GEORGE
ELIOT
The LAST VICTORIAN
KATHRYN HUGHES

Dedication

For my parentsAnne and John Hughesagain

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER 1: ‘Dear Old Griff’ Early Years 1819–28

CHAPTER 2: ‘On Being Called a Saint’ An Evangelical Girlhood 1828–40

CHAPTER 3: ‘The Holy War’ Coventry 1840–1

CHAPTER 4: ‘I Fall Not In Love With Everyone’ The Rosehill Years 1841–9

CHAPTER 5: ‘The Land of Duty and Affection’ Coventry, Geneva and London 1849–51

CHAPTER 6: ‘The Most Important Means of Enlightenment’ Life at The Westminster Review 1851–2

CHAPTER 7: ‘A Man of Heart and Conscience’ Meeting Mr Lewes 1852–4

CHAPTER 8: ‘I Don’t Think She Is Mad’ Exile 1854–6

CHAPTER 9: ‘The Breath of Cows and the Scent of Hay’ Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede 1856–9

CHAPTER 10: ‘A Companion Picture of Provincial Life’ The Mill on the Floss 1859–60

CHAPTER 11: ‘Pure, Natural Human Relations’ Silas Marner and Romola 1860–3

CHAPTER 12: ‘The Bent of My Mind Is Conservative’ Felix Holt and The Spanish Gypsy 1864–8

CHAPTER 13: ‘Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings’ Middlemarch 1869–72

CHAPTER 14: ‘Full of the World’ Daniel Deronda 1873–6

CHAPTER 15: ‘A Deep Sense of Change Within’ Death, Love, Death 1876–80

Epilogue

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1
‘Dear Old Griff’
Early Years 1819–28

IN THE EARLY hours of 22 November 1819 a baby girl was born in a small stone farmhouse, tucked away in the woodiest part of Warwickshire, about four miles from Nuneaton. It was not an important event. Mary Anne was the fifth child and third daughter of Robert Evans, and the terse note Evans made in his diary of her arrival suggests that he had other things to think about that day.¹ As land agent to the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall, the forty-six-year-old Evans was in charge of 7000 acres of mixed arable and dairy farmland, a coal-mine, a canal and, his particular love, miles of ancient deciduous forest, the remnants of Shakespeare’s Arden. A new baby, a female too, was not something for which a man like Robert Evans had time to stop.

Six months earlier another little girl, equally obscure in her own way, had been born in a corner of Kensington Palace. Princess Alexandrina Victoria was also the child of a middle-aged man, the fifty-two-year-old Prince Edward of Kent, himself the fourth son of Mad King George III. None of George’s surviving twelve children had so far managed to produce a viable heir to succeed the Prince Regent, who was about to take over as king in his own right. It had been made brutally clear to the four elderly remaining bachelors, Edward among them, that the patriotic moment had come to give up their mistresses, acquire legal wives and produce a crop of lusty boys. But despite three sketchy, resentful marriages, the desired heir had yet to appear. Still, at this point it was too soon to give up hope completely. Princess Alexandrina Victoria, born on 24 May 1819, was promisingly robust and her mother, while past thirty, was young enough to try again for a son. If anyone bothered to think ahead for the little girl, the most they might imagine was that she would one day become the elder sister of a great king.

Officially the futures of these two little girls, Mary Anne and Alexandrina Victoria, were not promising. As for every other female child born that year, the worlds of commerce, industry and the professions were closed to them. As adults they would not be able to speak in the House of Commons, or vote for someone to do so on their behalf. They would not be eligible to take a degree at one of the ancient universities, become a lawyer, or manage the economic processes which were turning Britain into the most powerful nation on earth. Instead, their duties would be assumed to lie exclusively at home, whether palace or farmhouse, as companions and carers of husbands, children and ageing parents.

Yet that, as we know, is not what happened. Neither girl lived the life that the circumstances of her birth had seemed to decree. Instead, each emerged from obscurity to define the tone and temper of the age. Princess Alexandrina Victoria, pushed further up the line of succession by her father’s early death, even gave her name to it. ‘Victorian’ became the brand name for a confident, expansive hegemony which was extended absent-mindedly beyond her own lifetime. ‘Victorian’ was the sound of unassailable depth, stretch and solidity. It meant money in the bank and ships steaming the earth, factories that clattered all night and buildings that stretched for the sky. Its shape was the odd little figure of Victoria herself, sweet and girlish in the early years, fat and biddyish at the end. Wherever ‘Victorian’ energy and bustle made themselves felt, you could be sure to find that distinctive image, stamped into coins and erected in stone, woven into tablecloths and framed in cheap wood. In its ordinary femininity the figure of Victoria offered the moral counterpoise to all that striving and getting. The solid husband, puffy bosom and string of children represented the kind of good woman for whom Britain was busy getting rich.

George Eliot’s image, by contrast, was rarely seen by anyone. Indeed, it was whispered that she was so hideous that, Medusalike, you only had to look upon her to be turned to stone. And her name, during its early years of fame, suggested the very opposite of Victorianism. Her avowed agnosticism, sexual freedom, commercial success and childlessness were troubling reminders of everything that had been repressed from the public version of life under the great little Queen. By 1860 Victoria and Eliot had come to stand for the twin poles of female behaviour, respectability and disgrace. One gave her name to virtuous repression, a rigid channelling of desire into the safe haven of marriage and family. The other, made wickeder by male disguise, became a symbol of the ‘Fallen Woman’, banished to the edges of society or, in Eliot’s actual case, to a series of dreary suburban exiles.

That was the bluster. In real life – that messy matter which refuses to run along official lines – the Queen and Eliot shared more than distracted, greying fathers. Their emotional inheritance was uncannily similar and pressed their lives into matching moulds. Both had mothers who were intrusive yet remote, a tension which left them edgy for affection until the end of their days. Victoria slept in the Duchess of Kent’s room right up to her coronation, while Eliot spent her first thirty years looking for comfortable middle-aged women whom she could call ‘Mother’. When it came to men, both clung with the hunger of children rather than the secure attachment of grown women. Prince Albert and George Henry Lewes not only negotiated the public world for their partners, but lavished them with the intense and symbiotic affection usually associated with maternally minded wives. And when both men died before them, their widows fell into an extended stupor which recalled the despair of an abandoned baby.

What roused them in the end were intense connections with new and unsuitable men. The Queen found John Brown, then the Munshi, both servants, one black. Eliot, meanwhile, married John Cross, a banker twenty years younger and with nothing more than a gentleman’s education. Menopausal randiness was sniggeringly invoked as the reason for these ludicrous liaisons. Victoria was called ‘Mrs Brown’ behind her back. And when John Cross had to be fished out of Venice’s Grand Canal during his honeymoon, the whisper went round the London clubs that he had preferred to drown rather than make love to the hideous old George Eliot.

Because of Eliot’s ‘scandalous’ private life, which actually the Queen did not think so very bad, there was no possibility of the two women meeting. Yet recognising their twinship, they stalked each other obliquely down the years. Eliot first mentions Victoria in 1848 when, having briefly caught the revolutionary mood, she speaks slangily in a letter of ‘our little humbug of a queen’.² Ironically, only eleven years later, Victoria had fallen in love with Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, because of what she saw as its social conservatism, its warm endorsement of the status quo. The villagers of Hayslope, headed by Adam himself, reminded her of her beloved Highland servants, and in 1861 she commissioned paintings of two of the book’s central scenes by the artist Edward Henry Corbould.

George Eliot noticed how hard the Queen took the loss of Prince Albert in 1861 and, aware of the similarities in their age and temperament, wondered how she would manage the dreadful moment when it came to her. The Queen, in turn, was touched by the delicate letter of condolence that Eliot and Lewes wrote to one of her courtier’s children on his death and asked whether she might tear off their double signature as a memento.³

The Queen’s daughters went even further. By the 1870s Eliot’s increasing celebrity and the evident stability of her relationship with Lewes meant that she was no longer a total social exile. Among the great and the good who pressed for an introduction were two of the royal princesses. Brisk and bright, Vicky and Louise lobbied behind the scenes for a meeting and then, in Louise’s case at least, dispensed with royal protocol by coming up to speak to George Eliot first.⁴

The princesses were among the thousands of ordinary Victorians, neither especially clever nor brave, who ignored the early grim warnings of clergymen and critics about the ‘immorality’ of George Eliot’s life and work. By the 1860s working-class men and middle-class mothers, New Englanders (that most puritan of constituencies) and Jews, Italians and Australians were all reading her. Cheap editions and foreign translations carried George Eliot into every kind of home. Even lending libraries, those most skittishly respectable of ‘family’ institutions, bowed to consumer demand and grudgingly increased their stock of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss.

What is more, all these Victorians read the damnable George Eliot with an intensity and engagement that was never the case with Dickens or Trollope. While readers of Bleak House might sniff over the death of Jo and even stir themselves to wonder whether something might not be done for crossing-sweepers in general, they did not bombard Dickens with letters asking how they should live. That intimate engagement was reserved for Eliot, who alone seemed to understand the pain and difficulty of being alive in the nineteenth century. From around the world, men and women wrote to her begging for advice about the most personal matters, from marriage through God to their own poetry. Or else, like Princess Louise, they stalked her at concert halls, hoping for a word or a glance.

The worries which Eliot’s troubled readers laid before her concerned the dislocations of a social and moral world that was changing at the speed of light. Here were the doubts and disorientations that had been displaced from that triumphant version of Victorianism. An exploding urban population, for instance, might well suggest bustling productivity, but it could also mean a growing sense of social anomie. Rural communities were indeed invigorated by their new proximity to big towns, but they were also losing their fittest sons and daughters to factories and, later, to offices and shops. Meanwhile the suburbs, conceived as a rus in urbe, pleased no one, least of all George Eliot, who spent five years hating Richmond and Wandsworth for their odd mix of nosy neighbours and lack of real green.

For if in one way Victorians felt more separate from each other, in others they were being offered opportunities to come together as never before. It was not just the railway that was changing the psycho-geography of the country, bringing friends, enemies and business partners into constant contact. The postal service, democratised in 1840 by the introduction of the Penny Post, allowed letters to fly from one end of the country to the other at a pace that makes our own mail service look like a slowcoach. Then there was the telephone which, at the end of her life, George Eliot was invited to try. As a result of these changes Victorians found themselves pulled in two directions. Scattering from their original communities, they spent the rest of their lives trying to reconstitute these earlier networks in imaginary forms.

Science, too, was taking away the old certainties and replacing them with new and sometimes painful ones. It would not be until 1859 that Darwin would publish Origin of Species, but plenty of other geologists and biologists were already embracing the possibility that the world was older than Genesis suggested, in which case the Bible was perhaps not the last word on God’s word. Perhaps, indeed, it was not God’s word at all, but rather the product of man’s need to believe in something other than himself. This certainly was the double conclusion that Eliot came to during the early anonymous years of her career when she translated those seminal German texts, Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1835–6) and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841). Her readers likewise wrestled with the awful possibility that there was no moral authority except the one which was to be found by digging deep within themselves. Not only did a godless universe lay terrifying burdens of responsibility upon the individual, but it unsettled the idea of an afterlife. To a culture which had always believed that, no matter how dismal earthly life might be, there was a reward waiting in heaven, this was a horrifying blow beside which the possibility that one was an ape paled into insignificance.

That much-vaunted prosperity turned out to be a tricky business too. For every Victorian who felt rich, there were two who felt very poor indeed, especially during the volatile 1840s and again in the late 1860s. During Eliot’s early years in the Midlands she saw the effect of trade slumps on the lives of working families. As a schoolgirl in Nuneaton she had watched while idle weavers queued for free soup; at home, during the holidays, she sorted out second-hand clothing for unemployed miners’ families. Even her own sister, married promisingly to a gentlemanly doctor, found herself as a widow fighting to stay out of the workhouse.

To middle-class Victorians these sights and stories added to a growing sense that they were not, after all, in control of the economic and social revolution being carried out in their name. Getting the vote in 1832 had initially seemed to give them the power to reshape the world in their own image: the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 had represented a real triumph of urban needs over the agricultural interest. But it soon became clear that early fears that 1832 would be the first step towards a raggle-taggle democracy were justified. On three occasions during the ‘hungry forties’ working-class men and women rallied themselves around the Charter, a frightening document demanding universal suffrage and annual parliaments. By the mid-186os, with the economy newly unsettled, urban working men were once again agitating violently for the vote.

These were worrying times. The fat little figure of the Queen was not enough to soothe Victorians’ fears that the blustery world in which they lived might not one day blow apart completely. In fear and hope they turned to the woman whose name they were initially only supposed to whisper and whose image they were seldom allowed to see. George Eliot’s novels offered Victorians the chance to understand their edginess in its wider intellectual setting and to rehearse responses by identifying with characters who looked and sounded like themselves. Thanks to her immense erudition in everything from theology to biology, anthropology to psychology, Eliot was able to give current doubts their proper historic context. Dorothea’s ardent desire to do great deeds, for instance, is set alongside St Teresa’s matching passion in the sixteenth century and their contrasting destinies explained. In the same way Tom Tulliver’s battles with his sister Maggie are understood not just in terms of their individual personalities, but as the meeting point of several arcs of genetic, cultural, and family conditioning at a particular moment in human history.

While disenchantment with Victorianism led readers to George Eliot, George Eliot’s advice to them was that they should remain Victorians. Despite the ruptures of the speedy present, Eliot believed that it was possible, indeed essential, that her readers stay within the parameters of the ‘working-day world’ – a phrase that would stand at the heart of her philosophy. She would not champion an oppositional culture, in which people put themselves outside the ordinary social and human networks which both nurtured and frustrated them. From Darwin she took not just the radical implications (we are all monkeys, there is probably no God), but the conservative ones too. Societies evolve over thousands of years; change – if it is to work – must come gradually and from within. Opting out into political, religious or feminist Utopias will not do. Eliot’s novels show people how they can deal with the pain of being a Victorian by remaining one. Hence all those low-key endings which have embarrassed feminists and radicals for over a century. Dorothea’s ardent nature is pressed into small and localised service as an MP’s wife, Romola’s phenomenal erudition is set aside for her duties as a sick-nurse, Dinah gives up her lay preaching to become a mother.

Eliot’s insistence on making her characters stay inside the community, acknowledge the status quo, give up fantasies about the ballot, behave as if there is a God (even if there isn’t) bewildered her peers. Feminist and radical friends assumed that a woman who lived with a married man, who had broken with her family over religion, who was one of the highest-earning women in Britain, must surely be encouraging others to do the same. And when they found that she did not want the vote for women, that she felt remote from Girton and that she sometimes even went to church, they felt baffled and betrayed.

What Eliot’s critics missed was that she was no reactionary, desperately trying to hold back the moment when High Victorianism would crumble. Right from her earliest fictions, from the days of Adam Bede in 1859, she had understood her culture’s fragility, as well as its enduring strengths. None the less, she believed in the Victorian project, that it was possible for mankind to move forward towards a place or time that was in some way better. This would only happen by a slow process of development during which men and women embraced their doubts, accepted that there would be loss as well as gain, and took their enlarged vision and diminished expectations back into the everyday struggle. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s penultimate book and last proper novel, she shows how this new Victorianism, projected on to a Palestinian Jewish homeland, might look and sound. Although it will cohere around a particular social, geographic and religious culture, it will acknowledge other centres and identities. It will know and honour its own past, while anticipating a future which is radically different. By being sure of its own voice, it will be able to listen attentively to those of others.

It was Eliot’s adult reading of Wordsworth and Scott that instilled in her the conviction that ‘A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land … a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection.’⁵ But it was during her earliest years, as she accompanied her father around the Arbury estate in his pony trap, that she fell deeply in love with the Midlands countryside. Her ‘spot’ was Warwickshire, the midmost county of England. Uniquely, the landscape was neither agricultural nor industrial, but a patchwork of both. In a stunning Introduction to Felix Holt, The Radical, George Eliot used the device of a stagecoach thundering across the Midlands on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act to describe a countryside where the old and new sit companionably side by side.

In these midland districts the traveller passed rapidly from one phase of English life to another: after looking down on a village dingy with coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of looms, he might skirt a parish all of fields, high hedges, and deep-rutted lanes; after the coach had rattled over the pavement of a manufacturing town, the scene of riots and trades-union meetings, it would take him in another ten minutes into a rural region, where the neighbourhood of the town was only felt in the advantages of a near market for corn, cheese, and hay.⁶

Mary Anne’s early life, contained within the four walls of Griff farmhouse, where her family moved early in 1820, still belonged securely to the agricultural ‘phase of English life’ and was pegged to the daily and seasonal demands of a mixed dairy and arable farm. Although there were male labourers to do the heavy work and female servants to help in the house, much of the responsibility was shouldered by the Evans family itself. Like many of the farmers’ wives who appear in Eliot’s books, Mrs Evans took particular pride in her dairy, running it as carefully as Mrs Poyser in Adam Bede, who continually frets about low milk yields and late churnings. Like the wealthy but practical Nancy Lammeter in Silas Marner, too, Mrs Evans and her two daughters had bulky, well-developed hands which ‘bore the traces of butter-making, cheese-crushing, and even still coarser work’.⁷ Some years after George Eliot’s death, a rumour circulated in literary London that one of her hands was bigger than the other, thanks to years of turning the churn. It was a story which her brother Isaac, now gentrified by a fancy education, good marriage and several decades of high agricultural prices, hated to hear repeated.

The rhythms of agricultural life made themselves felt right through Mary Anne’s young adulthood. As a prickly, bookish seventeen-year-old left to run the farmhouse after her mother’s death, she railed against the fuss and bother of harvest supper and the hiring of new servants each Michaelmas. And yet the very depth of her adolescent alienation from this repetitive, witless way of life reveals how deeply it remained embedded in her. Thirty years on and established in a villa in London’s Regent’s Park, her first thought about the weather was always how it would affect the crops.

But life on the Arbury estate was no bucolic idyll. The Newdigate lands contained some of the richest coal deposits in the county. As she grew older, the fields in which Mary Anne played had names like Engine Close and Coal-pit Field. Lumps of coal lay casually amid the grass. At night the girl was kept awake by the chug-chug of the Newcomen engine pumping water out of the mine less than a mile from her home. The canal in which she and Isaac fished was busy with barges taking the coal to Coventry. And when Mary Anne accompanied her father on his regular visits to Mr Newdigate at Arbury Hall, she would have noticed the huge crack which cut across the gold-and-white ceiling of the magnificent great hall. Subsidence caused by the mine-working had dramatically marked a building whose elaborate refashioning only a generation before had come to stand for everything that was elegantly Arcadian about aristocratic life.

Nor did Mary Anne have to look very far to fit the uneven textures of the Arbury estate into the wider landscape. Most of the people in the scrappy hamlet of Griff were not farm labourers but miners. In the nearby villages people were mainly employed in cottage industries like nail making, ribbon weaving and framework knitting. The pale faces and twisted bodies of the handloom weavers struck Mary Anne as absolutely different from the Arbury farmers, a contrast she was to use later in suggesting the weaver Silas Marner’s alienation from his ruddy Raveloe neighbours.

Only a few miles along the road was Nuneaton, the market town where Mary Anne was soon to go to school. In her very first piece of fiction she describes the town – renamed Milby – as a place where intensive homeworking had already left its grimy mark: ‘The roads are black with coal-dust, the brick houses dingy with smoke; and at that time – the time of handloom weavers – every other cottage had a loom at its window, where you might see a pale, sickly-looking man or woman pressing a narrow chest against a board, and doing a sort of treadmill work with legs and arms.’⁸

As Eliot’s description of hard labour and pinched surroundings suggests, these were not prosperous times for the Midlands. Victory over Napoleon in 1815 had meant an end to protection against imports of French and Swiss ribbon. A couple of months before Mary Anne’s birth, a cut in the rate paid to silk weavers brought an angry crowd out on to the street. There was jeering and jostling, and a man accused of working under-price was tied backwards on a donkey and led through the streets.⁹ Later, as a schoolgirl in Nuneaton, she was to see hunger-fuelled rioting at first hand.

As Mary Anne followed her father from miner’s cottage to farmhouse to Arbury Hall itself, she learned to place herself within this complex social landscape. She noted that while tenant farmers might nod respectfully at her, when she got to Arbury Hall, she was left in the housekeeper’s room while her father went to speak to the great man. She observed a whole range of accents, dress, customs and manners against which her own must be measured and adjusted. In this way she built up a library of visual and aural references to which she could return in her imagination when she was sitting, years later, in Richmond trying to recapture the way a gardener or a clergyman spoke. It was this faithfulness to the actual past, rather than a greetings-card version of it, which was to become a plank in her demand for a new kind of realism in fiction. In Adam Bede she breaks off in the middle of describing the young squire’s coming-of-age party to ask her sentimental, suburban reader: ‘Have you ever seen a real English rustic perform a solo dance? Perhaps you have only seen a ballet rustic, smiling like a merry countryman in crockery, with graceful turns of the haunch and insinuating movements of the head. That is as much like the real thing as the “Bird Waltz” is like the song of the birds.’¹⁰ Mary Anne Evans had not only seen labourers dancing, she had watched them getting drunk, making love, milking and shearing. She had been patronised by the gentry and petted by their servants. And while these pictures were neither charming nor quaint, they sustained her sense of being rooted in a community which was to carry her through the long years of urban exile. She knew every field, every hedgerow and every clump of trees. In later life, she had only to close her eyes and she could conjure up the smell of cows’ breath, hay and fresh rain. But she also knew the way the muddy canal absorbed the sunlight and the noise the looms made as the weavers worked into the night. Looking at the world through her father’s expert eyes, she learned to see that these two strands of life were not conflicting, but that they represented a particular moment in the development of English life. The rural community had not been destroyed, but it was being radically regeared towards technology, profit and the power of the individual to manage his own life. And no one had benefited more from these changes than Robert Evans.

Evans had been born in Roston Common, Derbyshire, in 1773, one of eight children. There were the usual family romances about gentry stock, but by the time Robert arrived any grand connections were nothing more than stories. His father, George, was a carpenter and his mother was called Mary Leech. The five Evans boys were determined to ride the wave of social and economic expansion unleashed by the first phase of industrialisation. Second son William rose to be a wealthy builder, while Thomas overcame a shaky start to become county surveyor for Dorset. Even dreamy Samuel, who turned Methodist and kept his eye on the future world, ran a ribbon factory. Only the eldest boy, George, was unsteady. He boycotted the family’s carpentry business and there was talk of heavy drinking. When he died, the Evans clan turned its collective and implacable back on his young children.

Mary Anne was to experience both sides of this Evans legacy. Like her father and his brothers, she rose out of the class into which she was born by dint of hard work and talent. She left behind the farm, the dairy and the brown canal, and fashioned herself into one of the leading intellectual and literary artists of the day. But just like her Uncle George – was it coincidence that she took his name as the first half of her writing pseudonym? – she learned what it was like to belong to a family which regularly excluded those of whom it did not approve. When, at the age of twenty-two, she announced that she did not believe in God, her father sent her away from home. Fifteen years later, when she was living with a man to whom she was not married, her brother Isaac instructed her sisters never to speak or write to her again. The Evanses, like thousands of other ambitious families at that time, demanded that its members forge their individual destinies while skirting nonconformity.

In the case of the Evans boys, those destinies were forged in the workshop rather than the classroom. When they did attend school – run by Bartle Massey, a name which would crop up in Adam Bede – it was to learn accounting, ‘mechanics’ and ‘to write a plain hand’. Robert’s hand did indeed remain plain all his adult life, but despite almost daily entries in his journal and a constant correspondence with his employers, he was never to become comfortable with the pen. Reading his papers remains a tricky business, thanks to patchy punctuation, haphazard spelling and a whimsical use of capitals and italics. ‘Balance’ becomes ‘ballance’, ‘laughed’ is ‘laph’d’, while ‘their’ and ‘there’ are constantly confused. Despite a career of forty years spent note-taking and report-making, Robert Evans remained uneasy with the written word, finding, like Mr Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, ‘the relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world’.¹¹

Evans preferred to dwell in the stable and particular. As a young carpenter he had learned how to turn the elms and ash of Derbyshire and Staffordshire into windows, tables and doors. And as he walked through the forest on his way to the farmhouses where he was employed, he looked around at the trees that ended up on his work-bench. He took note of the conditions under which the best wood flourished. He saw when a stand was ready to be cut and when it should be left for a few weeks more. Later in his career it was said that he had only to look at a tree to know exactly how much timber it would yield.

To any landed proprietor, intent not simply on gazing at his parkland but increasing its profit, a man like Evans could be useful. It was now that he came to the attention of Francis Parker, a shrewd young gentleman of about the same age, who spotted the carpenter’s potential to be more than a maker of cottage doors and fancy cabinets. Parker persuaded his father – another Francis Parker – to put Evans to work managing Kirk Hallam, their Derbyshire estate. So began Evans’s career as a self-made man. Reworked in fiction as the ruptured rivalrous bond between Adam Bede and Arthur Donnithorne, the real-life Parker and Evans remained cordial, but always mindful of their vastly different stations. Over the next forty years they offered each other – often by letter, since Parker lived much of the time in Blackheath, Kent – cautious encouragement and condolence as the trials of their parallel lives unfolded.¹²

In 1806, by a cat’s cradle of a will, Francis Parker senior inherited a life interest in the magnificent Warwickshire estate of Arbury Hall from his cousin Sir Roger Newdigate. Parker, now renamed Newdigate, moved to Arbury and brought Evans with him as his agent. Evans, by now thirty-three and a father of two, was installed at South Farm, from where he could manage the 7000-acre estate while running his own farm.

