George Eliot: The Last Victorian
At the end of 1839 Mary Ann decided to start work on a chart laying out the history of the Church from the birth of Christ to the Reformation. If all went well it would be published and some of the profits would go towards building a new church at Attleborough. To help her with the vast research, she reported proudly to Maria Lewis that Mrs Newdegate ‘permits me to visit her library when I please in search of any books that may assist me’.33
Only a few years previously Mary Ann had been made to wait in the housekeeper’s room, while her father talked business with old Mr Newdigate. Now here she was, taking possession of the library, that symbol of culture, achievement and learning. Her father’s professional success and her own genteel education had eased her transformation from near-servant to near-lady. Instead of the awkward little girl with the thick Warwickshire accent of only a few years ago, there was an intense young woman with a well-modulated voice and an abundance of learning, as well as the required string of genteel accomplishments. Of course, no amount of round vowels and fancy arpeggios were ever going to give Mary Ann a smooth passage into the gentry. Mrs Newdegate might allow her agent’s daughter to borrow her books and run her clothing club, but she was not going to invite her to dinner or allow her to marry her son. These distinctions of rank, so subtle and yet so rigid, grated on Mary Ann, as a passage from Felix Holt, perceptively quoted by John Cross, suggests: ‘No one who has not a strong natural prompting and susceptibility towards such things [the signs and luxuries of ladyhood], and has, at the same time, suffered from the presence of opposite conditions, can understand how powerfully those minor accidents of rank which please the fastidious sense can preoccupy the imagination.’34
Like many upwardly mobile men and women of the Victorian period, Mary Ann’s transformation into a member of the genteel middle class remained open to scrutiny all her life. Eliza Lynn, a minor novelist of about the same age who met Mary Ann when she was in her early thirties and bore her a strange lifelong grudge, maintained that ‘there was something underbred and provincial [about Miss Evans] … She held her hands and arms kangaroo fashion; was badly dressed; had an unwashed, unbrushed, unkempt look altogether.’35 Even when George Eliot was at the height of her reputation and had acquired sufficient money to buy herself some new clothes and a hairbrush there were still those ready to snipe at her lack of breeding. In an increasingly secular age, her irregular relationship with G. H. Lewes was linked less often to the fact that she did not attend church than that she was, more pertinently, ‘not quite a lady’.
Mary Ann’s confidence about putting together an ecclesiastical chart reflects the scope of her reading during these Griff years. Although she had refused her father’s offer of a housekeeper, she allowed him to fund her continuing education in other ways. Twice a week Signor Joseph Brezzi arrived from Leamington to teach her Italian and German – the language which was to play such an important part in her personal and professional life. Robert Evans also happily settled her bills at Short’s, the Nuneaton bookseller who did his best to keep up with her often obscure demands. It was now that she embarked on a habit of private reading which was to form the foundation for one of the greatest self-educations of the century. During these gloomy Evangelical years of 1837–40 the books she chose were inevitably religious. None the less, her practice of careful study, shrewd analysis and clear summary writing (in the form of letters to Maria Lewis and Martha Jackson) laid the basis for the critical skills which she was to apply across the huge range of subject matter which she tackled during her working life.
