to nurture.

She knew, though, that anyone who could not feel with her might well judge her, both on grounds of infidelity to Lewes’s memory, and because of the unusual age gap between herself and her new husband. The gossip came. One contemporary noted that Eliot had been buying new clothes for her wedding journey, unkindly remarking that everything possible had been done to make her look not too unsuitable a bride for a man of forty. Eliot had anticipated in literature the kind of censure she received in life. The citizens of Middlemarch criticize Dorothea’s two marriages, observing that she had first wed a sickly clergyman old enough to be her father, then, less than a year after his death, renounced her estate to marry the clergyman’s young, impecunious cousin: “She
could not have been ‘a nice woman’, else she would not have married either the one or the other.”

Isaac Evans, Eliot’s provincially minded brother, saw events from a different if equally conservative perspective. Now that she was at last legally married, no matter to whom, he wrote to her to offer his congratulations. Eliot’s biographers have scourged Isaac for his woefully conventional and unsympathetic stance toward his sister, and he certainly doesn’t emerge from the story of her life looking good. But on my visit to the Nuneaton museum I was moved to discover that, after her death, he had labeled the case in which she had saved their father’s eyeglasses: “My father’s spectacles kept by George Eliot.” At the end, he acknowledged who she really was.

The most gratifying response to the unexpected turn of events came from Barbara Bodichon. “Tell Johnny Cross I should have done exactly what he has done if you would have let me and I had been a man,” Bodichon wrote. “You see I know all love is so different that I do not see it unnatural to love in new ways—not to be unfaithful to any memory.” The marvelous Bodichon was the kind of friend we might all hope to have, or strive to be: warm and generous and intuitive. She added that, from all she knew of Lewes, she was sure he would be glad for Eliot.

Charles Lewes, Eliot’s stepson, who gave her away at the wedding, said the same thing. He told Anne Thackeray Ritchie, the novelist’s daughter, that his father had not a grain of jealousy in him, and would have wanted Eliot to be happy. To Ritchie, Charles also reported a comment of Eliot’s, which stands as an unarguable justification for having done what seemed so implausible:
if she hadn’t been human with feelings and failings like other people, how could she have written her books?