The Evans family and the Parker-Newdigate clan had attached themselves to one another in a mutually beneficial arrangement which was to last right down the nineteenth century. While the Newdigates spent many years and much money pursuing pointless lawsuits about who was responsible for what under the terms of Roger Newdigate’s eccentric will, the Evans brothers quietly consolidated their own empire. With Robert now moved to Warwickshire, Thomas and William stayed behind to manage the Newdigates’ Derbyshire and Staffordshire estates. The moment Robert’s eldest boy was old enough, he was sent back to Derbyshire to learn the family trade. And when occasionally something did go wrong, Robert Evans stepped in quickly to make sure that there was no blip in the steady arc of the family’s influence. In 1835 brother Thomas went bankrupt. This was a potential disaster, since if Thomas left his farm at Kirk Hallam he would also have to give up as estate manager. Robert immediately proposed a solution to his employer whereby he would become the official tenant of the farm, allowing Thomas and his son to continue to work the land and stay in place.¹³ In the Evanses’ world, business relationships always took precedence over family ones. Although during Mary Anne’s childhood Robert made regular trips northwards, on only a couple of occasions did he take her with him to meet her uncles and aunts. Their odd-sounding dialect struck her as strange, but years later she found good use for it when she came to create the North Midlands accents in Adam Bede.¹⁴

Evans applied the same canny caution to his personal life. While working in Staffordshire he had noticed a local girl called Harriet Poynton. She was a servant, but a superior one. Since her teens she had been lady’s maid to the second Mrs Parker-Newdigate senior and occupied a position of unparalleled trust. Her duties would have involved looking after the wardrobe and toilet of her mistress, buttoning her up in the morning and brushing out her hair at night. Constantly in her mistress’s presence, the lady’s maid frequently became the recipient of cast-off clothes, gossip and affection. All the signs suggest that Mrs Parker-Newdigate looked on Harriet as something like a daughter. Marriage to Harriet Poynton cemented Robert Evans’s ties to his employers. The Parker-Newdigates were presumably delighted that two of their favourite servants had forged an alliance. At the very least it meant that their own comforts and conveniences would not be disturbed. In an unusual arrangement, Mrs Parker-Newdigate, now moved to Arbury Hall, insisted that Harriet continue to work after her marriage.

We know nothing of the courtship. It is hard to imagine Robert Evans divulging much beyond the current cost of elm or the need to drain the top field. But this was not about romance. Evans offered the thirty-one-year-old Harriet the respectability of marriage without the need to leave her beloved mistress. In return, her ladylike manner promised usefully to soften his blunt ways and flat vowels. They married in 1801 and children followed quickly. Robert was born in 1802, Frances Lucy, shrewdly named for Mrs Parker-Newdigate, in 1805.

In the end, it was Harriet’s attachment to her mistress that killed her. In 1809 Mrs Parker-Newdigate went down with a fatal illness to which the heavily pregnant Harriet also succumbed. A baby girl, also Harriet, was born, but died shortly afterwards and was buried with her mother. In acknowledgement of her unique relation to them in both life and death, the Parker-Newdigates took the unusual step of adding Harriet’s name – ‘faithful friend and servant’ – to the family memorial stone in nearby Astley Church.

Like all widowers with children, Robert Evans needed to marry again and quickly. We do not know who looked after the babies during the four years before he took his second wife. Perhaps Harriet’s family rallied round. Maybe one of his sisters from Derbyshire came to help at South Farm. The next thing known for certain, however, is that he made another smart match. Christiana Pearson was the youngest daughter of Isaac Pearson, a yeoman who farmed at Astley. Yeoman farmers were freeholders and so harder to place socially than those who rented their farms, a point which was to unsettle the snobbish Mrs Cadwallader in Middlemarch.¹⁵ The Pearsons were certainly not gentry, but they were prosperous, active sort of people, used to serving as church wardens and parish constables. If Evans’s first marriage confirmed his allegiance to the Newdigates, his second proclaimed a growing independence from them.

The Pearson daughters – there were four of them – embodied a particular kind of rigid rural respectability which would be reworked by their niece to such powerful and funny effect in the Dodson sisters in The Mill on the Floss. Literary detectives have matched up the Dodsons to the Pearsons exactly. Ann Pearson, who married George Garner of Astley, became the model for Aunt Deane; Elizabeth was second wife of Richard Johnson of Marston Jabbett and formed the basis for rich, pretentious Aunt Pullet; while Mary, second wife of John Evarard of Attleborough, was transformed into thrifty, superstitious Aunt Glegg. The overriding characteristic of the Dodson sisters (and hence the Pearsons) is their sense of superiority on every imaginable topic and an assumed right to comment on those who do not match their exacting standards. ‘There were particular ways of doing everything in that family: particular ways of bleaching the linen, of making the cowslip wine, curing the hams and keeping the bottled gooseberries, so that no daughter of that house could be indifferent to the privilege of having been born a Dodson, rather than a Gibson or a Watson.’¹⁶

Christiana was the youngest of the Pearson girls – there was a brother, too – and perhaps here lies the clue to why she agreed to become Robert Evans’s second wife. Still unmarried in her late twenties, she may have wanted to flee the role of companion and nurse to ageing parents. Perhaps she also wanted protection from her overbearing sisters. At forty-one, Robert Evans was a vigorous man whose reputation as the cleverest agent in the area was growing all the time. No longer a servant exactly, he was a ‘rising man’. South Farm needed a mistress, someone who could run a dairy, organise a household, feed the workmen and supervise the servants. Christiana Pearson could do worse than become the second Mrs Evans.

The marriage, in 1813, produced five children, three of whom survived. First came Christiana, always known as Chrissey, in 1814. Next, in 1816, was Isaac and two and a half years later came Mary Anne. The fact that these were all Pearson names suggests that Mrs Evans’s nearby family continued to take what seemed to them a natural precedence and influence in the children’s lives. That the last baby was a girl – Robert Evans’s third – was probably a disappointment, especially since boy twins born in 1821 did not survive more than a few days. For a man who was still busy building a business dynasty, girls were not especially useful. They could run a farmhouse, but they could not trade, build or farm. Until they married – when they had to be provided with a dowry – they remained a drain on their family’s resources.

Four months after Mary Anne’s birth the family moved to Griff House, the Georgian farmhouse on the Coventry-Nuneaton road which was to be home for the next twenty-one years. It was far more impressive than the boxy South Farm and, together with the attached 280 acres of farmland, represented the high noon of Robert Evans’s status and influence. There were eight bedrooms, three attics and four ground-floor living-rooms. A cobbled courtyard was surrounded by a dairy (which was to become the model for the richly seductive Poyser dairy in Adam Bede), a dovecote and a labourer’s cottage. The four acres of garden were picture-book perfect, with roses, cabbages, raspberry bushes, currant trees and, best of all, a round pond. During her adult years spent in boarding-houses, hotel rooms and ugly suburban villas, Mary Anne’s imagination would return repeatedly to the Eden that was Griff. When, in 1874, Isaac’s daughter Edith sent her some recent photographs of the house, Mary Anne found herself spinning back in time: ‘Dear old Griff still smiles at me with a face which is more like than unlike its former self, and I seem to feel the air through the window of the attic above the drawing room, from which when a little girl, I often looked towards the distant view of the Coton “College” [the workhouse] – thinking the view rather sublime.’¹⁷

Although as a mature novelist George Eliot referred repeatedly to memory and childhood as the bedrock of the adult self, she actually left very little direct information about her own early years. Even John Cross, the man she married eight months before her death, wrestled with large gaps as he attempted to recall his wife’s childhood for the readers of his three-volume George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, published in 1885. To bulk out his first chapter he leaned heavily on the account of Maggie Tulliver’s early years in The Mill on the Floss, introducing distortions which biographers spent the next hundred years consolidating into ‘fact’.

Drawing on the relationship between Mr Tulliver and Maggie, Cross has Robert Evans clucking in wonder at the cleverness of his ‘little wench’ and making her a special pet. In fact, there is no evidence that Evans had a particular fondness for Mary Anne, although plenty to suggest that she worshipped him. By the time his youngest child was born, Evans was forty-six years old and established in both his career and family life. A head-and-shoulders portrait from 1842 shows him massive and impassive as a piece of great oak.¹⁸ A high, wide forehead gives way to a long nose and broad lips – features that were repeated less harmoniously in Mary Anne. Evans radiated physical strength – one anecdote has him jauntily picking up a heavy ladder, which two labourers were unable to manage between them. But it was his moral authority that made him a figure to be reckoned with. Once, when travelling on the top of a coach in Kent, a female passenger complained that the sailor sitting next to her was being offensive. Mr Evans changed places with the woman and forced the sailor under the seat, holding him down for the rest of the journey.¹⁹

It was this reputation for integrity that meant that Evans was increasingly asked to play a part in the burgeoning network of charitable and public institutions, which were becoming part of the rural landscape during the 1820s and 1830s. His meticulous bookkeeping and surveying skills were an asset to church, workhouse and hospital. In a blend of self-interest and social responsibility, he was able to take advantage of this move towards a professional bureaucracy by charging fees for services rendered. Less officially he also became known as someone who would discreetly lend money to embarrassed professional men, including the clergy. By charging a fair interest, the frugal carpenter’s son was able to make a profit out of those gentlemen who had been less successful than himself at negotiating the violent swings of the post-war economy.

But the heart of Evans’s empire would always remain his work as a land agent. This was what he understood and where he excelled. Since the middle of the previous century English agriculture had been developing along capitalist lines. The careless old ways of farming were giving way to scientific methods, which promised to yield bigger crops and profits. Landowners now employed professional agents to oversee the efficient running of their estates. It was Robert Evans’s job to ensure that the Newdigate tenant farmers kept their land properly fenced, drained and fertilised.²⁰ Livestock was carefully chosen according to its suitability for particular pasture. Farm buildings were to be light, airy and dry. Evans was an excellent draughtsman, and one of his letters to his employer includes a meticulous scale drawing of a proposed farm cottage, complete with threshing floor, corn bay, straw bay, cowshed, kitchen and dairy. Dorothea Brooke would have been delighted.²¹

Evans’s expertise encompassed every aspect and activity of the Arbury estate. He regularly inspected the coal-mine, arranged for roads to be built and kept a watchful eye on the quarries, which were only a few yards from the gates of Griff House. As his reputation grew throughout the region, Evans came to be seen less as a clever servant of the Newdigates and increasingly as a professional man in his own right. Several other local landowners, including Lord Aylesford at Packington, now asked him to manage their land. Evans’s relationship with the Newdigates became subtly different as he started to carry himself with more authority. Francis Parker-Newdigate senior was, according to local sources, ‘a despisable character – a bad unfeeling Landlord’.²² Evans was not prepared to carry out policies which he felt to be unfair. In 1834 he suggested to Newdigate that a particularly bad wheat harvest obliged him to return a percentage of the rent to the tenants. The old man was typically reluctant, so Evans wrote directly to his son, now Colonel Newdigate, in Blackheath. Permission to refund came back immediately.²³

Years later, as interest in George Eliot’s social origins reached fever pitch, a rumour arose that her father had been nothing more than a tenant farmer. According to this reading, Eliot’s literary achievement became heroic, the stuff of fairy-tales, instead of the continuation of a trajectory which had started long before she was born. Indignantly, Eliot intervened to explain her father’s status as a man of accomplishment and skill, in the process putting her own achievement into a more realistic context.

My father did not raise himself from being an artizan to be a farmer: he raised himself from being an artizan to be a man whose extensive knowledge in very varied practical departments made his services valued through several counties. He had large knowledge of building, of mines, of plantation, of various branches of valuation and measurement – of all that is essential to the management of large estates. He was held by those competent to judge as unique amongst land agents for his manifold knowledge and experience, which enabled him to save the special fees usually paid by landowners for special opinions on the different questions incident to the proprietorship of land.²⁴

For all his modernity, Robert Evans remained a staunch conservative. Like many children who had gone to bed hearing stories of Madame Guillotine, he fetishised the need for strong government. And government, for him, must always be rooted in the power and prestige of land. It was not to Westminster he looked for leadership, but to the alliance of squire and clergy serving together on the magistrates’ bench. Evans believed in keeping corn prices high by means of artificial protection even if that meant townsmen having to pay more for their bread. The notorious ‘Peterloo’ incident, a few months before Mary Anne’s birth, in which the cavalry cut a murderous swathe through thousands of people gathered in Manchester to protest against the Corn Laws, would have drawn from Evans a shiver of fear followed by a glow of approbation. Closer to home, the violent hustings at Nuneaton in December 1832 would have confirmed his suspicion that extending the franchise to men with no stake in the land could result only in a permanent breakdown of precious law and order.²⁵

Even if Robert Evans had not been a natural conservative, ties of deference and duty to the Newdigates meant that he was obliged to follow them in supporting the Tory party. He attended local meetings on the family’s behalf and in 1837 made sure the tenants turned up to the poll by ‘treating’ them to a hearty breakfast. At times his support for the Tories against the reforming Whigs took on the flavour of a religious battle. Describing his efforts at the 1837 election in a letter to Colonel Newdigate, he urged ‘we must not loose a Vote if we can help it’.²⁶

We know less about Mrs Evans. Eliot mentions her only twice in her surviving letters, and Isaac and Fanny seem to have been unable to recall a single thing about her for John Cross when he interviewed them after his wife’s death. Cross’s solution was to take the generalised and evasive line, followed by many biographers since, that Mary Anne’s mother was ‘a woman with an unusual amount of natural force – a shrewd practical person, with a considerable dash of the Mrs Poyser vein in her’,²⁷ referring to the bustling farmer’s wife in Adam Bede. But what evidence there is suggests that Christiana Evans was actually more like Mrs Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, a kind of Mrs Poyser minus the energy and wit, but with a similar stream of angry complaints issuing from her thin lips. Anecdotal sources indicate that from the time of her last two confinements Mrs Evans was in continual ill-health. She had, after all, lost twin boys eighteen months after Mary Anne’s birth. For a woman who had already produced two girls, losing two sons, especially towards the end of her fertile years, must have been a blow. Whether this was the lassitude of bereavement, depression or physical exhaustion is not clear, but the impression that emerges is of a woman straining to cope with the demands of her family.

Raising stepchildren is never easy, but Christiana seems to have found it intolerable, especially once she had three babies of her own to look after. Around the time of Mary Anne’s birth, seventeen-year-old Robert was dispatched to Derbyshire to manage the Kirk Hallam estate, with fourteen-year-old Fanny accompanying him as his housekeeper and, later, as governess to a branch of the Newdigate family. It may not have been a formal banishment, but the effect was to stretch the elder children’s relationship with their father and his second family to the point where on their occasional visits home they were greeted as stiffly as strangers.²⁸

Chrissey, too, was rarely seen at Griff. According to John Cross, ‘shortly after her last child’s birth … [Mrs Evans] became ailing in health, and consequently her eldest girl, Christiana, was sent to school at a very early age, to Miss Lathom’s at Attleboro’.²⁹ Even during the holidays Chrissey rarely appeared at home: her biddable personality made her a favourite with the Pearson aunts who were happy to take her off their youngest sister’s hands. Only Isaac was allowed to stay at Griff to the more reasonable age of eight or nine. Even at the end of her life, Eliot had no doubts that Isaac had been their mother’s favourite. In part this was due to temperamental similarity. The boy’s subsequent development suggests that he was a Pearson through and through – rigid, respectable, intolerant of different ways of doing things. But it may also be the case that Christiana was a woman who found it easier to love her sons – both living and dead.

Critics have long noted the lack of warm, easy mother-child relationships in Eliot’s novels. Mothers are often dead and if they survive, then, like Mrs Bede, Mrs Holt and Mrs Tulliver, they are both intrusive and rejecting, swamping and fretful. Mrs Bede and Mrs Holt both demand constant attention from their sons by complaining about them. Mrs Tulliver, likewise, cannot leave Maggie alone. She worries away at the child’s grubby pinafores, stubborn hair and ‘brown skin as makes her look like a mulatter … it seems hard as I should have but one gell, an’ her so comical’.³⁰

Throughout her career George Eliot repeatedly explored what it is like to be the child of such a mother, one who both pulls you towards her and pushes you away. In a late poem, ‘Self and Life’, she describes the lingering desolation of being put down too suddenly from a warm maternal lap.³¹ Speaking in the more accessible prose of The Mill on the Floss, she shows the way in which a child in this situation responds with an infuriating mix of attention-seeking and self-punishing behaviour. In angry reply to Aunt Pullet’s insensitive suggestion that her untidy hair should be cropped, Maggie Tulliver seizes the scissors and does the job herself.³² In another incident she retreats to the worm-eaten cobwebby rafters, surely based on the attic at Griff, where she keeps a crude wooden doll or ‘fetish’ and, concentrating this time on the image of hated Aunt Glegg, drives a nail hard into its head. When her rage is exhausted, she bursts into tears and cradles the doll in a passion of remorse and tenderness.³³ Maggie’s swoops from showy self-display to brutal self-punishment were rooted in the violent swings of Mary Anne’s own childhood. An anecdote from around the age of four has her thumping the piano noisily in an attempt to impress the servant with her mastery of the instrument. Five years later she is cutting off her hair, just like Maggie. This sense that her childhood had been a time of uneasy longing remained with the adult Mary Anne. In 1844, at the age of twenty-five, she wrote to her friend Sara Hennell: ‘Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect – to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.’³⁴

Rejection by her mother forced Mary Anne to look elsewhere for a passionate, intimate connection. At the age of three she fell violently in love with her elder brother Isaac. She trotted behind him wherever he went, following him as he climbed trees, fished or busied himself with imaginary adventures down by the quarry. The Eden that was Griff now had its own tiny Adam and Eve. Eliot’s ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets, written in 1869, open with a description of the children as romantic soulmates, twins, each other’s missing half.

I cannot choose but think upon the time

When our two lives grew like two buds that kiss

At lightest thrill from the bee’s swinging chime,

Because the one so near the other is.³⁵

But while they may be deeply attached to one another, there is still division and difference in this Eden. The boy in the sonnets and Tom in The Mill on the Floss are older, bigger and more powerful than the little sisters who dote on them. The girl in the sonnets watches, admiring, while her brother plays marbles or spins tops; Maggie idolises Tom as the fount of all practical knowledge. And to cope with this power imbalance, Maggie likes to fantasise that the positions are reversed. In a cancelled passage from The Mill on the Floss, she imagines that,

Tom never went to school, and liked no one to play with him but Maggie; they went out together somewhere every day, and carried either hot buttered cakes with them because it was baking day, or apple puffs well sugared; Tom was never angry with her for forgetting things, and liked her to tell him tales;… Above all, Tom loved her – oh, so much, – more, even than she loved him, so that he would always want to have her with him and be afraid of vexing her; and he as well as everyone else, thought her very clever.³⁶

The split, when it comes, is awful. Tom comes home from school to find that Maggie has forgotten to feed his rabbits. His anger is swift and terrible, but it is his gradual pulling away into the realm of boydom which hurts even more. He begins to find Maggie’s adoration tiresome, her chatter silly and her superior cleverness embarrassing. Gradually he turns into the stern, conventional patriarch who scolds, criticises and eventually ignores his wayward sister.

The separation of the boy and girl in the ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets seems, at first, to be less traumatic. ‘School parted us,’ the narrator tells us, rather than some fierce falling-out. For several years ‘the twin habit of that early time’ is enough to let the children come together easily on their subsequent meetings. But as time goes by their lives carry them in opposite directions, to the point where, although ‘still yearning in divorce’, they are unable to find their way back to that shared language which once held them together.³⁷

The fact that the brother-sister divided was a drama that Eliot treated twice, once in prose, then in poetry, suggests that it had deep roots in her own life. Certainly Mary Anne’s early attachment to Isaac is on record as greedy and rapacious. After her death, Isaac Evans recalled for John Cross that on his return from boarding-school for the holidays he was greeted with rapture by his little sister, who demanded an account of everything he had been doing.³⁸ The scene is a charming one, but it hints at a distress which cannot be explained simply by sibling love. Behind the little girl’s urgent questioning there lurked a deep need to possess and control Isaac for fear he might abandon her. But it was already too late. When the boy was about nine he had acquired a pony and could no longer be bothered with his little sister. Mary Anne responded by plunging into a deep, intense grief, which was to echo down the years. ‘Very jealous in her affections and easily moved to smiles or tears,’ Cross explained to his readers, ‘she was of a nature capable of the keenest enjoyment and the keenest suffering, knowing “all the wealth and all the woe” of a pre-eminently exclusive disposition. She was affectionate, proud and sensitive in the highest degree.’³⁹

Observing his wife’s temperament in later life, John Cross believed that the pony incident provided the key to understanding George Eliot’s personality. ‘In her moral development she showed, from the earliest years, the trait that was most marked in her all through life – namely, the absolute need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and to whom she should be all in all.’⁴⁰ Later biographers have been quick to point out how this passage has become the cornerstone for a character reading of Eliot as needy, dependent and leaning heavily on male lovers and women friends for approval. Yet Eliot’s later comments on her own personality, together with the pattern of her subsequent relationships, suggest that Cross was doing no more than telling it how it was. The early withdrawal of her mother’s affection had left her with a vulnerability to rejection that would last a lifetime.

So when Mary Anne was sent away to boarding-school at the age of five, it was inevitable that she would take it hard. Even this was not the child’s first time away from home. For the previous two years she and Isaac had spent every day at a little dame school at the bottom of the drive. In her two-up-two-down cottage, Mrs Moore looked after a handful of local children and attempted to teach them their letters in an arrangement that went little beyond cheap baby-sitting. But now Mary Anne was to join Chrissey at Miss Lathom’s school three miles away in Attleborough, while Isaac was sent to a boys’ establishment in Coventry: hence the reference to ‘school divided us’ in the ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets. Boarding-school was not unusual for farmers’ daughters, but five was an exceptionally early age to start. After only eleven years of marriage Christiana Evans had managed to clear Griff House of the five young people who were supposed to be living there.⁴¹

School did not turn out to be an emotional second start for Mary Anne. Although she sometimes came home on Saturdays, and saw her nearby Aunt Evarard more often, she felt utterly abandoned. At the end of her life she told John Cross that her chief memory of Miss Lathom’s was of trying to push her way towards the fireplace through a semicircle of bigger girls. Faced with a wall of implacable backs, she resigned herself to living in a state of permanent chill. The scene stuck in her memory because it reinforced her feelings of being excluded from the warmth of her mother’s lap. No wonder, then, that her childhood nights were filled with dreadful dreams during which, reported Cross, ‘all her soul … [became] a quivering fear’.⁴² It was a terror which stayed with her throughout her life, edging into consciousness during those times when she was most stressed, depressed or alone. Even in late middle age she had not forgotten that churning sickness, working it brilliantly into the pathology of Gwendolen Harleth, the neurotic heroine of her last novel, Daniel Deronda.

Children who are separated from their parents often imagine that their bad behaviour is to blame. Mary Anne was no exception. She interpreted her banishment from Griff as a sign that she had been naughty and adopted the classic strategy of becoming very good. The older girls at Miss Lathom’s nicknamed her, with unconscious irony, ‘Little Mama’ and were careful not to upset her by messing up her clothes.⁴³ The toddler who had once loved to play mud pies with Isaac grew into a grave child who found other little girls silly. When, at the age of nine or ten, she was asked why she was sitting on the sidelines at a party, she replied stiffly, ‘I don’t like to play with children; I like to talk to grown-up people.’⁴⁴

As part of her plunge into goodness, Mary Anne buried herself in books. Her half-sister Fanny, who had once worked as a governess, recalled for John Cross the surprising fact that the child had been initially slow to read, preferring to play out of doors with her brother. But once Isaac withdrew his companionship Mary Anne was left, like so many lonely children, to construct an imaginary world of her own. In 1839 she told her old schoolmistress Maria Lewis how as a little girl ‘I was constantly living in a world of my own creation, and was quite contented to have no companions that I might be left to my own musings and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress. Conceive what a character novels would give to these Utopias. I was early supplied with them by those who kindly sought to gratify my appetite for reading and of course I made use of the materials they supplied for building my castles in the air.’⁴⁵ Quite who ‘supplied’ these novels is unclear. At the age of seven or so Mary Anne would have found very few books lying around Griff. The Evanses were literate but not literary and the little girl was obliged to read nursery standards like Aesop’s Fables and Pilgrim’s Progress over and over. Her father’s gift of a picture book, The Linnet’s Life, was special enough to make Mary Anne cherish it until the end of her life, handing it over to John Cross with a warm dedication.⁴⁶ Joe Miller’s Jest Book was learned by heart and repeated ad nauseam to whoever would listen. In middle age Eliot recalled that an unnamed ‘old gentleman’ used to bring her reading material, but no more is known.⁴⁷ For the girl who was to grow up to be the best-read woman of the century, it was an oddly unbookish start.