Her letters to Maria Lewis, who was now installed unhappily as a governess in a clergyman’s family near Wellingborough, set out a formidable list of titles during the years 1838 to 1839. The core text remained the Bible, which she read every day. To this was added a series of commentaries and theological works, which helped define her position on the doctrinal controversies that were close to tearing apart the Established Church. The Tracts for the Times, with their yearnings for an Anglican Church reconciled with Rome, predictably repelled her. She looked more favourably on Joseph Milner’s History of the Church of Christ (1794–7) with its mild Evangelicalism and cautious tolerance towards dissenters. Another book she liked was John Hoppus’s Schism as Opposed to Unity of the Church (1839), which attacked the assumption of Roman Catholics and Anglicans that the structure of their Church rested on the direct authority of God. Years later it was this ability to empathise with intellectual and psychological positions far from her own that would mark George Eliot’s mature art. At the age of twenty, however, open-mindedness simply muddled her. ‘I am powerfully attracted in a certain direction but when I am about to settle there, counter assertions shake me from my position.’36
Mary Ann’s Evangelical conscience did not allow her to read for pleasure. Works of fiction, which took the reader away from the stern business of soul-saving and into a compensatory world of fantasy, were, she believed, particularly harmful. In an essay disguised as a letter to Maria Lewis on 16 March 1839 she set out her objection to novels: ‘For my part I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing even a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life. Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?’ With the convenient exception of her beloved Scott, plus a few individual works such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, Mary Ann sternly outlawed all novels in favour of religious and historical texts. Even fiction on religious themes, of which there was a huge outpouring at this time, ‘should be destroyed for the public good as soon as born’.37
Instead Mary Ann filled up her tiny amounts of free time by plunging into biographies of the good and the great, identifying with their struggles while going out of her way to deny any hubris. The experiences of William Wilberforce, the Evangelical reformer who campaigned against slavery, struck an immediate chord: ‘There is a similarity, if I may compare myself with such a man, between his temptations or rather besetments and my own that makes his experience very interesting to me. O that I might be made as useful in my lowly and obscure station as he was in the exalted one assigned to him.’38 Other model lives devoured included John Williams, an obscure dissenting South Seas missionary, and the sentimental Hannah More whose Evangelical pieties were immensely popular in middle-class households. Favoured poets included those twins of religious verse, Cowper and Young.
Although piety was the cloak Mary Ann threw over her intellectual energy, at times the full scope of her ambition peeps through the learned references and pious quotations with which she peppers her letters to Maria Lewis. Her early drive did not dissipate just because she was now at home making cheese. If anything, frustrations about the limitations on her time intensified it. Her letters to Maria Lewis are didactic and pedagogic, anxious to display their superior knowledge. She lectures her former teacher on German pronunciation, recommends books, and generally acts like the older woman’s spiritual and intellectual adviser.
But Mary Ann remained painfully aware that this desire to show off was the result of Ambition, her besetting sin. As a good Evangelical Christian, she should stamp on any impulse to push herself forward – these early letters are full of apologies for egotism, for talking too much about herself, for ‘the frequent use of the personal pronoun’.39 At twenty she was not able to integrate these two sides of her personality – the desire for attention and the wish to surrender the self – and the result is a series of emotionally and tonally uneven letters. A demand for attention from Maria is followed by a humble withdrawal, in which Mary Ann imagines Miss Lewis thinking critically of her and rushes to apologise.
You will think me interminably loquacious, and still worse you will be ready to compare my scribbled sheet to the walls of an Egyptian tomb for mystery, and determine not to imitate certain wise antiquaries or antiquarian wiseacres who ‘waste their precious years, how soon to fail?’ in deciphering information which has only the lichen and moss of age to make it more valuable than the facts graphically conveyed by an upholsterer’s pattern book.40
Ironically, the end point of this dance between advance and withdrawal was a dazzling display of learning and verbal dexterity, seen here in the elaborate comparison of her handwriting with Egyptian hieroglyphics. In these bursts of words we begin to see Mary Ann flushed with pleasure as she realises what she is capable of. For if literature was forbidden as sinful, language was somehow another matter. In May 1840 she sings to Maria, ‘I am beguiled by the fascinations that the study of languages has for my capricious mind, and could e’en give myself up to making discoveries in the world of words.’41 Eighteen months later she crows, ‘I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.’42
