George Eliot: The Last Victorian

Robert Evans was buried next to his second wife in Chilvers Coton churchyard on 6 June 1849. Only six days later the Brays and Mary Ann set off for the Continent. Even in the midst of this double upheaval, Mary Ann’s old, impulsive ways reasserted themselves. Three months earlier she had reviewed James Anthony Froude’s novel The Nemesis of Faith for the Coventry Herald. The book was a particularly shocking example of ‘the crisis of faith’ novel and instantly became a cause célèbre. The tale of a clergyman who loses his faith and falls in love with a friend’s wife was sufficiently scandalous to get the book burned at Exeter College, Oxford, where Froude was, though not for much longer, a Fellow. Its publisher, John Chapman, who had also brought out the Strauss translation, sent a copy of The Nemesis of Faith to Mary Ann, who reviewed it rapturously in the Herald. Writing anonymously, as was usual at that time, she thrilled that ‘the books which carry this magic in them are the true products of genius’.22 She also wrote a complimentary note to Froude, coyly signing it ‘the translator of Strauss’. In an uncharacteristic burst of discretion, Chapman refused to divulge Mary Ann’s identity, so Froude was obliged to respond via the publisher. Guessing that the translator of Strauss had also written the Herald review in which he was described as a ‘fallen star’, Froude suggested flirtatiously that ‘she might help him to rise’. Receiving the letter in ‘high glee’, Mary Ann ran to Rosehill to show it to Cara, who reported herself ‘so pleased she should have this little episode in her dull life’.23 Mary Ann was in love again. It was now that she wrote to Sara teasingly representing herself as an unfaithful and aloof husband, giving her intoxication with Froude as the reason for her distraction. By this time she had read his previous book, Shadows of the Clouds, and declared herself in the grip of ‘a sort of palpitation that one hardly knows whether to call wretched or delightful’.24

The fallen star and the translator of Strauss finally met when Froude came to visit Rosehill in early June. The timing could not have been worse. Robert Evans had been buried the day before and Mary Ann was beside herself with grief. The burden of the past months and years had left her thin and pale. Still, when Bray suggested that Froude might like to join them on the Continental trip, he enthusiastically agreed. But then a strange thing happened. Four days later Charles, Cara and Mary Ann were in London, about to board the train to Folkestone, when John Chapman dashed up at the last minute with the decidedly odd message that Froude could not accompany them after all because he was about to be married.25

The most likely explanation behind this clumsy little drama is that Froude, despite finding Mary Ann less appealing in person than print, had decided that he would like to go abroad with the Brays. At this stage it looked as though the party would be larger, perhaps including Edward Noel and another old friend called Dawson. Over the next few days, when all the extra travellers had dropped out, Froude realised that he was being matchmade with Mary Ann.

Cara Bray might be in an unconventional marriage herself, but she was as keen as any of the Evanses to find Mary Ann a partner, especially now she was released from daughterly duties. Apart from anything, it would absolve the Brays from having her to live with them. It was one thing to have Mary Ann as a stimulating neighbour, quite another to live with her as a depressed and demanding member of the household. The only hitch in Cara’s scheme was that Froude did not have the slightest desire to marry Mary Ann. Panicked by the thought of spending the next few weeks pushed together with an over-ardent ageing spinster, he took the coward’s way out and sent his friend Chapman with the last-minute message. The fact that he chose to emphasise his engagement as the reason he could not travel is tellingly strange. Presumably he had been aware of it – he married Charlotte Grenfell only four months later – when he agreed to the trip. We do not know what passed between Mary Ann and Froude at their meeting a few days earlier, but it is clear that she had spent the previous dreary months building him up in her imagination. Did her pent-up need push her into reckless declarations of affection, just as it had with Dr Brabant? Did Froude find himself repelled by a clingy, ugly woman when he had been expecting a pretty girl with whom he might flirt for a few weeks on the way to the altar? Whatever the exact reason, the party which left for Folkestone consisted of only three.

As it turned out, it was probably just as well that Froude decided not to catch the train. Over the following weeks, as the party made its way through Calais, Paris, Avignon, Marseilles, Genoa and finally on to Geneva, Mary Ann emerged as a weepy and demanding travelling companion. Still laid low by grief, on several occasions during a fraught horseback journey through the Alps she was seized by hysterics, convinced that a broken side-saddle was about to pitch her into oblivion. Over a decade later, remembering with mortification just how tiresome she had been, she thanked Cara for her patience. ‘How wretched I was then – how peevish, how utterly morbid! And how kind and forbearing you were under the oppression of my company!’26

The year before, John Sibree’s decision to spend a year in Geneva after giving up the ministry had prompted Mary Ann into envious raptures: ‘O the bliss of having a very high attic in a romantic continental town, such as Geneva.’27 Now she decided to follow his example. For the first time in her life she had the time and just enough money to live how and where she pleased. Her father was dead and her siblings did not need her. She had been left £100 cash in her father’s will in lieu of some household items given to Chrissey and Fanny. If she was careful, she had enough to last the year. On 23 July she wrote to tell her half-sister Fanny of her plans: ‘The day after tomorrow I part from my friends and take up my abode at Geneva where I hope that rest and regular occupation will do more for my health and spirits than travelling has proved able to do.’28 Two days later, and quite probably breathing a sigh of relief, the Brays returned to Coventry, Mary Ann having been installed in a respectable pension in the centre of the town.