CHAPTER 2
‘On Being Called a Saint’
An Evangelical Girlhood 1828–40

AT THE AGE of eight Mary Anne took a step towards a new world, urban and refined. In 1828 she followed Chrissey to school in Nuneaton. Miss Lathom’s had been only three miles from Griff and was attended by farmers’ daughters with thick Warwickshire tongues, broad butter-making hands and little hope of going much beyond the three Rs. The Elms, run by Mrs Wallington, was a different proposition altogether. The lady herself was a genteel, hard-up widow from Cork. She had followed one of the few options available to her by opening a school and advertising for boarders whom she taught alongside her own daughters. There were hundreds of these ‘ladies’ seminaries’ struggling to survive in the first half of the nineteenth century and most of them were dreadful. What marked out The Elms was its excellent teaching: by the time Mary Anne arrived, the school was reckoned to be one of the best in Nuneaton. Responsibility for the thirty pupils was shared between Mrs Wallington, her daughter Nancy, now twenty-five, and another Irishwoman, Maria Lewis, who was about twenty-eight.

The change of environment did nothing to help Mary Anne shed her shyness. Adults and children still steered clear, assuming they had nothing to offer the little girl whom they privately described as ‘uncanny’.¹ Only the assistant governess Miss Lewis, with her ugly squint and her Irishness, recognised in Mary Anne something of her own isolation. Looking beyond the smooth, hard shell of perfection, she saw a deeply unhappy child ‘given to great bursts of weeping’. Within months of her arrival at Nuneaton Mary Anne had formed an attachment to Miss Lewis, which was to be the pivot of both women’s lives for the next ten years. Miss Lewis became ‘like an elder sister’ to the Evans girls, often staying at Griff during the holidays.²

Mr and Mrs Evans were delighted with Mrs Wallington’s in general and Maria Lewis in particular. In their different ways they both set great store by their youngest girl getting an education. Shrewdly practical, Robert Evans had already schooled his eldest daughter, Fanny, to a standard that had enabled her to work as a governess to the Newdigates before her marriage to a prosperous farmer, Henry Houghton. Anticipating that the quiet, odd-looking Mary Anne might remain a spinster all her life, Evans was determined that she would not be reduced to relying on her brothers for support. A life as a governess was not, as Miss Lewis’s example was increasingly to show, either secure or cheerful. Still, it was the one bit of independence open to middle-class women and Robert Evans was determined that it should be Mary Anne’s if she needed it.

Christiana’s hopes for her daughter were altogether fancier.³ Like many a prosperous farmer’s wife, she expected a stint at boarding-school to soften her child’s rough corners and round out her flat vowels. A smattering of indifferent French and basic piano were the icing on the cake of an education designed to prepare the girl for marriage to a prosperous farmer or local professional man. In the case of young Chrissey the investment was soon to pay off handsomely. A few years after leaving Mrs Wallington’s she married a local doctor, the gentlemanly Edward Clarke. Still, husbands were a long way off for little Mary Anne. All Mrs Evans hoped for at this stage was that her odd little girl would become near enough a lady. Maria Lewis may not have been pretty, but her careful manners and measured diction were held up to Mary Anne – who still looked and sounded like a farm girl – as the model to which she should aspire.

It did no harm, either, that Miss Lewis was ‘serious’ in her religion, belonging to the Evangelical wing of the Church of England. From the end of the previous century the Evangelicals had worked to revitalise an Established Church that had become lethargic and indifferent to the needs of a changing social landscape. A population which was increasingly urban and mobile found nothing of relevance in the tepid rituals of weekly parish worship. During the 1760s and 1770s, the charismatic clergyman John Wesley had taken the Gospel out to the people, preaching with passion about a Saviour who might be personally and intimately known. For Wesley ritual, liturgy and the sacrament were less important than a first-hand knowledge of God’s word as revealed through the Bible and private prayer. When it came to deciding questions of right and wrong, the authority of the priest ceded to individual conscience. This made Methodism, as Wesley’s brand of Anglicanism became known, a particularly democratic faith. Mill workers, apothecaries and, until 1803, women, were all encouraged to preach the word of the Lord as and when the spirit moved them.

This challenge of Methodism, together with the continuing vitality of other dissenting sects such as the Baptists and the Independents, had forced the Established Church to put its house in order. The result was Evangelicalism – a brand of Anglicanism which held out the possibility of knowing Christ as a personal redeemer. In order to attain this state of grace an individual was to prepare her soul by renouncing all manner of leisure and pleasure. A constant diet of prayer, Bible study and self-scrutiny was required to stamp out temptation. Yet at the same time as renouncing the world, the Evangelical Anglican was to be busily present within it. Visiting the poor, leading prayer meetings and worrying about the state of other people’s souls were part of the programme by which the ‘serious’ Christian would reach heaven. Uninviting though this dour programme might seem, Evangelicalism swept right through the middle classes and even lapped the gentry during the first decades of the century. Its combination of self-consciousness, sentimentality and pious bustle went a long way to defining the temper of domestic and public life in early nineteenth-century England. In ‘Janet’s Repentance’, one of her first pieces of fiction, George Eliot showed how Evangelical Anglicanism had worked a little revolution in the petty hearts and minds of female Milby, a barely disguised Nuneaton: ‘Whatever might be the weaknesses of the ladies who pruned the luxuriance of their lace and ribbons, cut out garments for the poor, distributed tracts, quoted Scripture, and defined the true Gospel, they had learned this – that there was a divine work to be done in life, a rule of goodness higher than the opinion of their neighbours.’⁴

Even Robert Evans, not known for his susceptibility to passing trends, was affected by Evangelical fervour. During the late 1820s he went to hear the Revd John Jones give a series of passionate evening sermons in Nuneaton. Jones’s fundamentalist style was credited with inspiring a religious revival in Nuneaton and with provoking a reaction from more orthodox church members – events which Eliot portrayed in ‘Janet’s Repentance’. But Evans was too much of a conservative to do more than dip into this new moral and political force. As the Newdigates’ representative, he was expected to uphold the tradition of Broad Church Anglicanism. The parish church of Chilvers Coton stood at the heart of village life and it was here the Evanses came to be christened – as Mary Anne was a week after her birth – married and buried. Labourers, farmers and neighbouring artisans gathered every Sunday to affirm not so much that Christ was Risen but that the community endured.

At a time when many country people still could not read, it was the familiar cadences of the Prayer Book rather than the precise doctrine it conveyed which brought comfort, a point Eliot was to put into the mouth of the illiterate Dolly Winthrop as she urged the isolated weaver Silas Marner to attend Raveloe’s Christmas service: ‘If you was to … go to church, and see the holly and the yew, and hear the anthim, and then take the sacramen’, you’d be a deal the better, and you’d know which end you stood on, and you could put your trust i’ Them as knows better nor we do, seein’ you’d ha’ done what it lies on us all to do.’⁵

While this was exactly the kind of hazy, casual observance which the Evangelical teenage Mary Anne abhorred, as a mature woman she came to value the way it strengthened social relations. Mr Ebdell, who had christened her, turns up in fiction as Mr Gilfil of ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’. Schooled in his own suffering, Gilfil is a much-loved figure in the community, with an instinctive understanding of his parishioners’ needs. He pulls sugar plums out of his pockets for the village children and sends an old lady a flitch of bacon so that she will not have to kill her beloved pet pig. Yet when it comes to preaching, that key activity for a new generation of zealous church-goers, Mr Gilfil is sadly lacking: ‘He had a large heap of short sermons, rather yellow and worn at the edges, from which he took two every Sunday, securing perfect impartiality in the selection by taking them as they came, without reference to topics.’⁶

Gilfil begins a long line of theologically lax, but emotionally generous, Anglican clergy in Eliot’s fiction which includes Mr Irwine of Adam Bede and Mr Farebrother in Middlemarch. Irwine may hunt and Farebrother play cards, much to the horror of their dissenting and Evangelical neighbours, but both extend a charity and understanding to their fellow men which was to become the corner-stone of Eliot’s adult moral philosophy.

Ironically, it was just this kind of loving acceptance which drew Mary Anne away from her family’s middle-of-the-road Anglicanism towards the Evangelicalism of Miss Lewis. At nine years old she was hardly able to comprehend the doctrinal differences between the two ways of worship, but she was easily able to register that Maria Lewis gave her the kind of sustained attention which her own mother could not. If loving God was what it took to keep Miss Lewis loving her, Mary Anne was happy to oblige. With the insecure child’s eager need to please, she adopted her teacher’s serious piety with relish. After her death, when family and friends were busy offering commentaries on Eliot’s early influences, the idea grew that it was Maria Lewis’s indoctrination that had provoked Mary Anne into the flamboyant gesture of abandoning God at the age of twenty-two. In fact Miss Lewis’s observance, though rigorous, was always sweet and sentimental. She was hardly a hell-fire preacher, more a gentle woman who talked earnestly of God’s tender mercies. But she was not so gentle, however, that she was not prepared to push the blame in the direction where she believed it lay. Reminiscing after Eliot’s death, she maintained that it was Mary Anne’s next teachers, the Baptist Franklin sisters, who were to blame for the girl’s ‘fall into infidelity’.⁷

The Franklins, whose establishment was in the smartest part of Coventry, ran the best girls’ school in the Midlands. The ambitious curriculum and pious ambience attracted girls from as far away as New York. Too rarefied for Chrissey Evans, who returned home to Griff after her stint at Mrs Wallington’s, it was none the less the perfect place for twelve-year-old Mary Anne.

The Franklin sisters, Mary, thirty, and Rebecca, twenty-eight, were the daughters of a local Baptist minister who preached at a chapel in Cow Lane. Despite these stern-sounding origins, they were generally agreed to be the last word in female charm and culture. In what was becoming a classic pattern for the early nineteenth-century schoolmistress, Miss Rebecca had spent time in Paris perfecting her French before coming home to pass on her elegant accent to her pupils. Indeed, her combination of refinement and learning had given the younger Miss Franklin a personal reputation as one of the cleverest women in the county.

In such an exquisite atmosphere Mary Anne could hardly fail to flourish. Her French improved by leaps and bounds, and she won a copy of Pascal’s Pensées for her efforts, a triumph which still gave her pleasure at the very end of her life. Her English compositions were immaculate, read with admiration by Miss Franklin ‘who rarely found anything to correct’.⁸ As the best pianist in the school, she was sometimes asked to play for visitors, even if she often fled from the parlour in ‘an agony of tears’ at her failure to excel.⁹

Mary Anne’s educational progress went hand in hand with her social transformation. She had already lost her accent by listening carefully to Miss Lewis’s pedantic, old-fashioned diction. Now she took Miss Rebecca as her model, developing the low, musical voice which in later life continued to hint at the effort it had taken to acquire. These were the years when the question of who or what was ‘genteel’ pressed hard upon the provincial middle classes. Women of the previous generation – like her brisk Pearson aunts – rooted their self-worth in keeping a spotless home and helping their husbands run a thriving business. They felt no shame in being spotted up to their elbows in whey or poring over an account book. But from the 1820s middle-class women were increasingly required to behave in ways which showed that they were ‘ladies’. Ladies did not involve themselves in profit making and they employed domestic servants to do the rougher housework. Instead of curing bacon they spent their time in a series of highly ornamental activities – painting, music and fine needlework – which advertised the fact that their husbands and fathers could afford to keep them in leisure. Evangelicalism went some way towards curbing the worst excesses of this faux-gentility, but even a serious Christian like Mary Anne Evans was expected to drop the ways of speaking and behaving which she had learned in her parents’ farmhouse.

The Franklins’ brand of Baptism was mild, but still they believed in the conversion experience, that moment when an individual realises his sinfulness and asks to be born again in Christ. It is not clear if Mary Anne underwent a sharply defined crisis in her mid-teens, but it is certainly the case that she became more ponderously religious than ever before. She was always first to lead her schoolmates in spontaneous prayer, a habit that aroused in them feelings of queasy awe. One of the daughters of these unfortunate girls recalled years later that Mary Anne’s schoolfellows ‘loved her as much as they could venture to love one whom they felt to be so immeasurably superior to themselves’.¹⁰

Delighted with her growing reputation for perfection, Mary Anne’s response was to compose a poem entitled ‘On Being Called a Saint’ in which she tortured herself deliriously with the possibility that she was not quite as perfect as everyone believed. Her opening stanza sighs,

A Saint! Oh would that I could claim

The privileg’d, the honor’d name

And confidently take my stand

Though lowest in the saintly band!¹¹

Saints, of course, are not supposed to worry about what they look like. At a time when even her most pious classmates were becoming interested in their looks and the things that went with them – flirtation, courtship, marriage – Mary Anne was increasingly aware that she was unlikely to attract many admirers. Her big nose, long upper lip and lank hair were really not so very ugly, especially at a time when many a teenage girl had to worry about black teeth and smallpox scars, but her mother’s early lessons about her unacceptability had been well learned. Believing herself a fright, she became one.

Evangelical and dissenting Protestantism had always warned against the pleasures of the flesh, identifying vanity as a particularly besetting sin. Mary Anne seized on this licence with enthusiasm, deliberately playing up her plainness by looking unkempt and adopting a severe style of dress, including an unflattering Quaker-type cap.¹² If being pretty was the one thing at which she did not excel, she would turn the situation on its head and become expert at looking plain. In a plodding essay on ‘Affectation and Conceit’ written at this time, she upbraids pretty, vapid women who ‘study no graces of mind or intellect. Their whole thoughts are how they shall best maintain their empire over their surrounding inferiors, and the right fit of a dress or bonnet will occupy their minds for hours together.’¹³ At fifteen Mary Anne was a long way from the realisation that she was just as guilty of manipulating her appearance in order to maintain superiority over her peers.

Throughout her adult life, other people made periodic attempts to get Mary Anne interested in her appearance. But her sense of hopelessness in this area was so embedded that nothing made much difference. While she was staying in a boarding-house in Geneva in 1849 a fellow guest – a marquise no less – insisted on giving her a more up-to-date hairstyle. Mary Anne felt ridiculous: ‘All the world says I look infinitely better so I comply, though to myself I seem uglier than ever – if possible.’¹⁴

Years later, in 1863, when she and Lewes held a housewarming party at their new home off Regent’s Park, their interior designer Owen Jones gave Mary Anne a talking-to about ‘her general neglect of personal adornment’ and insisted on shoehorning her into a splendid moiré dress bought especially for the occasion.¹⁵

Mary Anne reported these two incidents to her correspondents with amused disbelief. She was so convinced of her own ugliness, other people’s kind attentions were always suspected as possible teases. As a result she never acquired the confidence which would have allowed her to make the best of herself. In middle age, when she was seen regularly at the theatre and in concert halls, she became well known for the awful mishmash of her outfits, part high fashion, part provincial dowdiness. At the end of her life, and married to the much younger John Cross, her attempts to put together a flattering new image earned her sniggers from the effortlessly elegant.

Yet behind the poker-faced demeanour which sometimes confused visitors into thinking she was a third Miss Franklin, Mary Anne’s emotions worked as violently as ever. One schoolmate recalled her shock at finding a passionate demand for love scribbled in the back of the paragon’s German dictionary.¹⁶ The tearful exits which usually followed her piano recitals in the Franklins’ drawing-room suggest the intensity with which she lived. Performance of all kinds was to remain a tricky business throughout her life. She longed for the praise, acclaim and love that went with setting her fiction before the public, but could not bear the criticism and gossip that naturally accompanied them. Her need to be right and perfect went beyond vanity and became a matter of survival, to the point where Lewes realised he had better suppress all but the most flattering reviews if she were not to plunge into a paralysing despair. The teenage Mary Anne was, if anything, even more thin-skinned. Performing for the Misses Franklin and their visitors offered the possibility of reaching an instant of perfection and, better still, having it witnessed by others. When that moment of transcendence failed to appear – because, in her own eyes, she had failed to reach the required standard – it was as if she had blown her last chance at love.

Mary Anne’s surviving exercise book, too, reveals a deep interest in the whole drama of rejection. In her neat hand she copied out a trashy poem called ‘The Forsaken’ in which a young woman is jilted by a casual, arrogant man. Melodramatic though this might have been, it explores Mary Anne’s experience of her brother’s early coldness. The man in the poem behaves much as Isaac had done – leaving his sweetheart – sister bereft, while he sets out to explore a wider world, returning in this case not with a pony but with another woman. By way of a fantasy revenge, one of the last poems Mary Anne copied out in her notebook is ‘To a Sister’ in which a far-away brother begs his sister to remember him.¹⁷ These verses and the trauma behind her choice of them laid the basis for Mary Anne’s pessimistic expectations about adult sexuality: women are doomed to love men who will not love them back. The future she imagined for herself was the one which came to pass. Until the age of thirty-four she was to endure one romantic rejection after another.

In 1835 Christiana Evans fell ill with breast cancer, and at Christmas Mary Anne was called home from school to nurse her. All the French prizes and piano performances in the world could not rescue the cleverest girl in the school from the expectations which the nineteenth-century family placed on its unmarried daughters. Any hopes Mary Anne might have harboured about moving on from the Franklins to an even more prestigious school, perhaps on the Continent, were dashed by the summons home to Griff.

Mary Anne’s entire education had been shaped by the demands of her mother’s health. At five she had been sent away because Christiana was too frail to manage her and at sixteen she was being called back because she was dying. Characteristically, any grievance Mary Anne felt was kept well buried. The one surviving letter of this time, written to Maria Lewis, uses the conventional pieties of the sickroom, ‘We dare not hope that there will be a permanent improvement.’¹⁸ There wasn’t. In the early hours of 3 February 1836 Christiana Evans died.

In a letter to his employer a few weeks later Robert Evans appeared to accept the situation stoically: ‘I have gone through a great deal of pain and Greif, but it is the work of God therefore I submit to it chearfully as far as Human Nature will permit.’¹⁹ In fact, he was far from resigned. When it became apparent in late December that Christiana was about to die, Evans had fallen violently and suddenly ill with a kidney complaint. The man who had always seemed as solid as an oak crumpled at the prospect of losing a wife for the second time. For a while it looked as if he too might die. But tender nursing and ferocious bleeding with leeches had their effect, and by mid-January he was shakily mobile. For a difficult few weeks it had seemed as if the Evans family – always a more fragile structure than it appeared – might collapse completely.

For the first time, almost, since Mary Anne’s birth the three children of Robert Evans’s second marriage were living under one roof. Chrissey was the housekeeper, Isaac the apprentice and Mary Anne her father’s surrogate wife. It was she who accompanied the old man on shopping trips to Coventry, mended his clothes and read from Walter Scott, the author whom they both loved. There is no evidence that the placid Chrissey resented her younger sister’s place in their father’s affections. Always her mother’s favourite daughter, the elder girl was released by Mrs Evans’s death into forming an attachment outside the family. A little over a year later she was married and her housekeeping duties devolved on Mary Anne.

With Isaac, the situation was not so easy. This could have been a time of reconciliation, with brother and sister moving beyond their childhood estrangement to build a new, adult relationship. But a single surviving anecdote which Cross tells from their intervening boarding-school years suggests that the tensions between them were as alive as ever. ‘On coming home for their holidays the sister and brother began … the habit of acting charades together before the Griff household and the aunts, who were greatly impressed with the cleverness of the performance; and the girl was now recognised in the family circle as no ordinary child.’²⁰ No teenage boy enjoys being outshone by his younger sister, especially in front of those family members who had previously placed him first. Between the lines of an anecdote anxiously repeated by John Cross to emphasise the harmony between Isaac and Mary Anne, there lurked a rivalry which was to reemerge now that the two were once more under the same roof.

On the surface theirs was an argument about religion. Isaac was a High Anglican, at the very opposite end of the spectrum from Mary Anne. At its most intellectually sophisticated, the Anglo-Catholic movement was rigorous and ascetic, favouring a return to the liturgy and monastic practices of the pre-Reform church. But Isaac had imbibed, probably from the tutor in Birmingham where he had finished his education, a more comfortable version, which celebrated the pleasures of the material world. While Mary Anne’s transformation from village girl to young lady had been modelled on Evangelical ideals of genteel behaviour, Isaac’s parallel metamorphosis into a gentleman – and that, indeed, is how he described himself in 1844 when he acted as executor to Aunt Evarard’s will – had been along decidedly High Church lines. His was a faith which allowed a man to hunt, drink and dine, before absolving himself from sin through the sacrament. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast with Mary Anne’s conscience-scourging, Bible-reading puritanism.

Brother and sister were on a collision course and the crash came in August 1838. They spent a few days together in London, during which Mary Anne was picky about everything. The choir at St Paul’s was frivolous and silly. Going to the theatre was sinful and she preferred to spend the evening reading. The only time she cheered up was on a visit to Greenwich Hospital. Finally, brother and sister went to a bookshop where he bought a couple of hunting sketches, while she pounced triumphantly on a copy of Josephus’s History of the Jews.²¹

Here was a return to the power struggle of a decade earlier. Isaac’s rejection of his little sister in favour of a pony had been the catalyst for her plunge into books and religion. Now she was using the intellectual muscle developed as a result to try and regain control of him. No longer sufficiently undefended to ask openly for love, she insisted that he bend down and do her will instead. The fact that he did not, that he constantly eluded her with his sociability and worldliness, only made her angrier. Her response was to become even more censorious, sniping at what she admitted later were his perfectly ‘lawful amusements’²² and adopting a superior, critical tone whenever talking about him. ‘Isaac is determinately busy, and altogether improving,’ she wrote smugly to Maria Lewis on 13 March 1840, as if discussing an annoying child.²³

There had been a brief rapprochement fifteen months before the trip to London when, on 30 May 1837, Chrissey married Edward Clarke at Chilvers Coton. On that occasion brother and sister broke down and had ‘a good cry’ at the realisation that life at Griff was moving into a new and unknown phase.²⁴ It was now that Mary Ann – newly elevated to ‘Miss Evans’ and minus the final ‘e’ of her Christian name – became the official housekeeper. Quite possibly her father offered to hire someone to do the job, leaving her free to study full-time at home. That she did not accept this tempting proposal suggests that she had a great deal at stake in becoming the mistress of Griff. John Cross, always anxious to absolve his late wife of anything that might hint at oddness or masculinity, emphasised the pleasure she took in ‘the soothing, strengthening, sacred influences of the home life, the home loves, the home duties’.²⁵

A mix of motives is more likely. Running a working farmhouse was one of the few opportunities for a middle-class woman to exercise her energy and organisational skills, and Mary Ann certainly enjoyed being ‘an important personage at home’.²⁶ When the aunts came to dinner they could not fail to have noticed the gleaming tiles, polished furniture and well-stocked cupboards. The awkward, bookish little girl whom none of them had really cared for turned out to be a Pearson after all.

Keeping house for her father was also a way for Mary Ann to bind him closer to her. With her mother and elder sister out of the way, she was finally able to occupy the position of wife to Robert Evans. Over sixty and in indifferent health, Evans was devolving more and more responsibility for the estate business on to Isaac. In time-honoured tradition, he expected his youngest daughter to be the comforter of his declining years, filling his evenings with companionship, reading and music, before nursing him to his grave. It was a dull, heavy burden, but one which allowed Mary Ann to monopolise the member of her family who, she maintained on the eve of his death a decade later, was ‘the one deep strong love I have ever known’.²⁷

But it would be wrong to imagine something gloomy and gothic for Mary Ann Evans. Chilvers Coton was not Haworth; Robert Evans was not Patrick Brontë; and the girl herself was certainly not running mad over the moors. Griff was a working farmhouse, Robert Evans was still active and Isaac had a sociable, busy life. Mary Ann found herself playing hostess to a steady stream of visitors. The Pearson aunts and her married sisters all lived near enough to make frequent appearances at Griff. Then there were the Derbyshire Evanses, Samuel and his wife Elizabeth, who visited in early 1839. Mary Ann’s former schoolteachers, Miss Lewis and the Misses Franklin, came to stay several times. Old family friends put up at Griff, sometimes for days at a stretch.

Nor was she entirely confined to home. In November 1839 she stayed with her old school friend Jessie Barclay in London, making her first train journey to get there. The following year her father took her to visit his brothers’ families in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, making a detour on the way home to sightsee in Lincoln. Still, long-distance travel was neither easy nor cheap and the mail remained the chief way in which middle-class girls living at home continued their school friendships. Indeed, Hannah More, whose pious books Mary Ann much admired, referred to these post-school, pre-marriage years as the ‘epistolary period of life’. Many of Mary Ann’s letters from these years have not survived, but luckily forty-five remain, the majority written to Maria Lewis and Martha Jackson, an old classmate.