These early letters, with their see-sawing between assertion and self-denial, were the crucible in which Eliot’s mature prose style was formed. At this point Mary Ann had very little real sense of her correspondent as a real and separate person with problems of her own. There are a few sympathetic noises when Maria describes a particularly unpleasant row with her employers, but the focus quickly shifts back to Mary Ann. Maria Lewis functioned as a kind of imaginary audience, whose reactions were to be anticipated and described by Mary Ann herself, with no reference to what was really felt or thought.43 This inventing of Miss Lewis’s response to her loquacity is the embryo of a stylistic practice which Eliot was to employ heavily at the beginning of her novel-writing career. In Scenes of Clerical Life, for instance, she often breaks off her narrative to deal with an imaginary reader’s response. Of Mr Gilfil, for instance, ‘You already suspect that the Vicar did not shine in the more spiritual functions of his office.’44
The letters to Martha Jackson are different. Martha had attended the Franklin school where she was a pale imitation of Mary Ann, being both clever and ‘serious’ in her religion. Now back at home with her parents, Martha continued to be edgy about Mary Ann’s intellectual superiority. In January 1840 Mary Ann, perhaps anticipating slow progress on the ecclesiastical chart, sent a warning shot to Martha not to tread too closely on her patch. ‘I am right glad to read of your enjoyments … and of your determination to study, though, by the bye, it is hardly fair of you to trench on my field; I shall have you publishing metaphysics before my work is ready, a result of the superior development of a certain region of your brain over that of my poor snailship.’45
Even this was not sufficient to deter the thick-skinned Martha, who wrote back demanding a list of every book that Mary Ann was currently reading. Clearly the time had come to sort out questions of pre-eminence once and for all. In her next letter Mary Ann suggested that they should organise their correspondence around a series of set topics, turning their letters into virtual essays. At this point Martha sensibly withdrew from the fray. The next time we hear from her she has taken up the girlish hobby of flower names, rechristening her friends according to their particular characteristics. Mary Ann has been assigned ‘Clematis’ which means ‘mental beauty’. Martha, meanwhile, has become ‘Ivy’ which refers to ‘constancy’ but which, as Mary Ann quickly points out in a letter of 30 July 1840, is also a creeping parasite.46
In these letters to Martha, Mary Ann was careful to stress how little time she had for study and so, by implication, how wonderfully she was doing in the circumstances. ‘Pity the sorrows of a poor young housekeeper,’ she intoned on 6 April 1840, ‘and determine to make the very best use of your present freedom therefrom.’ Later, in case Martha had missed the point, she continued, ‘I am conscious of having straitened myself by the adoption of a too varied and laborious set of studies, having so many social duties; otherwise circumstanced I might easily compass them all.’47
Competitiveness with Martha aside, Mary Ann’s frustration about the small amount of time available to her was pressing and real. The ecclesiastical chart never got off the ground. Before she was even near to finishing it, another appeared on the market in May 1840. Pretending not to mind, she declared it ‘far superior in conception to mine’ and made a show of recommending it to friends.48 The combined duties of housekeeper, hostess, companion and charity worker were so time-consuming that even personal letters could rarely be written at one sitting. ‘I am obliged to take up my letter at any odd moment,’ she wrote to Maria Lewis on 7 November 1838, ‘so you must excuse its being rather a patchwork, or to try to appear learned, a tessellated or mosaic affair.’49 And even when she did manage to write, her other life often inscribed itself on the paper: ‘I write with a very tremulous hand as you will perceive; both this and many other defects in my letter are attributable to a very mighty cause – no other than the boiling of currant jelly.’50
This rigorous schedule of early mornings and late evenings crammed with private study was by no means unique to Mary Ann Evans. Florence Nightingale was doing the same thing in nearby Lea Hurst. So was Elizabeth Barrett in Wimpole Street. So were hundreds of other nameless middle-class girls who yearned for a life which went beyond the trivialities of the parlour and the store cupboard. What made Mary Ann Evans special was not simply her energy and determination, but also her ability to master a range of subjects far beyond the curriculum of even the best ladies’ seminary. A letter written to Maria Lewis on 4 September 1839 demonstrates both the strengths and limitations of this kind of self-education. Mary Ann’s use of the geological metaphor not only indicates that her reading was now straying beyond the strictly religious, but that she was acquainted with the new scientific discoveries which would soon shake orthodoxy to its core. More immediately, it articulates her secret terror that, without the advantages of a formal education, her reading might lack fruitful cohesion, amounting in the end to nothing more than accumulated junk.