It is too easy to write up these Geneva months as a kind of heroic turning point in Mary Ann’s life, a breaking out of provincial spinsterhood into something brave and independent. John Cross certainly saw it like this, declaring that Geneva represented ‘a delightful, soothing change after … the monotonous dullness … of an English provincial town like Coventry, where there is little beauty of any sort to gladden the soul’.29 It would be good to imagine Mary Ann expanding in the bracing atmosphere of this most liberal of cities, transforming herself from provincial bluestocking into European intellectual. But much of the time she spent in Geneva was marked by loneliness, disappointment and the familiar frustrated longing for intimacy. She spent a lot of time holed up in her pension. And although she had French and German, this was not a passport to Swiss culture, which anyway turned out to be more stodgily bourgeois than anything she had experienced among the avant-garde of Coventry. Friendships formed with other tourists were fleeting and shallow, something which always unsettled her. Unable to stick it out for a year, she returned home after only eight months.

None the less, Geneva did represent a particular stage in Mary Ann’s creative development. It was now that her potential as a novelist emerged. Previously her published work consisted of erudite translation, workmanlike reviews and heavy-handed attempts at humorous essays. The letters she had written in Coventry had been lively and acute, but it was in the ones she sent from Geneva that the scope of her observant eye became clear. It was now, too, that she first started to write a journal, though unfortunately the first part of it, covering 1849–54, was destroyed by John Cross, anxious to eliminate evidence of her bumpy emotional life before she settled into unwedded commitment with G. H. Lewes. But if there is no journal account of her time in Geneva, we do still have a clutch of long, vivid letters describing the shabby genteel atmosphere of life in a Swiss boarding-house.

The recent revolutions in France and Italy had resulted in a flow of well-heeled refugees into tolerant Geneva. Not yet permanently exiled, they hovered within striking distance of their homes, waiting to see how the political dust would settle. The Campagne Plongeon, where Mary Ann was staying, contained some of these stateless gentlefolk, including the Marquis de St Germain and his extended family, who were temporarily unable to return to their native Piedmont because of their association with the discredited regime.

It was not just the politically dispossessed who found refuge at Campagne Plongeon. There were two sad Englishwomen in residence, both cut off from their family and cultural roots. The Baronne de Ludwigsdorf was a refined woman who spoke perfect French and German, and reminded Mary Ann of Cara. She also had minimal self-esteem, declaring that, while she would like to be Mary Ann’s friend, ‘she does not mean to attach herself to me, because I shall never like her long’.30

The reasons for the other Englishwoman’s dislocation were more straightforward. Mrs Lock ‘has had very bitter trials which seem to be driving her more and more aloof from society,’31 reported Mary Ann. In the gossipy atmosphere of the pension, the details soon emerged. Apparently Mrs Lock’s daughter had married a French aristocrat by whom she had two daughters. But the previous year the young woman had run off with her husband’s cousin. Mrs Lock was so ashamed that she felt obliged to stay away from her old life in England. ‘No one likes her here,’ explained Mary Ann bluntly, ‘simply because her manners are brusque and her French incomprehensible.’32

The third category comprised tourists. There were an American mother and daughter. The former was ‘kind but silly – the daughter silly, but not kind, and they both of them chatter the most execrable French with amazing volubility and self-complacency’.33 European visitors tended to be more cultured. Mary Ann was mildly pleased to meet Wilhelm von Herder, grandson of the philosopher, who took her boating and from whom she purloined a copy of Louis Blanc’s Histoire de dix ans, 1830–1840.

Hurt by the lack of letters from home, Mary Ann turned to this ragbag crew for comfort. Recently orphaned, her need for surrogate parenting was more intense than ever and she worked hard to turn each of the middle-aged female guests into a surrogate mother. Of course, her letters to Cara and Charles were designed to let them know just how well she was doing without them. None the less, she does genuinely seem to have become a favourite in the Campagne Plongeon community. The Marquise de St Germain, for instance, declared that she loved her and fiddled with her hair, making ‘two things stick out on each side of my head like those on the head of the Sphinx’.34 The Baronne de Ludwigsdorf was ‘a charming creature – so anxious to see me comfortably settled – petting me in all sorts of ways. She sends me tea when I wake in the morning, orangeflower water when I go to bed, grapes, and her maid to wait on me.’35 Madame de Vallière, who ran the pension and was herself a political exile, is described as ‘quite a sufficient mother’.36 Even the brusque and unpopular Mrs Lock turns out, in that insistently repeated word, to be ‘quite a mother’,37 fussing over Mary Ann and making sure she had people to talk to at dinner.

In return Mary Ann offered these women something which was unique in the disappointed, self-absorbed atmosphere of the pension – an empathic listening ear. Charles Bray had been the first to identify the girl’s ability to set her own concerns temporarily on one side, while she absorbed the truth of another. Now she developed the capacity even further, drawing confidences out of people who were long used to hugging their unhappiness to themselves. Baronne de Ludwigsdorf, for instance, ‘has told me her troubles and her feelings, she says, in spite of herself – for she has never been able before in her life to say so much even to her old friends’.38

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