Evangelicalism, with its roots in the Puritan doctrines of the seventeenth century, had always placed the well-tended home at the heart of Christian life. Becoming mistress of Griff gave Mary Ann a larger sphere for her religious activities than she had hitherto known. Making jam and churning butter were not simply routine domestic tasks, but crucial ways of worshipping God. Determined to give up all worldly pleasures since ‘I find, as Dr. Johnson said respecting his wine, total abstinence much easier than moderation’,²⁸ she was in the powerful position of being able to make sure that everyone else at Griff did too – or else endure her smouldering disapproval. Every Michaelmas she sulked at having to organise a harvest festival supper. The pagan overtones of the feasting and drunkenness made the event ‘nauseating’ to her. Equally unpleasant was having to give up a day to the ‘disagreeable bustle’ of preparing for Isaac’s twenty-third birthday, on 19 May 1839, which was to be marked by a crow-shooting party.²⁹ The one saving grace was that since the birthday itself fell on the Sabbath, the celebrations were held over until the next day. By the time she came to write Adam Bede twenty years later, Eliot’s mature vision had transformed both the harvest supper and the coming-of-age party into occasions which celebrated the cohesion of village ties and the enduring nature of community life. At this point, though, they seemed witless and wanton.

That same crucial shift in perception is apparent in another incident which occurred around now. In early 1839 Mary Ann’s Methodist aunt and uncle were visiting from Derbyshire. Elizabeth Evans was a devout Methodist and a one-time preacher. Her vocation and a few details about her career notoriously formed the basis of Eliot’s portrayal of Dinah in Adam Bede. A genuinely good woman, Elizabeth Evans radiated the kind of generous fellow feeling which was anathema to her sour-minded niece. During the course of the visit Mrs Evans spoke joyfully about a minister she knew who had recently died. Undeterred by the fact that he was a drinker – a quality not likely to endear him to the abstinent Evangelical and dissenting conscience – she spoke enthusiastically about the man’s good qualities and concluded that he was now surely in heaven. ‘This was at the time an offence to my stern, ascetic hard views,’ explained the middle-aged Mary Ann, ‘how beautiful it is to me now!’³⁰

Despite disapproving of her aunt’s reluctance to condemn, Mary Ann seized upon Elizabeth Evans as the one person within the extended family network with whom she could share the daily experience of her faith. Sadly, most of this experience was a kind of torture. In a letter written just after the 1839 visit, Mary Ann pours out her despair at her failure to reach God. Even at this point, two and a half years before she gave up going to church, she was battling with the realisation that her gloomy and self-denying faith had little to do with the divine and a great deal to do with her own internal dramas.

Instead of putting my light under a bushel, I am in danger of ostentatiously displaying a false one. You have much too high an opinion my dear Aunt, of my spiritual condition and of my personal and circumstantial advantages … I feel that my besetting sin is the one of all others most destroying, as it is the fruitful parent of them all, Ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures. This seems the centre whence all my actions proceed.³¹

Certainly it was ambition rather than fellow feeling which powered Mary Ann’s drive to become one of the most important figures in the parish. During these years she started a clothing club, organised bazaars, ran a Sunday School and visited the local workhouse, Coton College. ‘We shall never have another Mary Ann Evans’ was the ambiguous lament of those on the receiving end of her charity when she left for Coventry in 1841.³² Spiritual and social yearnings dovetailed nicely when this pious busyness brought Mary Ann to the attention of Mrs Newdegate (who used the older spelling of the family name), the new mistress of Arbury Hall. Old Francis Parker-Newdigate had died in 1835 and the inheritance had passed to his cousin’s wife, Maria Newdegate, and her son Charles. While Francis Parker-Newdigate had been indifferent to the welfare of his tenants, his successor was irritatingly involved. Devoutly Evangelical, Mrs Newdegate insisted that all the farmers should attend church at least once on Sunday. This new regime at Arbury Hall exactly suited Mary Ann, who soon became a pet of her father’s new employer.

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.

Those conflicts concerned the what and how of daily faith. As she continued her careful comparison of the different denominations, Mary Ann’s sympathies began to shift and broaden. By March 1840, she could read a book by the Anglo-Catholic William Gresley and find herself ‘pleased with the spirit of piety that breathes throughout’. In the same letter she mentions with approval three of the most celebrated texts of the High Church Oxford Movement – Oxford Tracts, Lyra Apostolica and The Christian Year. The last of these became a particular favourite, and several of her letters now quoted the ‘sweet poetry’ of its author John Keble, the kind of thing which only eight months earlier she would have characterised as the work of Satan.³

Mary Ann was also reading widely in the natural sciences. The elaborate geological metaphor she had used despairingly to Maria Lewis to describe the random contents of her mind suggests that she was well acquainted with Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the work which paved the way for Darwin’s implicit questioning of Genesis. Now, when she came across a book like The Doctrine of The Deluge, which attempted to sustain the scriptural account of the beginning of the world, she found it ‘allusive and elliptical’ where once she would have treated it as Gospel.⁴

Maria Lewis could hardly fail to pick up the clues that Mary Ann was moving away from the Evangelicalism which had sustained their friendship during the past ten years. If she had not taken account of the drift in her former pupil’s reading matter, she surely noticed a new tone in her letters. Although not necessarily less pious, they were shorter, lighter and not so inclined to quote from the Bible. A few months earlier Martha Jackson had signified her secession from intellectual competition with Mary Ann by assigning them both flower names and retreating into the language of conventional letter writing. Now Mary Ann, armed with her own flower name dictionary, dubbed Maria Lewis ‘Veronica’, meaning ‘fidelity in friendship’, and showered her with sugary declarations of love. Instead of the sober and stilted greetings with which she had used to open her letters, she employed the kind of arch flourish associated with young ladies’ correspondence: ‘Your letter this morning, my Veronica, was sweet to me as the early incense of the Jasmine, and sent a thrill from my heart to my finger ends that impels them at the risk of indigestion, to employ the half hour after dinner, being the only one at liberty, to thank you for the affection that same letter breathes.’⁵

But the fulsomeness of the tone calls attention to the lack of real feeling it is trying to conceal. Interspersed with these overblown protestations of love were alarming, and surely intentional, hints that Maria was no longer the emotional centre of her life. By May 1841 Mary Ann had moved from Griff to the outskirts of Coventry, and was keen to let Maria know that she was busy making new and exciting contacts. In a letter of the 21st she mentions ‘my neighbour who is growing into the more precious character of a friend’.⁶ This teasingly unnamed acquaintance was, in fact, Elizabeth Pears, the woman who was to introduce Mary Ann to the circle of people who would replace Maria as her confidante. For Miss Lewis, now middle-aged and soon to be out of a job, it must have felt as if every anchor in her life was being pulled away.

As the power balance between the two women shifted, their roles polarised. Maria became the junior member of the partnership, asking Mary Ann for advice about where she should look for work next. Mary Ann, in return, slipped easily into the role of advice-giver, discouraging Maria from running a school of her own by citing a whole string of horrors including ‘rent, taxes, bad debts, servants untrustworthy, scarlet fever, panic of parents, imposing tradesmen’.⁷ Instead, she promised she would look out for a position in a private household for Maria, and even asked Signor Brezzi if he knew of a family that needed a governess. But when a possible situation did present itself in May 1841, Mary Ann took the opportunity to drop hints to Maria about the change in her own religious opinions.

Of course in Mr. W’s family perfect freedom of thought and action in religious matters would be understood as an unquestioned right, but as education, to be such, implies aggression on supposed error of every kind and incubation of truth it is probable you would not choose to put yourself in a position apparently requiring the anomalous conditions of neutrality and command. It is folly to talk of educating children without giving their opinions a bias. This is always given whether weak or strong, not always nor perhaps in a large proportion of cases, a permanent one, but one instrumental in determining their point of repose.⁸

The message is coded, though easily unpicked. In matters of religious faith, Mary Ann supports the principle of ‘perfect freedom of thought and action’ in preference to Maria’s assumed desire to stamp out ‘supposed error of every kind’. She finishes with an oblique warning that while Maria may have used her authority as a governess to shape Mary Ann’s early religious views, her former pupil is now beginning to think for herself.

Throughout the summer of 1841 Mary Ann’s letters to Maria continue in this contradictory fashion. Elaborate pledges of affection are followed by hurtful snubs. On 12 August she declared, ‘How should I love to join you at Margate now that you are alone!’ before bewailing the fact that ‘I have no one who enters into my pleasures or my griefs, no one with whom I can pour out my soul, no one with the same yearnings the same temptations the same delights as myself.’⁹ How wounding to the woman who had spent the last decade as Mary Ann’s chief confidante. How could the girl claim that she had no one who understood her? What were these ‘yearnings’ and ‘temptations’ which separated them? Once again, Mary Ann realised she had gone too far, adding disingenuously, ‘Pray regard all I have written as cancelled in my own mind.’¹⁰ But Maria could not. She wrote back anxiously demanding reassurances that nothing had changed. The response she got was inflatedly insincere, declaring, ‘Yes, I firmly believe our love is of a nature not to be changed by place or time.’¹¹ Maria, by now rattled, countered with ‘a very ambiguous reply’ and suggested that it might not be a good idea for her to visit at Christmas. Mary Ann did her best to sound reassuring in her next letter, but actually came across as evasive, skidding off into a description of the glorious autumn weather.¹² Then, on 16 October 1841, she gave the clearest indication yet that something was different, if not actually wrong. In an abrupt postscript on that day she writes, ‘May I call you Maria? I feel our friendship too serious a thing to endure even an artificial name. And restore to me Mary Ann.’¹³ Despite her reasoning that a return to their real names reinstated the dignity of the friendship, it sounded more as if Mary Ann wanted to withdraw from a correspondence which had become a bore.

But turning Veronica back into Maria did not have the desired effect. Far from easing up on her demands for reassurance, Maria redoubled her anxious enquiries to know exactly what was going on. Exasperated by her growing revulsion for the older woman, on 23 October Mary Ann let loose with a brutal letter, conspicuously lacking the respect due to a former teacher.

You are veritably an overreaching friend, my dear Maria, not content with my scribbling a couple of sheets to every quarter of the moon, you even insist on dictating the subjects of the same, and the one you now impose on me is at once so sterile, so incomprehensible and so unfascinating that I should be quite justified in refusing to descant thereon. If you complain that my letters become increasingly illegible, just take into consideration the necessary effect of having to write a few pages almost daily. This has been the case with me of late, and I am likely to be more and more busy, if I succeed in a project that is just now occupying my thoughts and feelings.¹⁴

Maria, unsurprisingly, did not reply and Mary Ann realised that this time she was in danger of losing her only intimate friend: despite her boastful teasing, her new contacts in Coventry had not yet yielded the kind of emotional intimacy she craved. In a continuation of that earlier pattern of assertion followed by withdrawal, she wrote a few days later with muffled apology – ‘tell me that you forgive my – something between brusquerie and confusion in my last letter’.¹⁵

Somewhat mollified, Maria responded by again raising the vexed subject of her Christmas visit. After a delay of a week and a half, Mary Ann wrote back with the strongest hint yet that something profound had happened to her which Maria might not like. She mentions that her ‘whole soul has been engrossed in the most interesting of all enquiries for the last few days, and to what result my thoughts may lead I know not—possibly to one that will startle you, but my only desire is to know the truth, my only fear to cling to error’. Then she continues urgently, ‘Think – is there any conceivable alteration in me that would prevent your coming to me at Christmas? I long to have a friend such as you are I think I may say alone to me, to unburthen every thought and difficulty – for I am still a solitary, though near a city.’¹⁶

Maria evidently wrote back reassuring Mary Ann that there could be no ‘conceivable alteration’ in her friend that would make her not want to spend Christmas with her. Word of Mary Ann’s religious crisis may have already reached Maria Lewis through their network of mutual acquaintances. Or perhaps she put Mary Ann’s restlessness down to the fact that the Evans family was going through one of its periodic crises.

Isaac was about to be married. Some time previously, probably when he was living with his tutor in Birmingham, he had met a woman called Sarah Rawlins. A large dowry from her leather-merchant father sweetened the fact that she was ten years older than the prospective groom. The two families had long been acquainted and Mr Rawlins had been a pallbearer at Christiana’s funeral. And with a son in the Church, the whole family was clearly working its passage away from Trade. Like his father before him, Isaac was shrewdly cautious when it came to choosing a bride. Sarah, as with Christiana in the generation before, appeared to have most of the qualities required in the wife of a young man determined to consolidate his position as a gentleman.

Isaac was a ditherer in emotional matters, especially when their ramifications reached so far. If he and Sarah married, the obvious move was for them to become the new master and mistress of Griff, especially now that Isaac was already running much of the business. But in that case, where would Robert and Mary Ann live? Doubtless Sarah would be quite happy to look after the old man, but whether she really wanted her young sister-in-law watching her every move was quite another matter. Mary Ann might not have relished every aspect of housekeeping, but she depended on it for her sense of identity and was not about to relinquish it easily. ‘I will only hint’, she writes to Maria Lewis in May 1840, ‘that there seems a probability of my being … severed from all the ties that have hitherto given my existence the semblance of a usefulness beyond that of making up the requisite quantum of animal matter in the universe.’¹⁷ Toppled from her throne, she was unlikely to become an easy and serene deputy to Sarah. Her role henceforth would be marginal and ambiguous, involving a great deal of routine needlework and, in time, childcare. More specifically, it would mean taking instructions from the woman who had usurped her in Isaac’s life.

Such a potentially unhappy arrangement might well have caused Isaac to think twice about marrying Sarah at all. In July 1840 Mary Ann reports that her brother has gone to Paris and that the marriage is uncertain ‘so I know not what will be our situation’.¹⁸ Two months later the couple are re-engaged, although this time Mary Ann is cautiously optimistic that Isaac and Sarah will set up home elsewhere, so that ‘I am not to be dislodged from my present pedestal or resign my sceptre.’¹⁹ A few weeks further on the situation has changed again, although this time a workable solution emerges. Isaac and Sarah are to take possession of Griff, while Robert and Mary Ann will move to a new home in Coventry.

Mary Ann’s letters to Maria are loyally reticent about the anxiety to which she was being subjected during these ten agonising months. However, she was clearly at breaking-point. In September, possibly to celebrate the fact that the engagement was back on, Mary Ann travelled to Birmingham with Isaac for the annual festival. Together with Sarah they attended a concert of oratorios by Handel and Haydn, during which Mary Ann did her usual party piece of breaking down in hysterical tears, attracting embarrassed glances from her neighbours.²⁰

Some of Mary Ann’s upset can be explained by her continuing battle to resist the pull towards musical performance. She had displayed the same panicky defensiveness two years earlier during the oratorio at Coventry and again at Mrs Bull’s dancing party. This time, though, there was an added pressure. Sarah’s presence at the concert was a reminder to Mary Ann that she was on the point of losing the three things which gave her life ballast: Griff and its landscape, her authority as housekeeper and tireless parish worker, and the constant attention, albeit antagonistic, of her brother Isaac.

None of this would have been so bad if Mary Ann had felt that it would not be long before she too would be getting married and moving to a new home of her own. Her gradual release from Evangelicalism meant that she no longer necessarily believed that marriage was a worldly snare and by 1840 there are signs that she was beginning to notice attractive men when they crossed her path. In March she fell for a nameless young man whom she felt obliged to give up because of his lack of serious religion, or indeed any religion at all. Her one comfort from this short, intense attachment was that she was probably the first person to have said any prayers on his behalf.²¹

A couple of months later she was describing Signor Brezzi, her language tutor, as ‘all external grace and mental power’, even though she told herself (via a letter to Maria Lewis), ‘“Cease ye from man” is engraven on my amulet.’²² This was the first of many infatuations with men who stood in the role of teacher. Until the age of thirty-four Mary Ann was to be involved in a series of unhappily one-sided love affairs, in which she confused a man’s delight in her intellect as a declaration of his sexual involvement. Luckily in this case there was no embarrassing moment of reckoning and the bachelor Brezzi seems to have been unaware of the feelings he had aroused in his eager pupil. Their lessons continued smoothly on her arrival in Coventry.

Although neither of these crushes had been very important, still Isaac’s engagement a few months later triggered Mary Ann’s sense of abandonment and her terror that she would be alone for ever. Even at this late stage she retreated into the language of Evangelicalism to explain to Martha Jackson – with whom she found it easier to talk about these things than the spinsterish Maria Lewis – about why she felt obliged to renounce her desperate need for love. ‘Every day’s experience seems to deepen the voice of foreboding that has long been telling me, “The bliss of reciprocated affection is not allotted to you under any form. Your heart must be widowed in this manner from the world, or you will never seek a better portion; a consciousness of possessing the fervent love of any human being would soon become your heaven, therefore it would be your curse.”’²³ But if Mary Ann had decided to give up on marriage, her family had not. The reasoning behind the move to Coventry was that it would give her the chance to move in the social circles which might yield a husband. At twenty-one she was of a suitable age to embark on courtship and, although not pretty, she was clever, prosperous and good. A man might do worse than marry Miss Evans.

Coventry made Nuneaton look dingy and parochial. With its population of 30,000 and its fast railway to London, it crackled with purpose. Instead of the poky cottages with their clanking handlooms, there were steam-powered factories to which the workers walked every morning. And although the local ribbon trade fluctuated wildly, dependent on the vagaries of fashion and cheap foreign imports, it was still sufficiently sound to support a wealthy middle-class élite of manufacturers. Linked through a cat’s cradle of business partnerships and marriage, these families managed to combine a handy knack of making a profit with a busy social conscience. Educated, progressive and earnest, they favoured a broad range of social and municipal reform designed to improve the living conditions of the people who worked for them. It was men like these, rather than the old alliance of gentleman and parson, who increasingly dominated the city council.

If Coventry seemed to offer the perfect environment for Mary Ann, then the house Robert Evans took on the outskirts of the city showed her off to best advantage. Bird Grove was an impressive Georgian semi-detached building, set back from the Foleshill road in its own woody grounds. It was large enough for both Mary Ann and Robert to have their own studies. Flanked by similar properties owned by the city’s worthies, Bird Grove was a testimony to its new tenant’s social standing. Although Robert Evans was not well known in Coventry, his choice of house announced that here was a man who, even in retirement, regarded himself as a pillar of the community. On hearing that Evans was about to move into the new house, his former employer Lord Aylesford ‘Laphd and said they would make me Mayor’.²⁴

Although it was a relief to Mary Ann finally to move to Coventry in the middle of March 1840, leaving Griff was a wrench: ‘it is like dying to one stage of existence,’ she told Martha Jackson.²⁵ The strong feelings she had developed for the countryside, its buildings and people, as she drove around the Arbury estate with her father, had not dissolved over the intervening years of bookishness. Griff farmhouse would always remain the shape and colour of her childhood, the scene of those fierce loves which Wordsworth told her were the root of the adult self. Translated to Foleshill she found herself experiencing ‘a considerable disturbance of the usual flow of thought and feeling on being severed from the objects so long accustomed to call it forth’.²⁶

Moving to Coventry in order to give Mary Ann a stab at courtship sounded like a good idea, but it soon became clear that neither she nor her father knew where to start. Evans’s contacts were all based in Griff, which was five miles away, or the even more distant Nuneaton. Chrissey and Fanny were both nearby, but neither was in a position to launch her younger sister into Coventry society. Ever energetic, despite his increasing frailty, Evans decided to make church attendance the starting point of their new life. The obvious place to go was Trinity, in the centre of Coventry, since its vicar had previously owned the lease on Bird Grove. Within a month of moving to Foleshill, Evans was acting as sidesman. Father and daughter frequently made trips to other churches in the area to hear a particular clergyman preach. Ironically, just as Mary Ann was beginning to have serious, though still secret, doubts about her faith, her father was becoming more intense and discriminating in his church attendance.

During these first few months in Coventry, there was no outward change in Mary Ann to suggest that she was anything other than a devout Evangelical Anglican. Her dour, censorious manner continued to repel those who made tentative approaches towards her. A family called Stephenson, friends of Maria Lewis, talked to her at church and said that they looked forward to seeing her soon. Yet neither Mrs Stephenson nor her two young daughters called at Bird Grove, not sure if their friendship was really wanted. With the hypersensitivity of the very shy, Mary Ann felt the snub keenly and hit back with lofty disdain, declaring in a letter to Maria that the two Stephenson girls ‘possess the minimum of attraction for me’.²⁷

All the same, there is a hint that she was beginning to wonder whether other people – just like the silly Misses Stephenson – did not sometimes have the right idea. On one occasion she found herself shocked by the bright clothes of one local congregation, before going on to ponder ‘how much easier life would be to her, and how much better she should stand in the estimation of her neighbours, if only she could take things as they did, be satisfied with outside pleasures, and conform to popular beliefs without any reflection or examination’.²⁸ As it dawned upon her that her search for spiritual truth might mean that her current social isolation would soon be replaced by total ostracism, Mary Ann longed for the easy life which came with a numb conscience.

Still, she was not completely solitary during these first months in the city. The Misses Franklin tried to be helpful, singing her praises to their extensive circle of cultured, nonconformist friends. One important introduction was to the Sibree family, who lived not far away. Mr Sibree was minister of the local Independent Chapel, John junior was preparing to follow him into the ministry and sixteen-year-old Mary was a clever, lively girl who would become the first of the many ardent younger female admirers who clung to Mary Ann throughout her life.

An even more crucial contact was Elizabeth Pears, the neighbour who Mary Ann had hinted to Maria was ‘growing into the more precious character of friend’.²⁹ Mr and Mrs Abijah Hill Pears, to give them their magnificent full name, lived in the house adjoining Bird Grove. Mr Pears, a ribbon manufacturer, was a leading Liberal in the city and about to be made mayor. He was in partnership with one of the Misses Franklin’s brothers and it was through them that Mary Ann came to meet his Evangelical wife. The Franklins, as we have seen, introduced their distinguished former pupil with the oddly textured compliment that not only was she a ‘marvel of mental power’ but also ‘sure to get something up … in the way of a clothing-club’. Sure enough, within a few weeks of moving into the area Mary Ann had set up just such a scheme for unemployed miners and had organised the older and more established Mrs Pears into helping her.³⁰

Although on the surface Mary Ann continued to behave with her usual pious busyness, her private reading during these first months in Coventry was taking her deeper into unorthodoxy. The frequent starting points for her speculations were books which had been written to bolster literal interpretations of the Bible, but which raised more questions than they could answer. Books like Isaac Taylor’s Physical Theory of Another Life (1836) and John Pye Smith’s Relation between the Holy Scriptures and Some Parts of Geological Science (1839) attempted to respond to the onslaught made on orthodox Christianity by the new discoveries in physical science about the material origins of the earth. Both, however, failed to deal with these counter-proposals and ended up weakening their case. Other authors whom Mary Ann now encountered had already made the journey from orthodoxy and were able to present their material in a more open manner. John Pringle Nichol, who wrote The Phenomena and Order of the Solar System and View of the Architecture of the Heavens (1839), both of which gave Mary Ann great pleasure, had felt obliged to give up Holy Orders because of the change in his religious beliefs.

But by far and away the most influential single book Mary Ann came across during these months was Charles Hennell’s An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity. It had first been published in 1838, and a second edition – the one which Mary Ann bought – appeared in August 1841. Exactly when she read An Inquiry is unclear, but it is certainly the case that she was aware of the book’s existence and general argument by the autumn of 1841, not least because all the major participants in its remarkable genesis were related to her friend and neighbour Elizabeth Pears.

Charles Hennell was a London merchant who, along with his tribe of adoring sisters, had been brought up as a Unitarian. Unitarianism was the most tolerant, rational and forward-thinking of the many Protestant sects which flourished during the first part of the nineteenth century. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, the writer Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale were all brought up within its generous and humane parameters. Unitarians rejected any kind of mysticism, including the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Jesus was a great teacher, philosopher and living example, but not the Son of God. Although Unitarianism had developed outside the Anglican Church and within the dissenting tradition, it excluded much of the apparatus associated with nonconformity. There was no original sin, no doctrine of atonement and certainly no elect of chosen souls destined for heaven.

The Unitarians more than made up for their tiny numbers by their bustling, active presence in public life. With their intellectual roots in the Enlightenment philosophers Locke and Hartley, they placed a great deal of emphasis on the influence of education and environment in determining adult personality. Less concerned with the hereafter than the here and now, they worked hard to make certain that the best conditions prevailed for both individuals and societies to reach their full potential. This meant welcoming scientific progress, intellectual debate and the practical reforms that would naturally follow. In London, Coventry, Liverpool, Norwich and Manchester Unitarians were associated with a whole range of progressive causes from non-denominational education to the abolition of slavery. It was this social radicalism, combined with their rejection of Christ’s divinity, which made them highly suspect to the Anglican Establishment and even other dissenters, to whom they seemed little more than atheists and revolutionaries.

In 1836 Charles Hennell’s youngest sister Caroline, always known as Cara, had married a prosperous twenty-five-year-old Coventry ribbon manufacturer, Charles Bray. Since his adolescence Bray had moved in and out of faith. During his apprenticeship in London he had taken the same path as Mary Ann into dour, self-denying Evangelicalism. Since then he had enjoyed sufficient income and leisure to follow up a whole range of alternative ways of looking at the nature of man and his relationship to God.