I have lately led so unsettled a life and have been so desultory in my employments, that my mind, never of the most highly organized genus, is more than usually chaotic, or rather it is like a stratum of conglomerated fragments that shews here a jaw and rib of some ponderous quadruped, there a delicate alto-relievo of some fernlike plant, tiny shells, and mysterious nondescripts, encrusted and united with some unvaried and uninteresting but useful stone. My mind presents just such an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern, scraps of poetry picked up from Shakspeare, Cowper, Wordsworth and Milton, newspaper topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry entomology and chemistry, reviews and metaphysics, all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast thickening every day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations.51
Life at Griff may have been tense between 1838 and 1840, but not enough to explain the constant depressions and headaches which dogged Mary Ann. In her letters to Maria Lewis, who was in the genuinely stressful position of working and living with people who did not value her, she complains constantly of ‘low’ spirits and whole days lost in generalised unwellness. This was the beginning of a set of symptoms that was to plague her for the next forty years, becoming particularly acute whenever she was wrestling with her writing. Whole years of her life – 1862 and 1865 stand out especially – were lost to misery and migraine as she battled with Romola, The Spanish Gypsy and Felix Holt, The Radical.
At the age of twenty Mary Ann Evans was not to embark on her novel writing for another decade and a half. But the sickness and despair suggest that she was already engaged in a bitter struggle with a part of herself which insisted on expression. During these dull, miserable years she fought to overcome an overwhelming and ill-defined sense of destiny which she placed under that pejorative umbrella ‘Ambition’. The letter to Elizabeth Evans in March 1839 shows that she already had some inkling that much of her religiosity was nothing more than the desire to stand well in the world. But when she turned to the possibility of a more active kind of achievement, of the sort represented in the biographies she loved to read, she was brought up short by the lack of possibilities open to her. When in 1841 she moved to Coventry with her father, the delighted Misses Franklin introduced her to their accomplished friends ‘not only as a marvel of mental power, but also as a person “sure to get something up very soon in the way of a clothing-club or other charitable undertaking”’.52 This, baldly put, was the full scope of activity open to the prosperous, accomplished middle-class girl. Unlike the Franklins themselves, Mary Ann could not even find a vocation in teaching. The universities and professions were not open to her. Surely the cleverest, saintliest girl in the school could not be expected to spend her life getting up a clothing club?
Writing was one possibility. In the previous generation respectable women like Jane Austen and Hannah More had found success. No particular qualification was needed, and there was the great advantage that you could write at home, well away from the market-place in which no lady could be seen to participate. From her earliest years Mary Ann had toyed with the idea that her destiny might be literary. An anecdote from her childhood has her so entranced by Scott’s Waverley that she commits a large chunk of it to heart.53 Her surviving school notebook from around the age of fifteen contains the beginnings of a novel, ‘Edward Neville’, clumsily modelled on the work of G. P. R. James, who produced a series of poor-man’s-Scott historical fictions during the 1830s.54 The abandoned ecclesiastical chart, no matter how pious its origins, also suggests a pull towards publication. And in January 1840 Mary Ann finally achieved her dream of seeing her work in print. ‘As o’er the fields’, a poetic leave-taking of the earth and its pleasures as the speaker prepares for heaven, was accepted by the Christian Observer.
The novel, the chart and the poem all represent different kinds of writing which Mary Ann was trying on for size. Her attempts at the last two were easier for her conscience to accommodate, being mandated by her strict faith. The idea of writing fiction was still too dangerous. It involved dissolving into the imaginative state which she had identified as so perilous to the serious Christian searching for salvation. In the celebrated letter of 16 March 1839 which posterity has always found so wry Mary Ann tells Maria Lewis that her early and undisciplined passion for novels has ‘contaminated’ her with ‘mental diseases’ which ‘I shall carry to my grave’.