Bray was particularly influenced by a strand in the Unitarian philosophy known by the awkward name of Necessitarianism. This had its roots in the work of the eighteenth-century philosopher Joseph Priestley, who maintained that the moral and physical universe was governed by unchanging laws authored by God. It was the duty of man to discover these rules and then follow them, in effect working with God to promote an ever-improving world. Bray’s reading of Necessitarianism resulted in a personal creed that was cheerful and vague, but productive of social change. He believed in a God who did not need to be formally worshipped since ‘God will always do what is right without asking and not the more for asking.’³¹ Instead of wasting time in prayer, Bray threw himself into a whole range of progressive causes designed to improve the quality of life for the people he employed in his flourishing ribbon business. His quirky, optimistic philosophy was summarised in his two-volume The Philosophy of Necessity, which was published in October 1841, just before he met Mary Ann Evans.

Given his puppyish lack of tact, it is surprising that Charles Bray managed to conceal his views from Cara until their honeymoon in Wales. It was then that he started his intellectual onslaught, believing that he ‘had only to lay my new views on religious matters before my wife for her to accept them at once. But … I only succeeded in making my wife exceedingly uncomfortable.’³² Uncomfortable she may have been, but as a woman of principle and integrity, Cara was not about to brush her new husband’s objections to Christianity under the table. One of the central tenets of Unitarianism was the individual’s duty to question every new piece of information, knowledge or experience, even if it implied an error in the status quo. Although deeply attached to her faith, Cara felt obliged to consider her husband’s proposition that there was no firm evidence for the divine authorities of the Scriptures.

Cara asked her brother, Charles Hennell, to undertake a rigorous assessment of Bray’s claims on her behalf. Hennell had only just completed his own very thorough investigation of these matters, concluding that the spare creed of Unitarianism did indeed rest on incontrovertible biblical evidence. But being a man of moral energy, he agreed to his sister’s request to re-evaluate his work. The result was An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity, which scrupulously separated the known historical facts of Jesus’s life from the later accretions of myth, fantasy and desire. Hennell took each Gospel in turn, explored the personal slant of the author and teased out those points at which objectivity gave way to invention. There is, Hennell argues, insufficient evidence to support the view that Christ was divinely born, worked miracles, was resurrected from the dead or ascended into heaven. Everything that happened to Him was explicable within ‘the known laws of nature’. Out of this exhaustive study Jesus emerges as ‘a noble-minded reformer and sage, martyred by crafty priests and brutal soldiers’. In a conclusion that echoes his brother-in-law Charles Bray, Hennell argues that there is no point in concentrating on a future life because it is impossible to know whether it exists. Man’s focus should be on the present, both in terms of the pleasures he can derive from ‘this beautiful planet’ and also of the improvements he can make in the lives of himself and others.³³

Once Cara Bray had absorbed her brother’s findings, she stopped going to church and suggested her husband do likewise. Her strict regard for conscience and horror of hypocrisy meant that she could not bear the idea of attending a service in whose teachings she did not believe. That did not imply, however, that she now considered herself an atheist. On the contrary, she pursued God as earnestly as ever – Mary Ann was to maintain that Cara was ‘the most religious person I know’³⁴ – through private reading, careful thought and selective attendance at a variety of sermons, meetings and even services. She believed, as Mary Ann was to come to believe, that it was the duty of each individual to follow the truth wherever it might lead, without fear of social disgrace or superstitious terror.

Ironically, Elizabeth Pears first took Mary Ann with her on a visit to the Brays because she hoped, according to her brother Charles Bray, ‘that the influence of this superior young lady of Evangelical principles might be beneficial to our heretical minds’.³⁵ In fact, after nine lonely months in Coventry, Mary Ann doubted that she was about to have much of an effect on anyone. ‘I am going I hope to-day to effect a breach in the thick wall of indifference behind which the denizens of Coventry seem inclined to entrench themselves,’ she wrote to Maria Lewis on 2 November, ‘but I fear I shall fail.’³⁶ She did not, although Charles Bray’s recollection of their first meeting, written up in the autobiography he produced at the end of his life, may well have been embellished by hindsight. ‘I can well recollect her appearance and modest demeanour as she sat down on a low ottoman by the window, and I had a sort of surprised feeling when she first spoke, at the measured, highly cultivated mode of expression, so different from the usual tones of young persons from the country. We became friends at once.’³⁷

Either at this meeting, or a subsequent one, Mary Ann and the Brays started to talk about religion. The young woman who had been introduced to them as a strict Evangelical turned out to be almost as advanced a free-thinker as they were themselves. The point was a crucial one to Cara Bray who resented the implication, which hung around for years, that she and her husband were responsible for converting Mary Ann from deep piety to unbelief. For this reason, too, Charles Bray stressed in his autobiography that Mary Ann had already bought Hennell’s Inquiry by the time he and his wife met her in November 1841. However, the flyleaf of her copy is inscribed with the date 1 January 1842. Two explanations are possible. The first is that Mary Ann did not actually read the book until several months after meeting the Brays, which seems unlikely. The second, and more feasible, is that she had already tackled the book once before meeting the Brays and reread it subsequently during December, enthused by her acquaintance with the author’s sister and brother-in-law. Writing ‘1st of Jany’ on the flyleaf was her way of marking the moment when she formally renounced orthodox Christianity. For it was on the very next day, 2 January 1842, that she refused to go to church.

Christmas Day 1841 passed off unremarkably at Bird Grove. Fanny and Henry Houghton, Chrissey and Edward Clarke, Isaac and Sarah Evans, all came to dine at Foleshill. Two days later Robert Evans left on a business trip to Kirk Hallam, while Maria Lewis went to Nuneaton to look over a school she was hoping to run. Both of them had returned by Sunday, 2 January, the day on which Mary Ann refused to go to Trinity church.³⁸ She may have waited to make her stand until Maria was there because she wanted a buffer between herself and her father. Or perhaps she needed the woman who had shaped her earliest beliefs to witness their rejection. Either way, this was no momentary faltering of faith. A fortnight later, with Maria Lewis now gone, she was still refusing to accompany her father to church.

Robert Evans’s response was to withdraw into a cold and sullen rage. It was not the state of Mary Ann’s soul that troubled him so much as the social disgrace that came from having a daughter who refused to go to church. He had gone to considerable trouble and expense to ensure that she was given the best possible chance of marriage and here she was, undermining his efforts. He would, in truth, probably have been delighted if she had eased up on the fanatical religiosity which was in danger of repelling all but the most pious suitor. But to swing violently the other way and reject church worship altogether was to put herself outside respectable society. By refusing to accompany him to Trinity Mary Ann was condemning herself to spinsterhood.

In this ‘holy war’, as Mary Ann was to dub the difficult weeks that followed, God, housing and marriage were all tangled up together. The roots of the crisis went back to those ten uncertain months during which it was unclear whether Isaac would marry and take over Griff. Although Mary Ann’s letters to Maria during that time cast Isaac obliquely in the role of prevaricator, it is unlikely that a young man of twenty-five was powerful enough to hold the whole family to ransom. It was the old man himself, Robert Evans, who could not decide whether this was the time to hand over the business and, if so, where he and Mary Ann would now live. Staying at Griff, moving in with Chrissey at Meriden, going to a cottage on Lord Aylesford’s Packington estate, or opting for a smart town house in Coventry were all possibilities over which Evans pondered. And it was during this stop-start, yes-no period that Mary Ann was brought up sharp against the realisation that as an unmarried woman she had no power to shape her own life. It was her job to endure while Evans dithered, delayed and distracted himself from giving her a clear indication about the future.

When Mary Ann refused to go to Trinity with Robert Evans, she was rejecting not just her Heavenly Father but her earthly one too. The God who had tied her in self-denying, guilt-ridden knots for so many years had become identified with the patriarchal Evans, who remained indifferent to her emotional security and peace of mind. Rejecting an orthodox God was not simply about being up to date with theological and scientific debate. Nor was it concerned solely with asserting the primacy of individual conscience. It was, for Mary Ann, a refusal to be tied into a nexus of obligations that required her to attend church in order to get herself married and so relieve her father of the cost of her support.

As a result, the holy war was fought on two distinct levels. Evangelical and dissenting friends like the Sibrees, the Franklins and Mrs Pears fielded their most persuasive and sophisticated acquaintances in an attempt to argue Mary Ann out of her doubts. Within the Evans family itself, however, the struggle concerned more practical issues like daughterly duty, bricks and mortar, money and marriage. Robert Evans’s first response was to treat Mary Ann with ‘blank silence and cold reserve’ – a literal sending to Coventry – followed by ‘cooled glances, and exhortations to the suppression of self-conceit’.³⁹ When this didn’t work, Evans called upon his other children to persuade their younger sister to change her mind. Fanny Houghton, a well-read woman who also had doubts about orthodox Christianity, urged Mary Ann to keep her thoughts to herself and continue with outward observance.⁴⁰ Chrissey had no particular argument to make, but was requested to keep Mary Ann out of Robert’s way by having her to stay at Meriden. It was during these few days that Isaac rode over from Griff to ‘school’ Mary Ann about where her duty lay. According to Isaac the expensive house at Foleshill had been taken in order to find Mary Ann a husband. Wilfully to put herself outside the marriage market by refusing to go to church was an act of great financial selfishness. Cara Bray, reporting the whole saga to her sister Sara Hennell, explained:

It seems that brother Isaac with real fraternal kindness thinks that his sister has no chance of getting the one thing needful – ie a husband and a settlement, unless she mixes more in society, and complains that since she has known us she has hardly been anywhere else; that Mr Bray, being only a leader of mobs, can only introduce her to Chartists and Radicals, and that such only will ever fall in love with her if she does not belong to the Church.⁴¹

As if to confirm the truth of this pounds-shillings-and-pence argument, Robert Evans arranged to give up the lease of Bird Grove and set about preparing to move to a small cottage on Lord Aylesford’s estate. True to form, he would not make it clear whether or not he expected Mary Ann to come with him. This frustrating silence continued even once she had returned from Meriden to Foleshill at the end of February.

In a desperate attempt to provoke her father into communication, Mary Ann wrote him a letter, the only one to him which survives. It is an extraordinary document for a girl of twenty-two to write – intellectually cogent, emotionally powerful. She starts by making clear the grounds for her rebellion. She assures him that she has not, contrary to his fears, become a Unitarian. Nor is she rejecting God, simply claiming the right to seek Him without the clutter of man-made dogma and doctrine. As far as the Bible is concerned, ‘I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life … to be most dishonourable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness.’ For this reason, continues Mary Ann, it would be impossible for her ‘to join in worship which I wholly disapprove’ simply for the sake of social appearance. She then proceeds to discuss the vexed issue of ‘my supposed interests’ and the financial aspects of the case. She understands that now she has put herself beyond the reach of respectable society, it is unfair to expect her father to maintain the expensive Coventry house. The last thing she wants is to syphon off capital which will eventually be divided among all five Evans children. Then she turns to the question of where she is to go next.

I should be just as happy living with you at your cottage at Packington or any where else if I can thereby minister in the least to your comfort – of course unless that were the case I must prefer to rely on my own energies and resources feeble as they are – I fear nothing but voluntarily leaving you. I can cheerfully do it if you desire it and shall go with deep gratitude for all the tenderness and rich kindness you have never been tired of shewing me. So far from complaining I shall joyfully submit if as a proper punishment for the pain I have most unintentionally given you, you determine to appropriate any provision you may have intended to make for my future support to your other children whom you may consider more deserving.

She ends the letter with a resounding fanfare of self-justification. If Robert had any doubts about the fundamental shift in Mary Ann’s beliefs, he had only to notice the absence of the usual Evangelical references – to God, to heaven, to the Scriptures – and the substitution of language borrowing from (though not necessarily endorsing) Charles Bray’s Necessitarianism and Cara Bray’s Unitarianism. ‘As a last vindication of herself from one who has no one to speak for her I may be permitted to say that if ever I loved you I do so now, if ever I sought to obey the laws of my Creator and to follow duty wherever it may lead me I have that determination now and the consciousness of this will support me though every being on earth were to frown upon me.’⁴²

Robert Evans was unmoved. A few days later he told Lord Aylesford that he would soon be going back to the cottage at Packington and a week after that he put the lease of Bird Grove with an agent. In response, Mary Ann decided to go into lodgings in Leamington and look for a job as a governess. Mrs Pears promised to go with her to help her settle in. With Mary Ann’s obvious erudition it might seem as though any family would be delighted to employ her. But her unorthodox religious views were not obvious recommendations for a post in a provincial middle-class home. And even if she did manage to find one, the unhappy example of Maria Lewis meant that she was under no illusions about the hardship of a governess’s life, with its ‘doleful lodgings, scanty meals’. Still, anything was better than the current ‘wretched suspense’.⁴³

In the end Mary Ann never got to Leamington. By the middle of March Isaac had given up ‘schooling’ and started mediating and the situation looked as though it might be resolved. Cara Bray reported the whole sequence of events in a letter written to her sister Mary. She tells how she had met Mary Ann in the street and had noticed ‘a face very different from the long dismal one she has lately worn’.⁴⁴ The reason for the change of mood was that Isaac had sent a conciliatory reply to the letter she had written to her father explaining her motives. In this, Isaac accepted that Mary Ann had no wish to upset the family and acknowledged that she had been treated ‘very harshly’ simply for wanting to act according to her principles. He stressed that ‘the sending her away’ was entirely Robert’s idea and had nothing to do with money, but arose simply because ‘he could not bear the place after what had happened’. Isaac then finished the letter by ‘begging’ Mary Ann not to go into lodgings, but to come to stay at Griff instead, ‘not doubting but that Mr Evans would send for her back again very soon’. In the meanwhile, explains Cara, Mr Evans has taken Bird Grove off the market and will stay there until Michaelmas, ‘and before that time we quite expect that his daughter will be reinstated and all right again’.⁴⁵

But Cara was jumping ahead, perhaps because, despite what she publicly protested, she felt responsible for Mary Ann’s religious rebellion and wanted to reassure herself that no great harm had been done. Certainly Griff provided a welcome and welcoming interlude for Mary Ann, who was delighted not only with Isaac’s new friendliness towards her, but also with the way in which old acquaintances greeted her cheerfully, despite knowing all about her unfortunate position. However, according to a letter she wrote from there on 31 March, nothing had really changed: Robert Evans was pushing ahead with improvements on the Packington cottage, where he presumably intended to live alone. Agonised by the lack of clarity about her own future, Mary Ann swung between defiant assertion and indirect pleading, declaring vehemently to Mrs Pears that she did ‘not intend to remain here longer than three weeks, or at the very farthest, a month, and if I am not then recalled, I shall write for definite directions. I must have a home, not a visiting place. I wish you would learn something from my Father, and send me word how he seems disposed.’⁴⁶

With the three weeks up, there was a small amount of progress to report. After an unexpected intervention from Isaac’s wife Sarah, Mr Evans had agreed that Mary Ann should return to live with him. The young Mrs Evans had explained to the old man that making Mary Ann’s material comfort dependent on a change of heart was the best way of ensuring she would never compromise. Doubtless Sarah had no intention of sharing or giving up Griff now that she was happily settled, and was keen to argue for reconciliation and a continuation of the status quo. But although Mr Evans had softened sufficiently to agree to take his daughter back, he still could not decide where they were to make their home. In Coventry she had become ‘the town gazing-stock’ and Evans was not certain whether he could bear the embarrassment of continuing to live there. His latest idea was to move to what Mary Ann described gloomily as ‘a most lugubrious looking’ house in the parish of Fillongley, where Lord Aylesford was one of the chief landowners. This constant change of plan was sending Mary Ann to the brink: ‘I must have a settled home if my mind is to become healthy and composed, and I shall therefore write to my Father in a week and request his decision. It is important, I know, for him as well as myself that I should return to him without delay, and unless I draw a circle round him and require an answer within it, he will go on hesitating and hoping for weeks and weeks.’⁴⁷ Presumably Mary Ann drew that circle and got a satisfactory reply. By 30 April she was back at Foleshill with her father. A bargain had been struck: she would accompany him to church while he would let her think whatever she liked during the services.

While the Evanses were sulking, conferring and writing letters to one another about money, Mary Ann’s Evangelical and dissenting friends stood by, ready to do what they could. Elizabeth Pears, Rebecca Franklin and the Sibree family displayed tact and sensitivity in their dealings with both Mary Ann and her father. Although disappointed that their clever young friend had turned her back on the faith which personally sustained them, they did not rush to condemn her. As people who set great store by the authority of individual conscience in deciding outward behaviour, they would never have urged her towards hypocrisy. At the same time, they were aware that much of the crisis was due to the inability of either Mary Ann, Robert or Isaac Evans to inhabit a world of uncertainty, tolerance and compromise. Their duty, as they saw it, was to hold the family together long enough for a workable solution to emerge.

In the middle of March Robert Evans called on the Franklin sisters and, bewildered and exasperated, complained that Cara Bray had badgered his daughter into becoming a Unitarian. Miss Rebecca quickly responded that ‘she did not think Mrs. B. had shown any disposition to proselytize’. Along with Elizabeth Pears she impressed upon the old man that disowning Mary Ann was wrong and that ‘the world would condemn him’.⁴⁸

In the meantime the energetic Miss Franklin tried everything she could to reconvert her star pupil. She asked a clever, well-read Baptist minister friend to talk to the girl. He returned from their encounter insisting, ‘That young lady must have had the devil at her elbow to suggest her doubts, for there was not a book that I recommended to her in support of Christian evidences that she had not read.’⁴⁹

Next the Sibrees tried. In the small space of time she had known them Mary Ann had become attached to these pious, educated people who represented a family culture so different from her own. Mrs Sibree, an Evangelical Anglican, believed that ‘argument and expostulation might do much’ to bring Mary Ann back into the fold. For this reason she was careful to maintain a friendly welcome to the young neighbour. Mary Ann, for her part, was pathetically keen not to be rejected. ‘Now, Mrs Sibree, you won’t care to have anything more to do with me,’ she teased anxiously. ‘On the contrary,’ replied the older woman, ‘I shall feel more interested in you than ever.’⁵⁰

First Mr Sibree himself tried to convince Mary Ann of the literal truth of the Gospels in a series of encounters so intense that Mary Ann was left shaking.⁵¹ Next Mrs Sibree asked the Revd Francis Watts, a professor of theology from Birmingham, to try. Watts was a highly educated man with a formidable grounding in the German biblical criticism that had done so much to cast doubt on the divine authority of the Scriptures. But he too confessed himself beaten, murmuring only, ‘She has gone into the question.’⁵²

Despite the fact that the most subtle and clever men in the Midlands could not persuade Mary Ann to change her mind, on 15 May 1842 Robert Evans was able to record the end of the holy war: ‘Went to Trinity Church. Mary Ann went with me to day.’⁵³ On the surface it seemed as if Mary Ann had done the very thing she had declared she would not – compromised her convictions for the sake of social respectability. But it was, as she began to see for the first time in her life, more complicated than that. Agreeing to attend church while keeping her own counsel involved giving up the glamour and notoriety of the past few months. At the height of the holy war she had written a letter to Maria Lewis in which she spoke of her realisation that the martyr is motivated by the same egotistical impulse as the court sycophant.⁵⁴ It was gradually dawning on her that her high-minded rebellion had been fuelled by her old enemy, Ambition.

A month or so later there was another suggestion, this time in a letter written to Mrs Pears from Griff, that Mary Ann no longer believed herself fully justified in the actions she had taken: ‘on a retrospection of the past month, I regret nothing so much as my own impetuosity both of feeling and judging’.⁵⁵ It was a conclusion which was to stay with her for the rest of her life, for decades later she told John Cross that ‘although she did not think she had been to blame, few things had occasioned her more regret than this temporary collision with her father, which might, she thought, have been avoided by a little management’.⁵⁶

It was not that she believed her commitment to seek God outside a formal structure was mistaken, simply that she began to realise that she had other obligations no less important. Her needs as an individual had to be balanced against her duties as a daughter. Ultimately, what sustained humanity was not adhering blindly to a theory, political belief or religious practice, but the ties of feeling which bound one imperfect person to another. She would not give up her new beliefs for the sake of respectability, but she would forgo the glamour of shouting them from the roof-tops. She would endure people thinking that she had fudged her integrity if it meant that she could stay with the beloved father whom she had so deeply hurt. Far from giving up the authority of private conscience, she was stripping it of all its worldly rewards, including the glamour of being thought a martyr.

Eighteen months later, in October 1843, Mary Ann wrote out her fullest statement on the matter in the form of a letter to Sara Hennell, Cara’s elder sister, who had since become her best friend. By now she had had time to absorb and reflect upon the turbulence and pain of the holy war. Her personal feelings of regret had been broadened into the kind of generalised observation on human nature which would come to typify the wise, tolerant narrative voice of her novels. ‘The first impulse of a young and ingenuous mind is to withhold the slightest sanction from all that contains even a mixture of supposed error. When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.’ This soul, continues Mary Ann, believes that its new state of spiritual awareness more than compensates for the old world of error and confusion left behind. What’s more, it is determined to spread the good news by proselytising to all and sundry. A year or two on, however, and the situation appears quite different. ‘Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union. We find that the intellectual errors which we once fancied were a mere incrustation have grown into the living body and that we cannot in the majority of causes, wrench them away without destroying vitality.’ Finally she broadens her argument, linking her own experience within the Evans family to a model of the world at large.

The results of non-conformity in a family are just an epitome of what happens on a larger scale in the world. An influential member chooses to omit an observance which in the minds of all the rest is associated with what is highest and most venerable. He cannot make his reasons intelligible, and so his conduct is regarded as a relaxation of the hold that moral ties had on him previously. The rest are infected with the disease they imagine in him; all the screws by which order was maintained are loosened, and in more than one case a person’s happiness may be ruined by the confusion of ideas which took the form of principles.⁵⁷

The conclusions Mary Ann drew from the holy war prepared the way for her response to the difficult situation, fifteen years later, of being the unmarried ‘wife’ of George Henry Lewes. Living outside the law, she was socially ostracised in the same way Robert Evans feared would result from her non-attendance at church. However, much to the chagrin of her feminist friends, she refused to be known by her single name and insisted on being called ‘Mrs Lewes’. She steered clear of giving support to a whole cluster of causes, including female suffrage, which might be supposed to be dear to the heart of a woman who had shocked convention by living with a man outside wedlock. This fundamental separation of private conscience from public behaviour was the founding point of Eliot’s social conservatism. The fact that she loved a married man might authorise her own decision to live with him, but it could never justify a wider reorganisation of public morality. Family and community remained the best place for nurturing the individual moral self. Social change must come gradually and only after a thousand individuals had slightly widened their perceptions of how to live, bending the shape of public life to suit its new will. Revolution, liberation and upheaval were to have no place in Mary Ann’s moral world.

Nor did they have any in her fiction. George Eliot’s heroes and heroines may struggle against their small-minded communities, but in the course of their lives they learn that true heroism entails giving up the glory of conflict. Reconciliation with what previously seemed petty is the way that leads to moral growth. Romola, fleeing from her unfaithful husband Tito, is turned around in the road by Savonarola and sent back to achieve some kind of reconciliation. Maggie, too, returns to St Ogg’s after she has fled with Stephen and submits to the censure of the prurient townspeople. Dorothea’s fantasies of greatness end up in the low-key usefulness of becoming an MP’s wife.

The holy war cast a long spell not only over the fictions Mary Ann was to write, but over the intimate details of her daily life. None of her relationships would ever be quite the same again. On the surface, her friendship with Maria Lewis continued much as before. The first few letters of 1842 are lighter because more truthful. However, soon the correspondence starts to fail, spluttering on fitfully until Robert Evans’s death in 1849, but with a notable lack of candour on Mary Ann’s part. In a letter of 27 May she politely declares herself ‘anxious’ about whether Maria plans to visit, but prepares herself for the fact that Maria may be too ‘busy’ to reply immediately.⁵⁸ What Mary Ann had perhaps not fully recognised was that Maria was lonely and reluctant to give up her friendship with a family which had so often provided her with a home during the holidays. In fact, Maria continued to visit Foleshill over the next few years, but there was an increasing sense that she was visiting the whole family (she had, after all, taught Chrissey too) and not just Mary Ann. And there are signs that Mary Ann found these visits an increasing chore. In a letter of 3 January 1847 Cara wrote to her sister Sara, ‘[Mary Ann] is going to have a stupid Miss Lewis visitor for a fortnight, which will keep her at home.’⁵⁹ The nastiness of the tone is a surprise – Cara was a sweet-natured woman not inclined to hand out easy snubs. More than likely she was repeating what she had heard Mary Ann say of the squinting, pious, middle-aged schoolmistress who refused to realise that she was no longer wanted.

The exact end of the relationship is not clear. Reminiscing after Eliot’s death, her friend Sara Hennell recalled that the estrangement had been ‘gradual, incompatibility of opinions, etc, that Miss Lewis had been finding fault, governess fashion, with what was imprudent or unusual in Marian’s manners and that Marian always resented this’. Certainly Maria had made a sharp comment about the unsuitability of Mary Ann hanging on to Charles Bray’s arm ‘like lovers’.⁶⁰ Still, it was Mary Ann who made the decisive break when she demanded that Maria return all the letters she had written her. Understandably hurt, Maria said that ‘she would lend them her, but must have them returned’.⁶¹ But once she had them in her possession Mary Ann reneged, citing the authority of a friend (probably Charles Bray) who told her that letters belonged to the writer to do with as she pleased. It is not entirely clear why Mary Ann wanted them. It may be that she felt the correspondence with Maria represented a part of her that had not so much been left behind as absorbed into a larger and more tolerant present. Gathering the letters may have been a way of recouping and qualifying the energy of the Evangelical years. Or perhaps Mary Ann still felt guilty about her less than straight dealing with Maria during the year running up to the holy war and wanted to regain control of the evidence of her hypocrisy. Or possibly she had simply outgrown this first important relationship with a person outside her family and wanted to mark its end. Significantly, she did not keep the letters but handed them over to Sara Hennell, the woman who had replaced Maria as her most intimate friend.

Mary Ann had no further contact with Maria Lewis until 1874, when she learned through Cara where she was living (in Leamington) and sent her a warm letter together with ten pounds – a practice she continued regularly until her death. Maria responded to the renewed contact with affection and admiration: ‘As “George Eliot” I have traced you as far as possible and with an interest which few could feel; not many knew you as intimately as I once did, though we have been necessarily separated for so long. My heart has ever yearned after you, and pleasant it is truly in the evening of life to find the old love still existing.’⁶²

Maria was quite right about knowing Eliot better than anyone. After the author’s death she found herself eagerly courted by biographers keen for recollections of those early years. Although she was happy to talk to Edith Simcox when she came calling in 1885, she was understandably more cautious about giving away more tangible pieces of the past. Although on the best of terms with John Cross and delighted with his Life, still she refused to let him publish the letter which Eliot had sent with that first ten pounds. Having been robbed of the correspondence that had meant so much to her, she was determined to keep this tiny scrap of her star pupil to herself.

Mary Ann’s other friendship from those schoolgirl Evangelical years – with Martha Jackson – also did not survive the change in her religious beliefs. Martha’s mother, noting a change in the tone of Mary Ann’s letters and also hearing rumours of what had happened, ‘expressed a wish that the correspondence should close’, fearing that her daughter might be led into infidelity. In fact, there was little chance of that. Martha remained defiantly orthodox until the end of her life, refusing to let John Cross use extracts from her correspondence with Mary Ann on the strange grounds that, since he was probably not a Christian, he could not be trusted with the material.⁶³

From the beginning of 1840 Mary Ann’s relationship with her Methodist aunt and uncle had also been cooling. As her Evangelicalism waned her letters to Derbyshire became sporadic and more inclined to talk about family matters – moving houses, marriages, births. A visit to Wirksworth in June 1840 had dragged, partly, she said later, because ‘I was simply less devoted to religious ideas’.⁶⁴ A final extant letter to Samuel Evans, written by Mary Ann three months before her refusal to attend church, uses echoes of the old language of orthodox faith to hint at her new independence from it. ‘I am often, very often stumbling, but I have been encouraged to believe that the mode of action most acceptable to God, is not to sit still desponding, but to rise and pursue my way.’⁶⁵

Her growing certainty of her own beliefs and her corresponding tolerance of other people’s meant that in the years that followed Mary Ann rediscovered her affection for her aunt and uncle. Mary Sibree recalled for John Cross how Mary Ann told her ‘of a visit from one of her uncles in Derbyshire, a Wesleyan, and how much she had enjoyed talking with him, finding she could enter into his feelings so much better than she had done in past times, when her views seemed more in accordance with his own’.⁶⁶ Certainly by the time she came to write Adam Bede her antagonism towards orthodox ways of worship, particularly Methodism, had softened into an intuitive understanding of its value and meaning for people whose culture was now so very different from her own.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth and Samuel Evans never managed to extend that same understanding to their niece. Stories of her infamy became worked into the family inheritance. Their granddaughter remembered as a child being told by her mother that Mary Ann Evans was ‘an example of all that was wicked’. The Staffordshire branch of the family felt the same way. Well into the twentieth century, Mary Ann was still whispered about as a cousin ‘whose delinquency was an aggravated kind’.⁶⁷

In the immediate aftermath of the holy war, Mary Ann had not yet developed the tolerance which would allow her to appreciate the value of views which were not her own. Nor did she have the social poise that would permit her to express that empathy gracefully. Thus it was awkward to discover on her return from Griff to Foleshill on 30 April 1841 that Elizabeth and Samuel Evans, together with William Evans, were making a visit. The next day was a Sunday and, keen to avoid conflict, Mary Ann took refuge at Rosehill, the Brays’ home. There, much to her delight, Cara let her look at the letters which her brother Charles Hennell had written to her while writing An Inquiry. At Rosehill, Mary Ann had found the spiritual and intellectual home that was to sustain her for the next eight years.

CHAPTER 4
‘I Fall Not In Love With Everyone’
The Rosehill Years 1841–9

FROM NOW ON Mary Ann spent every free moment with the Brays. Although Rosehill was less than a mile from Bird Grove, the contrast could hardly have been greater. While the Evans household was conservative, conventional and nominally devout, the Brays’ was radical, avant-garde and truth-seeking. Here was the perfect atmosphere for Mary Ann to explore her new beliefs and the emotional release that came with them.

At the time Mary Ann first went to Rosehill Charles Bray was at the height of his reforming zeal. Prosperous, young and boundlessly energetic, he pursued a bundle of good and forward-thinking causes in the city and beyond. A passionate advocate of non-sectarian education, he built a school for children from dissenting families who had been excluded from Anglican institutions. He campaigned for sanitary reform and set up a public dispensary. He ran an anti-Corn Law campaign. Other projects were more visionary than feasible. He built a teetotal Working Men’s Club to lure labourers away from pubs, set up an allotment scheme so that they could produce their own food and established a co-operative store to undercut local shop prices. Unfortunately, the working classes of Coventry did not share Bray’s ideas about how they should live. Both the club and the gardening scheme failed through lack of support, while the store was forced to close by local shopkeepers determined to retain their monopoly.

Bray’s generosity and intellectual open-mindedness – many called it sloppiness – meant that he attracted friends easily. Rosehill had quickly become established as the place where any visiting reformer, philosopher or thinker could be assured of a warm welcome. Indeed, said Bray in the puffed-up autobiography he wrote at the end of his life, anyone who ‘was supposed to be a “little cracked”, was sent up to Rosehill’.¹ During these years Mary Ann met virtually everyone who was anyone in free-thinking, progressive society. The socialist Robert Owen, the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mental health reformer Dr John Conolly were just a few of the people who took their turn sitting on the bear rug which the Brays spread out in the garden every summer. Here, under a favourite acacia tree, they spent long afternoons in vigorous debate, intellectual gossip and various degrees of flirtation.

For just as the Brays challenged conventional thinking in every area of life, so their attitudes to marriage and sexual love were markedly unorthodox. Nor was this openness confined to daring chat. As people who thought deep and hard about how to live, they had come to the conclusion that the monogamy demanded by the marriage vows did not suit human nature, or at least did not suit theirs. Although enduringly attached to one another, both had taken long-term lovers.

Just how this arrangement had come about, and how openly it was acknowledged by others, is obscured by the reticence which the couple were obliged to observe in order to remain active in Coventry public life. Indeed, the main account of their irregular marriage was written down in code and not untangled until the 1970s. The stenographer was the phrenologist George Combe, who examined Bray’s head for lumps and bumps in 1851 and concluded that his ‘animal’ qualities were impressively predominant. Probing further, Combe extracted the following confession from his friend: ‘At twelve years of age he was seduced by his father’s Cook and indulged extensively in illicit intercourse with women. He abstained from 18 to 22 but suffered in health. He married and his wife has no children. He consoled himself with another woman by whom he had a daughter. He adopted his child with his wife’s consent and she now lives with him. He still keeps the mother of the child and has another by her.’²

This makes sense of some odd references in Mary Ann’s letters to Cara Bray during May 1845. Writing from Coventry to her friend on holiday in Hastings, Mary Ann says reassuringly, ‘Of Baby you shall hear to-morrow, but do not be alarmed.’³ A couple of days later she writes, ‘The Baby is quite well and not at all triste on account of the absence of Papa and Mamma.’⁴ Whoever this baby was, it did not last long at Rosehill. A month later an entry in Cara’s diary suggests that the baby was removed from the household. Clearly this first attempt at adoption had not worked out. Baby’s real mother may have wanted her back or perhaps Cara, while dedicated to young children through her teaching and writing, did not take to this particular infant. An attempt the following year with another baby, sister of the first, was successful and this time the Brays adopted Elinor, known as Nelly. Over the years Mary Ann became attached to the girl and when news of her early death came in 1865 it touched her deeply.

The fact that the first baby had been returned to its mother suggests that the Brays’ family life did not run as rationally or smoothly as Charles liked to believe. Although the details are sketchy, it appears that for a time he tried to get the children’s mother, Hannah Steane, to live at Rosehill as nursemaid. One version has Cara accepting this, but changing her mind when Hannah produced an illegitimate son, named Charles after his father. Henceforth Hannah, now reincarnated as Mrs Charles Gray, wife of a conveniently absent travelling salesman, was established in a nearby house – into which Bray could slip discreetly – with her growing family, five excluding Nelly.⁵

Cara’s answering love affair was more circumspect. According to a gossipy report from her sister-in-law in 1851, ‘Mrs Bray is and has been for years decidedly in love with Mr Noel, and … Mr Bray promotes her wish that Mr Noel should visit Rosehill as much as possible.’ Edward Noel was an illegitimate cousin of Byron’s wife, a poet, translator and owner of an estate on a Greek island. He was also married with a family. Whether he and Cara became physically intimate is not clear: one version maintains this was an unreciprocated passion. All the same, once Noel’s wife died from consumption in 1845, the way was clear for him to become a familiar fixture on the edge of Rosehill life.⁶

The Brays’ was the first of three sexually unconventional households which had a great impact on the young Mary Ann, whose romantic experience at this point was confined to a crush on her language teacher. Later she would find herself in a curious ménage à quatre with John Chapman, the publisher with whom she boarded in London during the early 1850s. And her subsequent dilemma over whether to live with George Henry Lewes was the result of his inability to divorce on the grounds that he had condoned his wife’s affair with another man.

It would be good to think that these open marriages were founded on a principled rejection of the ownership of one person by another, and in particular of women by men, of the kind which John Stuart Mill would set out in The Subjection of Women in 1869. But in fact there was more than a whiff of male sexual opportunism and hypocrisy about the various set-ups. Charles Bray, after all, maintained in public that ‘Matrimony is the law of our being, and it is in that state that Amativeness comes into its proper use and action, and is the least likely to be indulged in excess’,⁷ yet he did not confine himself to adultery with Hannah. There were rumours that ‘the Don Juan of Coventry’ had previously enjoyed an affair with Mary Hennell, one of Cara’s elder sisters. And there was even a suggestion that he and Mary Ann became lovers at some point. Certainly Maria Lewis objected to the way the two clung together and Sara Hennell admitted after Mary Ann’s death that she had always disapproved of the girl depending too much on male affection – perhaps specifically on the affection of her brother-in-law.⁸ Bessie Rayner Parkes, who was later to become one of Mary Ann’s best friends in London, certainly always believed that Mary Ann and Charles Bray had been lovers.⁹

Cara Bray, too, was inconsistent on the question of marital fidelity. Although she allowed her husband to have affairs and was herself at least emotionally intimate with Edward Noel, she reacted with Mrs Grundy-ish horror when Mary Ann went to live with George Henry Lewes in 1854. For five years she refused to communicate properly with her friend, let alone to see her. That a woman as progressive and principled as Cara should display such embarrassed confusion over sex outside marriage is a reminder of how deeply entrenched were codes of respectable behaviour – especially female behaviour – in even the most liberal Victorian circles.

Although the Brays’ attitude could seem contradictory, in other lights it was subtle and realistic. Just as Mary Ann had learned during the holy war that spectacular rebellion is often the result of wilful egotism, so the Brays realised that there was little to be gained by publicly embracing the open relationships advocated by their friend the socialist Utopian Robert Owen. They preferred to remain within society and work for its improvement, rather than withdraw to an isolated and principled position on its margins. Whether the world thought them scandalous or hypocritical did not concern them. It was this example of adherence to a complex inner necessity, regardless of how one’s behaviour might be interpreted, which Mary Ann now absorbed. It would stand her in good stead in the years to come when she lived with Lewes and, on his death, went through an Anglican marriage service with John Cross. Her apparent inconsistency bewildered family and friends. Isaac Evans was scandalised by the union with Lewes, but appeased by the marriage to Cross. Her old friend Maria Congreve, on the other hand, was serene about Lewes, but disappointed by what she perceived to be the hypocrisy of the 1880 wedding service. In these apparent switches of principle Mary Ann demonstrated her determination to live flexibly according to the fluctuations of her own inner life rather than in observance of other people’s needs and rules.

Whether Mary Ann actually had a physical relationship with Charles Bray remains frustratingly unclear. The fact that all her letters to him prior to 1848 have disappeared suggests that they were at least emotionally intimate and that someone wanted the evidence destroyed. But even if they were lovers, it was more than a sexual affair that was responsible for the blossoming of Mary Ann’s personality during these Rosehill years. The loving acceptance of Cara Bray and the intellectual companionship of Sara Hennell gave her a sense of being wanted – the first she had experienced since those early days with Isaac. Her young neighbour, Mary Sibree, recalled that ‘Mr and Mrs Bray and Miss Hennell, with their friends, were her world, and on my saying to her once, as we closed the garden door [at Rosehill] together, that we seemed to be entering a Paradise, she said, “I do indeed feel that I shut the world out when I shut that door.”’ ¹⁰

This new happiness permeated every part of Mary Ann’s being. Now she played the piano and sang in front of other people without bursting into tears. Instead of refusing to read novels, she argued for them on the grounds that ‘they perform an office for the mind which nothing else can’.¹¹ She relaxed sufficiently about her appearance to allow Cara to paint her portrait – a sweet, flattering water-colour which fooled no one and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.¹² She accompanied the Brays on holidays to other parts of the country and became a favourite with the friends and family they visited on the way.

With Mary Ann soaking up every new subject which the Brays pushed her way, it was inevitable that she should become interested in phrenology. The practice of bump-reading might seem like so much mumbo-jumbo now, but during the mid-nineteenth century it held considerable appeal for those who were trying to make connections between man’s physical constitution and his psychological processes. During a trip to London in July 1844 Charles Bray persuaded Mary Ann to have a cast made of her head – luckily it was no longer necessary to have one’s hair shaved off – and set about analysing its shape. Writing at the end of his life, and after hers, Bray naturally relied on post hoc knowledge to give his findings extra bite. In the following extract from his autobiography he creeps from phrenological ‘fact’ to interpretations of Mary Ann’s subsequent behaviour.

In the Feelings, the Animal and Moral regions are about equal; the moral being quite sufficient to keep the animal in order and in due subservience, but would not be spontaneously active. The social feelings were very active, particularly the adhesiveness. She was of a most affectionate disposition, always requiring some one to lean upon, preferring what has hitherto been considered the stronger sex to the other and more impressible. She was not fitted to stand alone.¹³

As Mary Ann’s willingness to contemplate phrenology suggests, her intellectual relationship with others softened during this period. During the high drama of the holy war, the competitive Evangelical had given way to the combative free-thinker. Now, during the 1840s, Mary Ann began the long journey towards empathy and tolerance which was to mark the mature narrative voice of George Eliot. A passage from Bray’s autobiography describes her at the very beginning of this bumpy process.

I consider her the most delightful companion I have ever known; she knew everything. She had little self-assertion; her aim was always to show her friends off to the best advantage – not herself. She would polish up their witticisms, and give them the full credit of them. But there were two sides; hers was the temperament of genius which has always its sunny and shady side. She was frequently very depressed – and often very provoking, as much so as she could be agreeable – and we had violent quarrels; but the next day, or whenever we met, they were quite forgotten, and no allusions made to them.¹⁴

Increasingly Mary Ann was able to move beyond these violent reactions and come to rest in a position of disciplined tolerance towards others. This was particularly true in matters of faith. In the immediate aftermath of the holy war Mrs Sibree had been doubtful about letting Mary Sibree take German lessons from Mary Ann in case the older girl should unsettle her daughter’s religious beliefs. Mr Sibree, however, did not ‘see any danger’ and the lessons began on Saturday afternoons. During these Mary Ann was always careful to steer clear of theological discussion, to the disappointment of Mary who tried to provoke the infamous Miss Evans into saying something controversial. Every time Mary tried to steer the conversation round to a dangerous topic, Mary Ann countered with a gentle reminder of ‘the positive immorality of frittering … [time] away in ill-natured or in poor profitless talk’. On one occasion the sixteen-year-old girl announced provocatively ‘how sure I was that there could be no true morality without evangelical belief. “Oh, it is so, is it?” she [Mary Ann] said, with the kindest smile, and nothing further passed.’¹⁵

Mary Ann’s deflective comments concealed the kernel of her argument with organised religion. In a letter of 3 August 1842 she told the Revd Francis Watts, one of the men who had tried to argue her out of infidelity, that feeling obliged to serve humanity out of a sense of duty and fear of punishment worked against ‘that choice of the good for its own sake, that answers my ideal’.¹⁶ Now that she was no longer burdened with having to save her soul through conspicuous good works, Mary Ann was able to concentrate on what really needed to be done. Finding that she was unsuited to some kinds of philanthropy – an attempt to help Cara at the infants’ school had not been a success – she thought carefully about how she could be most useful. Often this turned out to be as inglorious as making a direct financial contribution. When one of the Sibrees’ servants became burdened with the responsibility for newly orphaned nephews and nieces, she offered to pay for the care and education of ‘a chubby-faced little girl four or five years of age’.¹⁷ Again, she contributed two guineas to the Industrial Home for young women for which Mrs Sibree was collecting funds. ‘I tell of this’, says Mary Sibree, writing after Mary Ann’s death, ‘as one among many indications of Miss Evans’s ever-growing zeal to serve humanity in a broader way, motivated as she felt by a higher aim than what she termed “desire to save one’s soul by making up coarse flannel for the poor”.’¹⁸

Other people sensed this expansion in Mary Ann’s inner life and responded accordingly. No longer a chilly saint to be revered and avoided, she was approached by friends and servants who now came to her with their problems, ‘to an extent’, remembered Mary Sibree, ‘that quite oppressed her’.¹⁹ It was a phenomenon which was to last the rest of her life. Seven years later, when she was staying alone in a Geneva pension, she found herself a magnet for every lonely or anxious guest who needed someone to talk to. Twenty years on she was regularly besieged in letter and in person by men and women from around the world who were convinced that she, and she alone, could understand their story.

Thanks to growing family pressure, Mary Sibree had little contact with Mary Ann over the next few decades. But in 1873, as Mrs John Cash, wife of a prosperous manufacturer and the new mistress of Rosehill, she visited the woman who was now known as Marian Lewes in London. ‘It touched me deeply to find how much she had retained of her kind interest in all that concerned me and mine, and I remarked on this to Mr Lewes, who came to the door with my daughter and myself at parting. “Wonderful sympathy,” I said. “Is it not?” said he; and when I added, inquiringly, “The power lies there?” “Unquestionably it does,” was his answer.’²⁰

Mary Ann spent her first day home after the holy war at Rosehill reading letters which Charles Hennell had written to his sister Cara while working on An Inquiry. It was not just intellectual curiosity that made the experience so delightful. The fact that Hennell had responded to his sister’s religious doubts by devoting two years of his hard-pressed time to produce this magnificent piece of work resonated deep within Mary Ann. Her own brother Isaac had met his sister’s crisis of conscience with coldness, calculation and a complete lack of understanding. Charles Hennell, by contrast, seemed to have all the qualities desirable in an ideal brother – lover.

So it was painful to learn that he was already in love with someone else. Elizabeth Rebecca Brabant was the talented daughter of an intellectually minded doctor whose patients had included Thomas Moore and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, she got her nickname – ‘Rufa’ – from some verses the latter had written about her striking red hair. Dr Robert Brabant had taught himself German in order to study the work of eminent theologians such as David Friedrich Strauss, who had done so much to reveal the man-made origins of the Bible. In 1839 Dr Brabant was an inevitable early reader of Charles Hennell’s An Inquiry, which reached many of the same conclusions as Strauss. Delighted by the book, Brabant invited its author to his home in Devizes. Hennell, in turn, was enchanted by Rufa Brabant, to whom he quickly proposed. The good doctor, however, opposed the match when he examined the young man and found him to be consumptive. It is hard, now, to conceive the terror that tuberculosis generated a hundred and fifty years ago: the nearest analogy might be to finding that one has a slow-growing malignant tumour. The young couple agreed not to see each other but, by way of continuing their relationship, Rufa undertook to translate Strauss’s most important book, Das Leben Jesu (1835–6), for her suitor. Remarkably, Hennell, who did not know German, had written An Inquiry without detailed knowledge of its contents.

When Rufa arrived in Coventry to visit the Brays in October 1842 it was inevitable that Mary Ann would not like her. All the more so when Charles Hennell turned up the next day, presumably against Dr Brabant’s wishes. Rufa not only had the kind of hair which inspired poets, she read German theology in the original and enjoyed the love of a kind, clever man. However, during the next three weeks Mary Ann was able to draw on the emotional discipline which was eventually to become an integrated part of her personality. Writing to Sara Hennell on 3 November, she admits that her first impression of Rufa ‘was unfavourable and unjust, for in spite of what some caustic people may say, I fall not in love with everyone’. On further acquaintance, she is happy to report: ‘I admire your friend exceedingly; there is a tender seriousness about her that is very much to my taste, and thorough amiability and retiredness, all which qualities make her almost worthy of Mr Hennell.’²¹

There followed a tricky nine months during which events conspired to push Mary Ann and the officially unengaged Charles Hennell together. In March 1843 he turned up at Rosehill for a fortnight. In May he accompanied her and the Brays on a visit to Malvern. In July things came to a painful head when the same party, this time supplemented by Rufa, took a longer trip to Wales. During a ten-day stay in Tenby, Rufa badgered Mary Ann into attending a ball at the pavilion. Excruciatingly, no one asked her to dance. Doubtless Rufa was trying to be kind, but the news that she had resumed her engagement to Charles Hennell, this time with her father’s approval, only pointed up the differences between the two young women. Both were clever and serious. But one was pretty and well connected and the other was not. And it was Rufa, with her magnificent hair and a pedigree rooted in the intellectual middle classes, who had bagged Charles Hennell.

There was a consolation prize of sorts. Mary Ann was to be a bridesmaid at the wedding, which took place on 1 November in London. The service was conducted by the country’s leading Unitarian minister, William Johnson Fox, at the Finsbury Chapel. Escorted by Charles Bray, Mary Ann spent a week in London, staying with Sara Hennell, who lived with her mother in Hackney. When she had previously visited the city in 1838 with Isaac, it had been during the height of her Evangelical phase. The gloomy teenager who had glowered at the suggestion of a trip to the theatre had been replaced by a young woman eager to pack as many cultural experiences as possible into the time available. But despite the fun and bustle, Mary Ann was still feeling left out and left behind by the Brabant – Hennell marriage. This was her third time as a bridesmaid and it was hard to imagine that it would ever be her turn to enjoy the loving attention which other women seemed to claim by right. So in these dispiriting circumstances it was delightful to receive an invitation from Rufa’s father, asking her to accompany him home to Devizes for a holiday. She had first met the sixty-two-year-old Dr Brabant when he had joined the Brays’ party in Wales and, persuaded by the fact that Rufa had come into some money, had given permission for the young couple to marry. If she could not have Charles Hennell as a brother – lover, then perhaps she might claim Robert Brabant as a more congenial substitute for the still disapproving and distant Robert Evans.

Luckily, Dr Brabant was ripe for the role in which he had been cast. He begged Mary Ann to consider Devizes her home for as long as she was deprived of a permanent arrangement in Warwickshire. Even now, eighteen months after the holy war, Isaac and Robert Evans were still making noises about moving Mary Ann back to the country. To have a charming, educated older man telling her that she must consider his library as her particular domain must have been intoxicating. She responded eagerly to his attentions, rapturously boasting in a letter to Cara that her host had christened her ‘Deutera, which means second and sounds a little like daughter’.²² Her next letter, on 20 November, continues in the same breathless vein. ‘I am in a little heaven here, Dr. Brabant being its archangel … time would fail me to tell of all his charming qualities. We read, walk and talk together, and I am never weary of his company.’²³ She wrote to her father asking him if she could extend her stay to 13 December.

Not everyone in the Devizes household shared Mary Ann’s view of paradise, especially Dr Brabant’s wife and her sister. The latter, Miss Susan Hughes, had alerted Mrs Brabant, who was blind, to the fact that Miss Evans was permanently entwined with the doctor. Mrs Brabant immediately wrote to Rufa to ask her to tear herself away from her new husband and come down to Devizes to see if she could calm her over-ardent friend. Rufa in turn told her sister-in-law Cara what was going on and begged her to caution Mary Ann by letter about her behaviour. Miss Hughes, meanwhile, took the most direct path by advising Mary Ann on the train times home, three weeks before her proposed departure.