The same see-sawing between desire and repression, joy and rage, was apparent in her ambivalent relationship with music during these years. Although she continued to have private piano lessons and to play for her father, opportunities for performing in front of others were few. Now Mary Ann adopted a censorious attitude towards those who allowed themselves the pleasure of demonstrating their talent. In another pompous letter to Maria Lewis, written 6–8 November 1838, she reports that she recently attended an oratorio at Coventry and hated every minute of it. ‘I am a tasteless person but it would not cost me any regrets if the only music heard in our land were that of strict worship, nor can I think a pleasure that involves the devotion of all the time and powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an expertness in so useless (at least in ninety nine cases out of a hundred) an accomplishment can be quite pure or elevating in its tendency.’55 This reads strangely from a girl who in later life was to derive such pleasure from music and who would explore the nature of performance and artistry, especially for women, in Daniel Deronda. The ludicrous insistence that she has no ear for music and takes no pleasure in its secular uses suggests that exactly the opposite is the case. Just as in the earlier letter she fought against the recognition that she would like to write a novel and had already tried to do so, here she struggles with her desire to return to the days when she dominated the Franklins’ drawing-room with her piano playing.
At times this battle against love, beauty and imagination became too much. When, in March 1840, desire threatened to press in on Mary Ann from all sides, she broke down completely. Shortly after arriving at a party given by an old family friend she realised that ‘I was not in a situation to maintain the Protestant character of the true Christian’ and decided to distance herself. Standing sternly in the corner, she looked on from the sidelines while the other guests danced, chatted and flirted. Battling with an urge to surrender to the rhythm of the music and also, perhaps, to be the centre of attention, she took refuge first in a headache, then in an attack of screaming hysterics ‘so that I regularly disgraced myself’.56
The fact that Mary Ann repeated the story in a letter to Maria Lewis suggests that, far from feeling embarrassed by the incident, she was secretly delighted. As she saw it, her shouting and weeping attested to her holiness. For her hostess, the ‘extremely kind’ Mrs Bull, it probably suggested something quite different. Here, clearly, was a young woman in deep distress. As Mary Ann was no longer able to hold together the two parts of herself, the saint and the ambitious dreamer, something would surely have to give.
CHAPTER 3
‘The Holy War’
Coventry 1840–1
FROM THE END of 1839 there were signs that Evangelicalism was losing its constricting grip on Mary Ann. Her reading, which for so many years had been pegged exclusively to God, now began to range over areas which she had previously outlawed. Where once she had warned darkly of Shakespeare ‘we have need of as nice a power of distillation as the bee to suck nothing but honey from his pages’,1 now she quoted him with unselfconscious ease. She also used her increasing facility in German to read the decidedly secular Goethe and Schiller.
More crucially, she returned to the Romantic poets, whom she had not touched since her faith intensified in her mid-teens. She mentions both Shelley and Byron, men whose scandalous private lives would have disqualified them from her reading list only a couple of years previously. Through them, she entered a realm where the self dissolved luxuriously into feeling and imagination – the very process she had struggled to resist through her hysterical resistance to novel reading and musical performance. She also learned about the authority of individual experience in determining personal morality, even if that meant rebelling against social convention. It was, however, the more sober Wordsworth who particularly impressed her. Investing in a six-volume edition of his work to mark her twentieth birthday on 22 November 1839, she declared, ‘I never before met with so many of my own feelings, expressed just as I could … like them.’2 It was an admiration which was to grow to become one of the most enduring influences on her life and work. Wordsworth’s insistence, particularly in ‘The Prelude’, on the importance of landscape and childhood in shaping the adult self gave an external validation to the connections she was now making between her own past and the emerging conflicts of the present.