Mary Ann was too enraptured to take the hint. She insisted on extending her stay and when Cara wrote warning her to beware of Dr Brabant, she snapped back, ‘He really is a finer character than you think.’²⁴ The time had come for Mrs Brabant, whom Mary Ann had previously described as ‘perfectly polite’, to put her foot down. She demanded that Mary Ann depart immediately, a fortnight early, and swore that if she were ever to return then she, Mrs Brabant, would leave at once. It would be nice to report that the ‘archangel’ intervened and stood up for his ‘Deutera’. In fact, according to John Chapman paraphrasing Rufa in 1851, Dr Brabant ‘acted ungenerously and worse, towards Miss E. for though he was the chief cause of all that passed, he acted towards her as though … the fault lay with her alone’.²⁵

The roots of the Devizes crisis went deeper than the emotional topsoil turned over by the wedding. Mary Ann was probably not the first, and certainly would not be the last, young woman towards whom Brabant was over-familiar. In 1885 her cattiest literary rival, Eliza Lynn, told Herbert Spencer that she too had received advances from Dr Brabant during a visit to Devizes in 1847. Never missing an opportunity to snipe, Lynn expressed amazement that Miss Evans could bear to encourage Dr Brabant, who she declared was ‘more antipathetic than any man I have ever known … his love-making purely disgusting’.²⁶

Nor was this the first time that Mary Ann had let an intellectual rapport with an older man overstep the mark. The Revd Francis Watts, a friend of the Sibrees, had been one of the subtle thinkers enlisted to persuade Mary Ann back into the fold during the holy war. Although unsuccessful, he admitted to Mrs Sibree that Miss Evans had ‘awakened deep interest in his own mind, as much by the earnestness which characterised her inquiries as by her exceptional attainments’.²⁷ Mary Ann was equally taken with the Revd Watts. In a pattern which was to be repeated several times over the next decade, she used her intellect to keep a clever, unavailable man interested in her. While still in exile at Griff she had written to Watts suggesting that he oversee her translation of Vinet’s Mémoire en faveur de la Liberté des Cultes. With its proposition that man’s capacity for goodness is not dependent on his belief in an afterlife, Vinet’s book lay at the heart of her new beliefs. Enclosing a sample of her translation, she courted Watts in language which set abject humility alongside flirtatious presumption: ‘I venture to send you an échantillon that you may judge whether I should be in danger of wofully travestying Vinet’s style, and if you approve of my project I shall be delighted if you will become foster-father to the work, and arrange for its publication.’²⁸

A second letter, nearly three months later, makes it clear that it is Watts’s interest in her, rather than hers in Vinet, which makes the project meaningful to her. ‘I shall proceed con amore now that you encourage me to hope for the publication of the memoir. I confess my spirits were flagging at the idea of translating four hundred pages to no purpose.’ And then in a curiously oblique manner she continues: ‘A friend has given some admonitions that led me to fear I have misrepresented myself by my manner … It gives me much pain to think that you should have received such an impression, and I entreat you to believe that the remembrance of you, your words and looks calls up, I will not say humble, but self-depreciating reflections and lively gratitude.’²⁹

Watts must have been sufficiently reassured by Mary Ann’s acknowledgement of her over-familiarity to continue his involvement in the project throughout the autumn of 1842. However, a letter received in December sounded warning bells again. Writing to acknowledge the receipt of some books he had lent her, Mary Ann gushed, ‘I beg you to understand that I consider myself your translator and the publication as yours, and that my compensation will be any good that may be effected by the work, and the pleasure of being linked to your remembrance.’³⁰

Now Watts had no choice but to acknowledge that Mary Ann’s interest in Vinet arose out of her deep feelings for him. Panicked by the implications, he withdrew from the project and the correspondence, claiming busyness and possibly family illness as an excuse. The next thing we hear is that Mary Ann is returning his books and has given up on Vinet with the strange explanation that she has started translating ‘a part of Spinoza’s works for a friend’.³¹ In fact, the friend was Cara and, far from begging Mary Ann to start work on it, Cara had wanted to do it herself, telling her sister Sara: ‘I grieved to let Mary Ann carry it off, for I am sure I could understand his [Spinoza’s] Latin better than her English; but it would disappoint her.’³²

In truth, Mary Ann had embarked on Spinoza as a face-saving device, a way of rejecting Watts as surely as he had rejected her. It was a tactic she was to use in the even more embarrassing case of Dr Brabant, at whose suggestion the Spinoza translation was being done. Her last letter written from Devizes on 30 November 1843, a couple of days before her departure, gives the impression to Cara, who knew otherwise, that she is leaving on her own terms. She talks of her ‘grief at parting with my precious friends’, but makes no specific reference to the man who had previously been the epicentre of her correspondence.³³

From the moment she returned to Coventry Mary Ann adopted an attitude of studied condescension about Dr Brabant, referring to him in public as if he were a ridiculous pest. Yet she could never quite bear to bring the relationship to a decisive close. Following the Devizes débâcle the archangel and his Deutera did not communicate for three years. However, when in 1846 Mary Ann finished the translation of Strauss, which she had taken over from Rufa, she could not resist sending Brabant a bound copy. Perhaps she wanted to show him that his second daughter could manage a piece of work which exceeded anything his first might have managed. The appearance of Miss Evans’s parcel ruffled a few feathers in Devizes, and Sara Hennell was immediately asked to find out exactly what was going on. Mary Ann responded to her enquiry with defensive loftiness: ‘Pray convince her [Rufa] and every one concerned … that I am too inflatedly conceited to think it worth my while to run after Dr. Brabant or his correspondence.’ It is true, she admits, that she has initiated contact with him, but ‘as a favour conferred by me rather than received’. And in case this should seem too obviously at odds with known history, she qualifies this with, ‘If I ever offered incense to him it was because there was no other deity at hand and because I wanted some kind of worship pour passer le temps.’³⁴

Over the next few years Mary Ann kept up this slighting tone towards the doctor. In February 1847 when she wanted to return his copy of Spinoza to him – the one she had started translating instead of Vinet – she imagined hurling it towards Devizes so that it would leave ‘its mark somewhere above Dr. B’s ear’.³⁵

Brabant, by contrast, was unencumbered by embarrassed feelings and continued to display jaunty self-possession in his dealings with Mary Ann. In August of that year Sara reported that Mary Ann had received ‘a most affectionate invitation from Dr. B. a few days ago to go to Germany with him!’³⁶ Although there would have been others in the party, Mary Ann refused. Starting up a correspondence with the archangel was one thing, reliving the embarrassment of the Devizes episode quite another.

Still, the good doctor refused to disappear completely. Whenever he was in town he stayed at 142 The Strand, the Chapmans’ boarding-house where Mary Ann lodged during the early 1850s. On one such occasion when their paths crossed Mary Ann informed Cara that the ‘house is only just exorcised of Dr. Brabant’, as if he were a nasty smell.³⁷ Yet the very next day she wrote appreciatively of the doctor’s visit to Charles Bray, mentioning that he had taken her ‘very politely’ on an excursion to Crystal Palace, as well as the theatre.³⁸

Brabant’s most celebrated reappearance in Mary Ann’s life was in the shape of Edward Casaubon, the pedantic, ineffectual scholar of Middlemarch. For all Brabant’s bustling endeavour, he never actually managed to sustain any piece of intellectual work. According to Eliza Lynn, Brabant ‘used up his literary energies in thought and desire to do rather than in actual doing, and [his] fastidiousness made his work something like Penelope’s web. Ever writing and rewriting, correcting and destroying, he never got farther than the introductory chapter of a book which he intended to be epoch-making, and the final destroyer of superstition and theological dogma.’³⁹

Mary Ann saw for herself just how ineffectual Brabant really was when, at the beginning of 1844, she took over Rufa’s translation of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu. The new Mrs Hennell had found the work too onerous to combine with married life and suggested to her sister-in-law Sara that Mary Ann might like to step in. This was a delicate situation. Having watched Rufa carry off Charles Hennell, was Mary Ann being offered her cast-off translation as some kind of compensation? If this suspicion did go through her mind, Cara and Sara surely pressed her to set it to one side. They were both aware of how desperately she needed a substantial piece of work to stretch and exhaust a mind prone to pull itself to pieces. Mary Ann’s previous attempts at sustained intellectual work – the ecclesiastical chart, the translation of Vinet – had faltered through her own failure to get started. At the end of her life she told John Cross of her ‘absolute despair’ at this point of achieving anything.⁴⁰ The big attraction of the Strauss was that the translation was already commissioned – by the Radical MP Joseph Parkes – so there would be an external authority driving her to complete the project.

On taking up Strauss, Mary Ann asked Dr Brabant, via Sara Hennell, for some work he was rumoured to have done already on the concluding section. When the translation finally arrived it turned out, true to form, to be scrappy and incomplete. In any case, Mary Ann soon realised that trying to follow someone else’s translation was ‘like hearing another piano going just a note before you in the same tune you are playing’.⁴¹ Putting aside the doctor’s jottings, she started again from scratch.

Translating Strauss was to dominate her life for the next two years. Unable to concentrate for more than four hours a day, she evolved the method she was to follow when writing fiction of working from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. This meant that she managed to cover about six pages of Strauss a day. Sara, who had turned down the translation before it had been offered to Rufa, agreed to act as Mary Ann’s editor. Letters went back and forth between London and Coventry discussing various points of translation as they arose. When a section of the work was completed, Mary Ann mailed it to Sara to read through and check against the original. This reliance on the post caused constant worries about late and non-arriving packages. ‘I sent a parcel of MS to you on Friday. Have you received it? I thought I should have heard that it had arrived safely when you sent the proof,’ was a typically anxious communication between Mary Ann and Sara during a particularly difficult stretch.⁴²

The translation was a remarkably difficult piece of work, which would have taxed the most scholarly, university-educated brain. There were fifteen hundred pages of what Mary Ann described despairingly as ‘leathery’ German, with many quotations in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. At times it was only Sara’s brisk enthusiasm that kept her going: ‘Thank you for the encouragement you sent me – I only need it when my head is weak and I am unable to do much.’⁴³ Even more tricky than finding literal meaning was the teasing out of nuance. Was it ‘Sacrament’ or ‘The Sacrament’? Was ‘Dogmatism’ quite what Strauss meant by ‘das Dogma’?⁴⁴ And then there were pedantic, Rebecca Franklin-ish bickerings about English. Was ‘as though’ as good as ‘as if’? Was it ‘finally’ or ‘lastly’?⁴⁵

Although the title of the work was The Life of Jesus, it is the subtitle – Critically Examined – which provides the key to Strauss’s methodology. He takes each episode in the life of Jesus, as told in the four Gospels, and shows how it ‘may be considered not as the expression of a fact, but as the product of an idea of his earliest followers’.⁴⁶ Steeped in the Jewish tradition of the returning Messiah, Jesus’s disciples shaped their understanding of their master’s life to fit inherited expectations. Strauss’s aim was to unpick that process and show how the ‘historical’ Jesus had been created out of a series of Evangelical ‘mythi’.

There was nothing in Strauss that was new or strange to Mary Ann. She had long since come to the conclusion that Jesus was a gifted human teacher and not the Son of God. However, she did worry about the theologian’s relentlessly totalitarianising approach, which insisted on subsuming inconvenient exceptions into the arc of his narrative. ‘I am never pained when I think Strauss right,’ she wrote in the autumn of 1845, ‘but in many cases I think him wrong, as every man must be in working out into detail an idea which has general truth, but is only one element in a perfect theory, not a perfect theory in itself.’⁴⁷ The crucifixion was a case in point. Strauss had to concede that the Jews’ expectations of the Messiah did not include one who was to suffer and die, let alone rise again. So where did this part of the Gospel narrative come from? Strauss was obliged to conclude weakly that ‘Jesus Himself may have reached the conclusion of the necessity of his death … or the whole idea might have been added after his death.’⁴⁸

It was this stripping away of all that was ‘miraculous and highly improbable’ from the Gospels which oppressed Mary Ann the deeper she went into Das Leben Jesu. All her life she had read the Bible not simply as the revelation of God, but as the metaphorical language of her own experience. The quotations in her letters to Maria Lewis were not just for pious show, but a way of describing complex inner states. To be robbed of that language – for that is what she experienced Strauss as doing – was to be deprived of a vital part of herself. Her disillusionment with Das Leben Jesu became particularly acute at the beginning of 1846, when she tackled the detailed analysis of the crucifixion and resurrection. Describing herself as ‘Strauss-sick’, she fled to Rosehill, avoiding the first-floor study at Bird Grove, where she was supposed to be getting on with her work. She was, reported Cara in a letter to Sara, deathly pale and suffering from dreadful headaches.⁴⁹ To pull herself through this Slough of Despond she placed a cast of the Risen Christ together with an engraving in a prominent place by her desk. This was her way of reasserting the mystery and hopeful joy of the New Testament narratives which continued to sustain her long after she had given up orthodox Christianity.

Once the work was finished, except for routine worries over proofs, Mary Ann’s spirits began to rise. At the end of May 1846 she headed off to see Sara in London with the promise that ‘we will be merry and sad, wise and nonsensical, devout and wicked together!’⁵⁰ It was not simply liberation from the daily grind of translation that gave her such a delightful feeling of relief. The fact that the book was coming out at all was reason for celebration. Only a year earlier it had looked as though Strauss might go the same way as the ecclesiastical chart and Vinet – into oblivion. In May 1845 Joseph Parkes’s assurance that he would finance the publication started to look shaky and Mary Ann began ‘utterly to despair that Strauss will ever be published unless I … print it myself. I have no confidence in Mr Parkes and shall not be surprized if he fail in his engagement altogether.’⁵¹

In the end, the book did come out, published by John Chapman of Newgate Street. Mary Ann received only twenty pounds for her two years’ work and her name does not appear on the title page – or indeed anywhere else. None the less, its impact on her life was huge. Das Leben Jesu was a supremely important book and the name of its translator could not fail to circulate among well-informed people. Mary Ann’s meeting with the publisher John Chapman, while staying with Sara in summer 1846, was the catalyst for her move to London three years later and the start of her journalistic career. And, of course, the translation brought her to the notice of Strauss himself, who provided a preface in which he described her work as ‘accurata et perspicua’.⁵² In 1854 they finally met, thanks to the fussy ministrations of none other than Dr Brabant. Whether by chance or not, the good doctor popped up on the train on which Mary Ann and G. H. Lewes were travelling to Germany to start their life together, having fled gossiping London. Brabant insisted on introducing her to Strauss, whom he claimed as a kind of friend. The meeting, which took place over breakfast in a hotel in Cologne, turned out dismally. Strauss spoke little English and Mary Ann not much German. For this reason, or perhaps the buzzing presence of the insufferable Dr Brabant, Strauss appeared ‘strange and cast-down’ and the encounter drew to an embarrassed close.⁵³

Once the exhilaration of being released from her task had settled, Mary Ann was in a position to assess the Strauss experience. Despite her dedication, a strain of ambivalence runs through her comments about the whole business of translation. It was, when all was said and done, not original or creative work, but ‘trifling’ stuff. She resented having had to worry about whether or not Parkes would come through with the money for something which was ‘not important enough to demand the sacrifice of one’s whole soul’.⁵⁴ Even at this stage Mary Ann knew that she wanted to be something more than a mediator of other people’s words, although in later life she told a correspondent that at this point she stayed with translation because she felt that it was all she could do well.⁵⁵ Although she had completed three substantial translations by the time she started to write fiction, she never drew attention to the fact and would have been quite happy for her involvement in them to have remained little known.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of Strauss her loftiness concealed considerable pride in her achievement. She was pleased with Charles Wicksteed’s review in the Prospective Review praising the ‘faithful, elegant, and scholarlike translation’.⁵⁶ And when an old school friend approached her for advice about how she might earn her living as a translator, Mary Ann was quick to defend her own patch. Although she conceded that Miss Bradley Jenkins was clever, she poured scorn on her assumption that ‘she could sit from morn till noon, from noon till dewy eve, translating German or French without feeling the least fatigue’.⁵⁷ It was one thing for Mary Ann Evans to think translation beneath her, quite another for an old classmate to assume she could do the same thing just as well.

One important legacy of the Strauss years was the deepening of Mary Ann’s friendship with Sara Hennell. They had first met by proxy, during those difficult months of the holy war in the spring of 1842. From Cara, Mary Ann had heard all about her clever elder sister who had worked as a governess to the Bonham Carter family. Sara, meanwhile, followed the trials of Cara’s interesting young neighbour through the letters she regularly received from Rosehill. The two women were finally introduced that summer, when Sara spent one of her many holidays in Coventry. Six weeks of music and talk laid the foundations of a friendship which would become the most important of both women’s lives for the next few years.

In many ways Sara Hennell was a clever, sophisticated version of that first governess in Mary Ann’s life, Maria Lewis. While Miss Lewis worked in the house of a Midlands clergyman, Miss Hennell had taught the daughters of a wealthy, cultured Unitarian Liberal MP. Instead of a relationship with her employers marked by resentment and insecurity, Sara Hennell was treated respectfully, enjoying the friendship of her eldest pupil long after she had ceased to teach her. While Maria Lewis’s notions of good behaviour were provincial and old-fashioned, Sara Hennell was used to fitting gracefully into life in the best circles. Most significantly, while Miss Lewis remained narrowly Evangelical, Sara Hennell set out from the Unitarianism of her childhood to explore and expand her faith through careful study of the new biblical criticism. She followed her brother Charles into print, publishing several books on theology throughout her long life.

When Mary Ann handed the letters she had so abruptly demanded back from Maria Lewis to Sara, she was signposting the similarities in the position the two women occupied in her life. Like Maria, Sara was located at a convenient distance, available for holiday visits and intense correspondence, but not the tedium and messiness of everyday contact. Mary Ann’s letters to Sara are less self-enclosed than those to Maria, but still there is a sense that she uses them as a way of exploring her own thoughts rather than as a means of exchanging ideas and feelings. One of the first letters she writes to Sara is the important reassessment of the lesson learned during the holy war, in which she elevates the community of feeling over the hair-splitting of intellectual debate. Throughout the correspondence it is Sara’s job to provide an informed listening ear rather than a provocative intervention in her young friend’s flow of thought. It is the idea of Sara, rather than Sara herself, which becomes the enabling force.

Mary Ann was guiltily aware of the narcissism running through her correspondence and indeed, the first few letters to Sara recall the early ones to Maria Lewis in their anxiety about appearing egotistical. ‘An unfortunate lady wrote a note, one page of which contained thirty I’s. I dare not count mine lest they should equal hers in number.’⁵⁸ However, after a tentative start in which Mary Ann struggled to find a voice to speak to the Sara whom she held in her mind’s eye, the correspondence started to flow. Within a year, Mary Ann was addressing Sara as ‘Liebe Gemahlinn’, ‘Cara Sposa’ and ‘Beloved Achates’ – all terms which claimed her as something more than a friend.

Eliot’s early biographers, from her husband John Cross right down to Gordon Haight in the 1960s, felt uncomfortable with the language of sexual affection the two women used to one another. Cross simply left out the offending passages, while Haight anxiously explained them away in terms of contemporary conventions of female friendship. In fact, the language in the letters exceeds that used by even the closest women friends during the period. ‘This letter is only to tell you how sweet the genuine words of love in your letter to Cara have been to my soul. That you should really wish for me is a thought which I keep by me as a little cud to chew now and then,’ writes Mary Ann on 15 November 1847.⁵⁹ Eighteen months later Mary Ann is teasing Sara with the idea that she may have been unfaithful. ‘I have given you a sad excuse for flirtation, but I have not been beyond seas long enough to make it lawful for you to take a new husband – therefore I come back to you with all a husband’s privileges and command you to love me … I sometimes talk to you in my soul as lovingly as Solomon’s Song.’⁶⁰

By the autumn of 1842 it was already a joke in the Bray – Hennell circle that Mary Ann fell in love with everyone she met. At twenty-three she was still searching for that intense maternal love which her own mother had been unable to provide at the crucial stage in her development. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, neither Watts nor Brabant had been in a position to give her the kind of replacement mothering she craved. Both had backed off with differing degrees of grace. Sara Hennell, however, was in an altogether different position. Single and living with her mother, she was emotionally free to enter into an intense and absorbing relationship. Seven years older to the week than Mary Ann, she was young enough to seem a contemporary in the way that Maria Lewis never had, yet sufficiently mature to take on the role of mentor and nurturer.

The erotic language which Mary Ann used is a signal of the insecurity she felt about just how much Sara really loved her. By playing with ideas of possession, fidelity, flirtation and jealousy, she was both expressing and containing her fear that Sara might abandon her, just as Isaac Evans, Francis Watts, Robert Brabant and Robert Evans had all done. Yet by the time she was using analogies to Solomon’s Song in 1849 – the most explicitly erotic section of the Old Testament – she was already less dependent on the relationship. This echoed the pattern with Maria Lewis: it was at the point when Mary Ann wanted to leave the friendship that her declarations of love became most extravagant.

The reasons for the drift apart were familiar too. If Mary Ann was the one who used the language of love, it was Sara whose feelings stood the test of time. Unattached to any man except her brother, Sara’s devotion to Mary Ann did not wax and wane every time an interesting diversion appeared. Mary Ann, by contrast, used her relationship with Sara as a small child would her mother – as a secure emotional base from which to explore the world. Five years into the friendship the discrepancy in the amount the women needed one another started to show. Just like Maria Lewis, Sara expressed her insecurity about the strength of Mary Ann’s attachment in governessy comments about the inappropriateness of her behaviour with the opposite sex. ‘Poor little Miss Hennell’, reported Edith Simcox in 1885, ‘apparently always disapproved of Marian for depending so much on the arm of man.’⁶¹

Hand in hand with this emotional estrangement there went an intellectual one. In July 1848, during a season in which all Europe was in revolt against the old ways, Mary Ann wrote to Sara defending her new regard for the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand. From her tone it is clear that she felt or knew that Sara would disapprove of her reading authors whose names were synonymous with sexual freedom and political revolt. ‘I wish you thoroughly to understand that the writers who have most profoundly influenced me … are not in the least oracles to me … For instance it would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were to stun me with proofs that Rousseau’s view of life, religion, and government are miserably erroneous.’ The point was, she maintained, that it was Rousseau’s art which had made her look at the world in quite a different way, sending ‘that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has awakened me to new perceptions’.⁶²

George Sand had an even more wretched personal reputation than Rousseau in Britain. A woman who dressed as a man and lived apart from her husband stood out in comparison with Elizabeth Gaskell and even the eccentric Brontës. Mary Ann, who as a novelist would become known as ‘the English George Sand’, worked hard to reassure Sara that she was not about to take the original as her model. ‘I should never dream of going to her writings as a moral code or text-book.’ What excited her, she said, was that, like Rousseau, Sand was able ‘to delineate human passion and its results’.⁶³ Both these French writers might lead irregular lives and be indifferent literary stylists, but their ability to see characters truly and whole moved her with a sense of what the novel might achieve.

During the height of her friendship with Sara Hennell – 1843 to 1848 – there was no room in Mary Ann’s life for another significant emotional attachment. Not that that stopped her family trying to find her suitable suitors. The ‘problem’ of Mary Ann’s singleness continued to rumble on, with Isaac always ready to hint that she was being selfish by remaining a drain on her family’s resources. Even the sensible Fanny Houghton, her half-sister, was keen to introduce Mary Ann to potential partners. In March 1845 she told Mary Ann about a young picture restorer working on the big house at Baginton, who she thought might be suitable. A meeting was arranged and, true to form, within two days Mary Ann was bewitched, believing the boy to be ‘the most interesting young man she had seen and superior to all the rest of mankind’. On the third day the young man made an informal proposal through Mr Houghton saying ‘she was the most fascinating creature he had ever beheld, that if it were not too presumptuous to hope etc. etc., a person of such superior excellence and powers of mind’. Turning down a definite engagement, Mary Ann none the less gave permission for him to write. Cara describes the girl as ‘brimful of happiness; – though she said she had not fallen in love with him yet, but admired his character so much that she was sure she should’.⁶⁴

This was the first time that Mary Ann had been involved with a man who was available and who returned her feelings. The fact that both Francis Watts and Robert Brabant were older and married had allowed her to express intense longing, safe in the knowledge that no commitment would be required of her. With the young picture restorer it was different. Now that real emotional engagement was on offer, Mary Ann backed off. In the few days following her return from Baginton she was racked with dreadful headaches, which only leeches could relieve. By the time the young man appeared at Foleshill she had decided that he wouldn’t do at all ‘owing to his great agitation, from youth – or something or other’, reported Cara vaguely to Sara. The next day Mary Ann ‘made up her mind that she could never love or respect him enough to marry him and that it would involve too great a sacrifice of her mind and pursuits’.⁶⁵

However, Mary Ann did not get any relief from giving the young man her decision, especially when her letter ending the affair crossed with his to Mr Evans asking for permission to marry her. All she felt was enormous guilt at having led him on. She toyed with the idea of starting the relationship up again. ‘Not that she cares much for him,’ reported Cara, ‘but she is so grieved to have wounded his feelings.’⁶⁶

But there may have been more to it than that. On 21 April, three weeks after what was supposed to be her final decision, Mary Ann is writing to Martha Jackson about the relationship as if it may continue. ‘What should you say to my becoming a wife?… I did meditate an engagement, but I have determined, whether wisely or not I cannot tell, to defer it, at least for the present.’⁶⁷ Although Mary Ann had no real interest in this particular man, she was enjoying the experience of being the courted one, the adored. An offer of marriage, no matter how unsuitable, brought her into the fold of ordinary, lovable women.

To Sara, however, she gives a very different version of events. A letter written two weeks before the one to Martha Jackson speaks as though the relationship is well and truly a thing of the past. ‘I have now dismissed it from my mind, and only keep it recorded in my book of reference, article “Precipitancy, ill effects of”.’ She ends by confirming that her first allegiance is to Sara whose ‘true Gemahlinn’ or wife she is, which ‘means that I have no loves but those that you can share with me – intellectual and religious loves’.⁶⁸ At this relatively early stage in their friendship Mary Ann was anxious not to alienate Sara by any suggestion of ‘infidelity’. At the age of twenty-five her emotional allegiance was still to an unavailable partner, a woman. It would be nearly another decade before she would risk falling in love – this time lastingly – with an almost available man.

It was not just the Evans clan who tried to matchmake Mary Ann. Although Robert and Isaac were convinced that the Brays were cavalierly indifferent to her marriage prospects, in fact, Cara was quietly working away behind the scenes. In July 1844, returning from a holiday in the Lake District, the Brays took Mary Ann to stay with Cara’s young cousins in Manchester. The two young men, Philip and Frank, escorted the party round the city on a fact-finding mission to see whether Engels’s recently published description of the slums was accurate. It was. Cara wrote in horror to her sister-in-law Rufa, ‘The streets and houses where humans do actually live and breathe there are worse than a book can tell.’⁶⁹ But this was not her only disappointment. ‘I wish friend Philip would fall in love with her [Mary Ann],’ she wrote wistfully to her mother a few weeks later, ‘but there certainly were no symptoms of it.’⁷⁰ But at the party’s next stop, in Liverpool, romance seemed more likely. One of the guests at dinner was William Ballantyne Hodgson, Principal of the Liverpool Mechanics Institute, who was interested in the increasingly popular subjects of mesmerism and clairvoyance. He put Mary Ann in a hypnotic trance, which terrified her, since she was unable to open her eyes ‘and begged him most piteously to do it for her’.⁷¹ Hodgson’s concentration on Mary Ann during dinner suggests a definite romantic interest in her. Writing to a friend afterwards he described the evening as ‘Altogether a delightful party’ and admiringly listed the modern and classic languages which the extraordinary Miss Evans was able to read.⁷²

Men like Hodgson, Watts, Brabant and Bray who expressed a fascination with Mary Ann’s mind were used to mixing with clever women. Far from being comfortable with the simpering Angel in the House, the women in their lives were educated, well read and independent-thinking. So it is a clue to Mary Ann’s outstanding intellectual and spiritual radiance that she was so consistently the object of male attention. Indeed, the American poet Emerson, who met her during a visit to Rosehill in July 1848, could only repeat over and over to Charles Bray, ‘That young lady has a calm, serious soul.’⁷³

Hodgson and Emerson came into contact with Mary Ann only briefly. Other men, equally swept up by the exhilaration of talking to a woman whose mind ranged as widely as their own, found their lives profoundly altered by contact with Mary Ann Evans. John Sibree, the elder brother of her pupil Mary, was studying to become an Independent minister at Spring Hill College, Birmingham. Like Sara Hennell, he had made Mary Ann’s acquaintance by proxy, through letters which Mary had written to him while he was at Halle University, describing the drama of the holy war. During one of his holidays from Spring Hill, Sibree finally got to meet the woman about whom he had heard so much. Characteristically, they forged their friendship by reading Greek together and, once Sibree returned to college in Birmingham, the correspondence continued. The letters which Mary Ann wrote to Sibree during the first half of 1848 are unlike any others she was to write during her whole life. As performance-oriented as ever, she none the less imagines him as a very different audience from Sara Hennell or Maria Lewis. This time she is at pains to show herself as a fun, flirtatious and even daring woman. For instance, Hannah More, whose pious work she had used to recommend to all and sundry, is now dismissed as ‘that most disagreeable of all monsters, a bluestocking – a monster that can only exist in a miserably false state of society, in which a woman with but a smattering of learning or philosophy is classed along with singing mice and card playing pigs’.⁷⁴ Doubtless Mary Ann was attempting to distance herself from the drab image of a bluestocking, all the while trying to impress Sibree with her references to Handel, Hegel and Disraeli.

The letters to Sibree are also unusual in discussing politics. Throughout her life Mary Ann seldom mentioned contemporary events. But in spring 1848, with much of Europe in turmoil, it was impossible not to be drawn in. To those who know her in her mature incarnation as a conservative thinker, Mary Ann’s brash enthusiasm for sudden change comes as a shock. She starts off by using the language of the barricades: ‘decayed monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have a hospital for them, or a sort of Zoological Garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be preserved’. Of Louis Philippe, who with his ‘moustachioed sons’ had recently escaped to Britain, ‘for heaven’s sake preserve me from sentimentalizing over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions of unfed souls and bodies’. Victoria, meanwhile, is ‘our little humbug of a queen’. When it comes to predicting whether revolution will happen in Britain, Mary Ann has already identified her country’s unique capacity for slow constitutional change which, as a mature writer, she would elevate over political solutions. Writing to Sibree, however, she sees this as second-best to the thrill of revolution: ‘There is nothing in our constitution to obstruct the slow progress of political reform. This is all we are fit for at present. The social reform which may prepare us for great changes is more and more the object of effort both in Parliament and out of it. But we English are slow crawlers.’⁷⁵

Whenever Mary Ann engaged with a man intellectually, her emotions were not far behind. The tone of the Sibree letters quickly turned personal. On 8 March 1848 she ticked him off for writing too formally and asked for some details about his innermost life. ‘Every one talks of himself or herself to me,’ she boastfully claims and demands that he write to her about his religious beliefs. ‘I want you to write me a Confession of Faith – not merely what you believe but why you believe it.’⁷⁶ Sibree had already read Mary Ann’s translation of Strauss and was starting to have his doubts about his calling. The act of marshalling an account of his faith seems to have been the final stage in resolving to abandon the ministry. This was, of course, a massive step for, as Mary Sibree explained decades later to John Cross, ‘the giving up of the ministry to a young man without other resources was no light matter’.⁷⁷

Just how influential Mary Ann was in Sibree’s decision to give up his orthodox faith is not absolutely clear. Certainly she read the letters which Mrs Sibree and Mary wrote to John during the whole crisis, and she herself enclosed a letter with the former’s correspondence. In this letter she says, ‘You have my hearty and not inexperienced sympathy … I have gone through a trial of the same genus as yours … I sincerely rejoice in the step you have taken – it is an absolutely necessary condition for any true development of your nature.’⁷⁸

While the Sibrees had been tolerant and understanding when Mary Ann had given up church-going, it was quite a different matter when their own son took a similar course. It is not clear how much they blamed Mary Ann for influencing him, but they certainly felt she played a significant part. From 1848 Mary Ann had fewer meetings with Mary and the German lessons seem to have stopped. When Mary Ann moved to Geneva for eight months in 1849, Mary Sibree asked her to write to her care of Rosehill, presumably because she did not want her parents to know that their friendship was continuing. Mary Ann refused, telling the Brays: ‘Please to give my love to her [Mary] and tell her that I cannot carry on a correspondence with anyone who will not avow it.’ Perhaps she was feeling particularly annoyed with all things Sibree because Mr Sibree senior had just turned up with his brother in Geneva, which Mary Ann thought ‘a piece of impertinent curiosity’, suspecting that they had come to spy on her.⁷⁹ In the same way that she had been scathing about Brabant, Mary Ann now declared that Mr Sibree, whom she had once wanted as a substitute father, looked ‘silly’ while his brother was ‘vulgar-looking’.⁸⁰ She could not get over her hurt that the Sibrees had not given her the total understanding she craved. They were, she said in a later letter, benignly selfish, exhibiting ‘the egotism that eats up all the bread and butter and is ready to die of confusion and distress after having done it’.⁸¹

As the John Sibree episode suggests, Mary Ann’s relationships with men during this period were tinder-box affairs. She formed sudden bonds with dramatic results. Either she was thrown out of their house, or they were thrown out of a job. There were tears and headaches, and leeches and embarrassments, which in some cases lasted down the years. She began to despair that anyone would want a peaceful, sustained relationship with her. Often known as Polly, an old Warwickshire form of ‘Mary’, she allowed Sara to make an unflattering pun on her name by changing it again to ‘Pollian’, a play on Apollyon, the monster in Revelation who also makes an appearance in Pilgrim’s Progress. It chimed with her growing sense of herself as repulsive and wrong. In October 1846 she wrote an extended fantasy for Charles Bray – surely influenced by her reading of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus – in which she pictures herself as an old, ugly translator whose only hope now is to form a rational marriage with a dusty old German theologian. ‘The other day as I was sitting in my study, Mary [Sibree] came with a rather risible cast of expression to deliver to me a card, saying that a gentleman was below requesting to see me. The name on the card ran thus – Professor Bücherwurm, Moderig University [Professor Bookworm of Musty University] … ’ The professor then addresses Mary Ann:

‘I am determined if possible to secure a translator in the person of a wife. I have made the most anxious and extensive inquiries in London after all female translators of German. I find them very abundant, but I require, besides ability to translate, a very decided ugliness of person … After the most toilsome inquiries I have been referred to you, Madam, as presenting the required combination of attributes, and though I am rather disappointed to see that you have no beard, an attribute which I have ever regarded as the most unfailing indication of a strong-minded woman, I confess that in other respects your person at least comes up to my ideal.’

Mary Ann then describes herself as responding: ‘I thought it possible we might come to terms, always provided he acceded to my irrevocable conditions. “For you must know, learned Professor,” I said, “that I require nothing more in a husband than to save me from the horrific disgrace of spinster-hood and to take me out of England.”’⁸² Professor Bookworm is clearly based on that German professor of theology to whom Mary Ann had already given up two years of her life, D. F. Strauss. And although she could not have known it at the time, it was Strauss who would, by a twisted turn of events, rescue Mary Ann from spinsterhood. In the meantime, however, it was another crisis altogether that would take her out of England.

CHAPTER 5
‘The Land of Duty and Affection’
Coventry, Geneva and London 1849–51

BY THE END of the 1840s, that most stormy of decades for Britain, life had been transformed for nearly everyone in Mary Ann’s circle. Unsettled by the revolutions in Europe, John Sibree had rebelled against his family culture, thrown over the ministry and opted for the precarious teaching and translating career of the self-supporting intellectual. The Brays’ silk business was under pressure from cheap foreign imports and Rosehill would never again be run with such expansive ease. Meanwhile Chrissey, the meek and mild Evans girl who had left little impression on anyone, had been quietly sinking into chronic poverty and ill-health. Unlike her canny businessmen brothers, the gentlemanly Dr Clarke was not good with money. During the middle decades of the century medicine was busy pulling away from its roots in the apothecary shop and fashioning itself into a profession. Improved training and practice was one way of doing it. Living like a gentleman was another. No longer content to be seen as a clever servant, the physician – doctor now ran an ‘establishment’, which rivalled that of his well-heeled patients. His front door was opened by a maid, his dinner served on fine china and his rounds made on a good horse. In practice, however, the cost of maintaining a conspicuously prosperous establishment often proved too much for an income that was far from secure. Just as Lydgate in Middle-march discovers that his natural inclination to live well cannot be supported from the fees he receives as a doctor newly arrived in the area, so Edward Clarke was increasingly unable to balance the books.

By 1842 the situation was so grim that Dr Clarke was forced to raise money by selling a house which had been left to his wife by her Uncle Evarard. Robert Evans, still playing his role as money lender to the feckless gentry, gave his son-in-law £250 for the Attleborough property and, a few months later, advanced him another £800 on loan to help move the whole family to Barford, near Warwick, for a new start.¹ But still it was not enough. Within three years Clarke was bankrupt and the whole family decamped in panic to Bird Grove. From this low point it recovered neither its health nor prosperity. Dr Clarke died in 1852, leaving six surviving children. Chrissey was left to do her ineffectual best, scrabbling around for cheap schooling and apprenticeships, and at one point even considering moving the household out to Australia.² In 1859, worn out by her own fertility and bad luck, Chrissey died at the age of forty-five.

Although Mary Ann continued to hunger for romantic love, her elder sister’s example offered a stern warning about its consequences. Gritty Moss, Mr Tulliver’s sister in The Mill on the Floss, is surely based on Chrissey. Described originally as ‘a patient, loosely-hung, child-producing woman’,³ Mrs Moss has the hopeless look of someone defeated by too many babies and a husband who never manages to get into profit. As a married woman Chrissey had no rights to her own property – it was Edward Clarke, after all, who sold her house back to her father. If she was unfaithful, her husband could divorce her. If he had a lover, she was obliged to stay put. Whatever the reasons for a legal separation – and there were only a handful each year, among those wealthy and smart enough not to care what other people thought – the children automatically belonged to their father. Chrissey, as far as anyone knows, had no desire to end her marriage to Edward Clarke. But she had probably never wanted to give birth to nine children, a financial and physical strain that almost certainly hastened her death: her childless sister lived to sixty-one, her brother to seventy-four. Despite being married to a doctor, Chrissey seems to have had no access to the contraceptive knowledge that, only ten years later, would allow Mary Ann and Lewes to make the decision not to bring illegitimate children into the world.

Chrissey’s marriage was one of several which Mary Ann scrutinised as she approached her late twenties, those last-chance courtship years for a woman in the mid-nineteenth century. There were the Brays, with their advanced attitudes to sexual arrangements and sufficient money to support Mrs Gray and her brood of bastards. There was married, childless Fanny, who had time and energy to read the new higher criticism, but felt obliged to keep her opinions to herself. There were Isaac and Sarah, conventionally married and busy bringing up their four children to take their place among the professional classes. None of these were agonisingly miserable matches, but they were all compromised by wavering sexual attraction, intellectual incompatibility, or force of habit. Certainly none matched Mary Ann’s ideal of a true meeting of hearts and minds.

The fault, she concluded like many before and since, lay not with individual human failing, but with the institution of marriage itself. While marriages in Britain were not arranged in the literal sense, young middle-class people were often pressured by their families into engagements with people they barely knew. ‘How terrible it must be’, Mary Sibree remembered Mary Ann saying, ‘to find one’s self tied to a being whose limitations you could see and must know were such as to prevent your ever being understood!’ Far happier, Mary Ann concluded, was the Continental arrangement of dissolving marriages once affection had died.⁴

These remarks, recalled in hindsight by Mary Sibree for John Cross, are suspiciously prophetic. Within fifteen years of making them, Mary Ann Evans was to become a notorious victim of Britain’s stringent divorce laws. But although Sibree probably polished up her tale for posterity, the ‘problem’ of marriage was a subject which engaged Mary Ann from the moment she first became aware of the competing pressures of family, personal and religious law. Her impulsive courtship of the picture restorer in the spring of 1845 had shown her how easy it was to rush into a marriage that would suit no one except the people who had arranged it, in this case her half-sister Fanny Houghton. During the holy war she had learned painfully that obedience and revolt in relation to an external law mattered far less than adherence to a complex inner truth.

In June 1848, during a dismal holiday with her failing father in St Leonards-on-Sea, Mary Ann clawed out a few hours to read the just-published Jane Eyre. As she sat huddled in a cold hotel, the book threw a sharp beam of light on to her own situation. Speaking of Rochester’s commitment to care for his mad wife, Mary Ann declared in a letter to Charles Bray: ‘All self-sacrifice is good – but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man’s soul and body to a putrefying carcase.’⁵ She was quite aware that she, too, was chained soul and body to a putrefying carcass. But the difference between her situation and Rochester’s was that her chains were made not of an abstract law but the living, loving ties of human affection.

If conventional marriage looked increasingly unappealing and unlikely, the problem still remained of how Mary Ann was to live once her father died. Isaac’s continuing grumblings about the ‘selfishness’ of her single state suggested that he was never going to want her at Griff. The Clarkes could not support themselves, let alone an extra mouth. The last time the subject had come up, during the holy war, governessing in Leamington had emerged as a grim possibility. Fortunately, since then new and more appealing options had presented themselves. In April 1845 Mary Ann met Harriet Martineau, whose sister-in-law was a cousin of Cara’s.⁶ Martineau belonged to a tiny band of early-Victorian women who supported themselves through high-quality journalism and authorship. Born into the thriving nexus of Norwich Unitarianism she had received a good education by the standards of the day. Too deaf to follow her sisters into governessing when the family business failed, she started in print by writing the hugely successful Tales of Political Economy, moral fables that explained the virtues of free trade in simple terms, which the uncertainly literate would understand. From there she was to expand her range to include, by the time of her death in 1876, autobiography, fiction and an embarrassingly emphatic endorsement of mesmerism (hypnosis) as a cure for all kinds of ills. Although as a jobbing journalist Martineau’s work appeared all over the place, she was most closely linked with the Westminster Review, the periodical founded by James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in 1824 to espouse the hard, happiness-driven philosophy of utilitarianism.

In some ways Martineau was not an attractive role model for Mary Ann, being plain, gauche and gossipy. Her deafness required her to carry a large ear trumpet which she used to control and inhibit others. If she grew bored with a conversation, she withdrew the trumpet and started to shout over the top of the unfortunate speaker. Hans Christian Andersen, who once met her at a garden party in London, was so exhausted by the experience that he had to go and lie down afterwards. Her old-maidish respectability ran alongside a prurient interest in other people’s doings, creating a nasty tendency to bad-mouth. Years later, at the height of the scandal over Mary Ann’s elopement with Lewes, Martineau whipped herself up into a frenzy of disapproval. She even started a strange, self-aggrandising rumour that Mary Ann had written her an insulting letter prior to leaving for the Continent.⁷ That Mary Ann did not expose Martineau as a meddling fantasist in 1854 and continued to express admiration and even affection for her until her death twenty years later says a great deal about the debt she believed she owed her. More than any other woman in early-Victorian Britain, Martineau’s example pointed the way out of dependent provincial spinsterhood.

It was with Martineau’s example in mind that Mary Ann started to write articles for the Coventry Herald in October 1846. Charles Bray had bought the radical paper during the previous summer as a platform in his continuing battle with the city’s ruling Tories. Mary Ann’s laboured and lame pieces did not contribute much to the struggle. The most interesting thing about the series of loose, rambling essays entitled ‘Poetry and Prose from the Notebook of An Eccentric’⁸ which appeared from December is her use of the form to which she was to return only at the very end of her life. Like Impressions of Theophrastus Such, published in 1879, ‘Poetry and Prose’ purports to be the jottings of a middle-aged man and, in this first attempt, comes over as implausible and dull. The reviews she wrote for the paper were much more successful, building on real interests and knowledge. The first, which appeared in October 1846, was a cogent commentary on three books by the French historians Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet.⁹

Mary Ann’s journalism, and the reading which informed the best of it, had to be fitted around her increasingly heavy duties as a sick-nurse. Just as her mother had used her ill-health to send Mary Ann away from the family home, her father now used his frailty to bind her to it. Evans still loathed the Brays for their hijacking of his clever, respectable little girl into unorthodoxy. Jealous and resentful of Mary Ann’s continued attachment to Rosehill, he tried everything in his power to turn her attention back towards him. The most spectacular skirmish came in October 1845, when Mary Ann was due to accompany the Brays and Sara Hennell to Scotland. This promised to be a particularly exciting trip, since the plan was to tour Scott country, exploring the landscape long branded into her imagination from repeated readings of the Waverley novels. But from the start Robert was determined that she should not go. He put forward the desperate argument that Chrissey’s and Edward’s arrival at Bird Grove, following their final bankruptcy, required her presence. In the end Charles Bray intervened, stressing how much Mary Ann needed a change of scene to lift her health and spirits.¹⁰ Reluctantly, Evans agreed, but on the evening following her departure he fell from his horse and broke a leg. Isaac dispatched a letter to Glasgow telling Mary Ann to come home immediately. Luckily it missed her and the party toured Greenock, Glasgow, Loch Lomond and Stirling, blithely unaware of the drama unfolding in Warwickshire. When the letter finally caught up with Mary Ann in Edinburgh, she wanted to set out immediately and alone. Bray talked her into staying another day and the whole party went to visit Scott’s grand castle home in Abbotsford. The next day, 28 October, they all set out for home, travelling via Birmingham.

Robert Evans lived on for another grim three and a half years. At times, Mary Ann feared she was going mad with the strain of looking after him. He was not a man who said thank you, believing that his youngest daughter’s care and attention was his natural due. He was often grumpy and always demanding, wanting her to read or play the piano or just talk. During the ghastly visit to St Leonards-on-Sea in May – June 1848, Mary Ann reported to the Brays that her father made ‘not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour’.¹¹ Trapped on the out-of-season south coast, she tried to stretch out the days with ‘very trivial doings … spread over a large space’, to the point where one featureless day merged drearily into the next.¹²

The result was the kind of depression she had not experienced since the years of intense isolation at Griff. Spoofing Scott, she wrote to Charles Bray from the dismal guest-house that ‘my present address is Grief Castle, on the river of Gloom, in the valley of Dolour’.¹³ Without other people to reflect her back to herself – Robert Evans’s hungry demands only made her feel invisible – she felt herself on the brink of a terrifying disintegration. In a desperate letter to Sara, she cried out, ‘I feel a sort of madness growing upon me.’¹⁴

But throughout this slow pounding of her spirits Mary Ann’s devotion to her father never wavered. Mr Bury, the surgeon who attended Evans during these last years, declared that ‘he never saw a patient more admirably and thoroughly cared for’.¹⁵ Still deeply regretful of the pain she had caused him during the holy war, Mary Ann took her father’s nursing upon her as an absolute charge. And while the limits that her sick-room duties imposed upon her time and freedom often irked, they also satisfied her need for a vocation. Just as giving up two years of her life to the tortuous Strauss had calmed her fears that she was achieving nothing in her life, so the burden of caring for her father left neither time nor energy to agonise over her ultimate lack of direction. While others, especially Cara, marvelled at her sacrifice and patience, Mary Ann understood that it was her devotion to her father which made life possible. Without this ‘poetry of duty’ she feared herself ‘nothing more than miserable agglomerations of atoms’.¹⁶ Frightened about relaxing for a second, she had even begun translating Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in her spare time: ‘she says it is such a rest to her mind,’ reported Cara Bray wonderingly.¹⁷

This makes sense of the puzzle that it was in the final few months of Robert Evans’s life that Mary Ann found her greatest ease. She was with him all the time now, worrying about the effect of the cold on his health, tying a mustard bag between his shoulders to get him to sleep, sending written bulletins to Fanny and Robert about his worsening condition. There are no surviving letters to Isaac and Chrissey, and no evidence that they shared the load with her. It was Mary Ann’s half-brother Robert who spent the last night of their father’s life with her, a fact she remembered with gratitude all her life. Yet although she declared that her life during these months was ‘a perpetual nightmare – always haunted by something to be done which I have never the time or rather the energy to do’,¹⁸ she accepted that she would have it no other way. To Charles Bray she reported that ‘strange to say I feel that these will ever be the happiest days of life to me. The one deep strong love I have ever known has now its highest exercise and fullest reward.’¹⁹ To some extent this was because Evans was finally able to unbend a little and say ‘kind things’ to Mary Ann. ‘It shows how rare they are’, said Cara tartly, ‘by the gratitude with which she repeats the commonest expressions of kindness.’²⁰ But it was not just that. As the abyss of life without home, family or purpose loomed, Mary Ann clung to her exhausting duties as a way of keeping terror at bay.

It could not be held off for ever. When the final hours came, on the night of 30–31 May, disintegration threatened once again. In panic, Mary Ann sat down and scribbled an anguished note to Cara and Charles: ‘What shall I be without my Father? It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone. I had a horrid vision of myself last night becoming earthly sensual and devilish for want of that purifying restraining influence.’²¹

But, of course, it had never been her father who had protected Mary Ann from herself. It was her attachment to him, her elevation of his care into an absolute duty, which had disciplined the warring parts of herself into working together. For this reason Evans’s deliberate snubbing of her in his will may not have hurt her as much as it has outraged her biographers. There was nothing odd about his leaving the valuable Derbyshire and Warwickshire properties to Robert and Isaac respectively, while his three daughters received relatively small amounts of cash. Fanny and Chrissey had both been given a thousand pounds on their marriage and now got another thousand. Mary Ann received two thousand pounds in trust, the income to be administered by her brother, half-brother and the family solicitor. But it was in the tiny details that Evans’s will stung. The novels of Walter Scott, from which Mary Ann had read so tirelessly during the last few years of his life, were given to Fanny who, as far as we know, had no particular attachment to them. It was a small, cutting gesture, the only way Robert Evans knew to show Mary Ann that he had still not forgiven her for the holy war.

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