by Rebecca Mead
Eliot was conscious of the ambiguity of her maternal status. In a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe written a few months before Thornie’s death, just as he returned to London, she begged the American novelist’s forgiveness for the fragmentary nature of her note. She added that she had little anxiety that Stowe would misinterpret her, “for you have had longer experience than I as a writer, and fuller experience as a woman, since you have borne children and known the mother’s history from the beginning.”
The question of what it might mean for a woman to be a mother, or not, recurs throughout Eliot’s books. In an early work, “Janet’s Repentance,” one of the Scenes of Clerical Life, she describes the power of motherhood, which “turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.” When she wrote those words she was still of childbearing age, and I wonder what she felt about forgoing that intensity of experience herself, as the years of its possibility melted away. (In the case of Janet Dempster, who is cruelly bullied by her husband and becomes an alcoholic, childlessness constitutes “half [her] misery.”) But Eliot’s books are also filled with women for whom motherhood has produced more problems than satisfactions. In Felix Holt there is the haunting Mrs. Transome, who, shockingly, longs for the death of her elder son so that her younger son, the offspring of a long-past affair, can inherit her estate. Daniel Deronda is abandoned as a child by his mother, the Princess Halm-Eberstein, an opera singer who goes by the stage name of Alcharisi. This is in part so that Daniel will grow up as an English gentleman in ignorance of his Jewish heritage, which his mother despises, but it is also so that she will be free to pursue her vocation unencumbered. “Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster,” the Princess tells him, when they finally meet in Deronda’s adulthood. “I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel—or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.”
The Princess is an extreme example of a woman who forgoes motherhood for her art, and while she is personally unsympathetic in many ways she presents a conflict that Eliot would have shared, to some degree. (Deronda’s mother tells him: “You can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.”) Eliot believed that in spite of not ever bearing a child she had the emotional capacity for a maternal relation. But she recognized the contradictions inherent in her situation. In a letter to a friend written during Thornie’s illness she remarked that, “in proportion as I profoundly rejoice that I never brought a child into the world, I am conscious of having an unused stock of motherly tenderness”—a formulation that both pushes away and embraces the role of mother.
WHEN my love affair with the man in New Haven came to an end, my sense of loss was twofold. The end of things with him was explicable, if acutely painful. But the end of things with his daughter hurt differently, because the severing of that bond felt arbitrary. I had felt her close, and now she was gone—as distant as if she had sailed from me across the equator to inhabit a strange new land. Bereft, I told myself that I would never, ever, get involved with someone who already had children—not because they were too hard to love, but because they were too hard to lose.
But a few years later I met a man who had three sons, not very different in age than were the Lewes boys when George Eliot met George Henry Lewes. I hoped my heart would be large enough for all the love that was required of me; my hope turned into trust, and we married. As a younger woman I had not anticipated having a marital home instantly filled with half-grown boys, and if sometimes in the years of their adolescence I found it helpful to recall Dorothea’s words about the need for patience with young men—who may seem idle and weak because they are growing—more often I have been impressed by my stepsons’ resourcefulness and moved by their varied good natures. Before long another small brother was added to the fraternity, and it is one of the great joys of my life to see my son playing with his adored older brothers, and to recognize the ways in which my unexpected family has brought me an increase of love, not a diminution of it.
“I feel very full of thankfulness for all the creatures I have got to love, all the beautiful and great things that are given to me to know, and I feel, too, much younger and more hopeful, as if a great deal of life and work were still before me,” Eliot wrote to Charles, the oldest Lewes boy, in 1861, a few months after he had moved home to London. As the scholar Rosemarie Bodenheimer has pointed out, it was around the time that the Lewes boys came into her life that Eliot and Lewes began speaking of her books as her children. She referred to The Mill on the Floss as “my youngest child” as she was writing it, and the metaphor seems to have been adopted by the Lewes boys as well. In 1861, on reading a newspaper announcement of a forthcoming work by her, Thornie wrote from Edinburgh, “What is its name, or is the Baby work not yet christened?”
Eliot spoke of the labor of producing her books as a form of parturition, and of them existing as independent lives once produced. She once told a correspondent that her experience of finishing a novel was not exultant or triumphant. “What comes after, is rather the sense that the work has been produced within one, like offspring, developing and growing by some force of which one’s own life has only served as a vehicle, and that what is left of oneself is only a poor husk.” However apt a description that might be of writing a book, I can’t help feeling that Eliot misses something about motherhood in her choice of metaphor. When I was the mother of a newborn I felt the opposite of dried up and used up. Though I was exhausted, I had never felt more alive and vital and necessary. Books are less like babies, perhaps, than they are like adolescents: nurtured by motherly tenderness but very much their own person, then launched into the world to stand on their own.
In her novels, though, Eliot is a one-woman refutation of the canard that only writers who are parents can write well about parenthood. One of the comic threads running through Middlemarch is the myopic delight that Celia, Dorothea’s younger sister, takes in her firstborn son, baby Arthur. It’s a painfully accurate caricature; after my son was born, I giddily wrote to a friend, a professor of English literature, “All these years I’ve thought I was Dorothea, and now I’ve turned overnight into Celia.”
Elsewhere in the novel, her perceptiveness about how anguishing a mother’s experience can be is so acute that I can hardly bear the sense of recognition I feel in reading it. Fred is adored by his mother, the mild, good-natured, silly Mrs. Vincy, whose imagination is limited to the most restricted precincts of Middlemarch, and who sees only nascent promise in her eldest son’s dilatoriness. There is a great deal of comic value in this, but in Book Three of Middlemarch, Eliot grants Mrs. Vincy a moment of gravitas. Fred has been taken sick, and Dr. Lydgate has diagnosed typhoid fever. Mrs. Vincy is distraught. “Her brightness was all bedimmed; unconscious of her costume which had always been so fresh and gay, she was like a sick bird with languid eye and plumage ruffled,” Eliot writes. “She went about very quietly: her one low cry was to Lydgate. She would follow him out of the room and put her hand on his arm moaning out, ‘Save my boy.’ ”
Eliot’s characterization of Mrs. Vincy’s distress as her firstborn son lies in mortal danger is profoundly compassionate, and subtly captures a harrowing truth. “All the deepest fibres of the mother’s memory were stirred, and the young man whose voice took a gentler tone when he spoke to her, was one with the babe whom she had loved, with a love new to her, before he was born,” she writes. Eliot locates even silly Mrs. Vincy’s dignity and depth. She finds it in Mrs. Vincy’s motherhood, and in her terrible fear of the worst that can befall a mother.
CHARLES Lewes was the only stepson who would survive her. Six years after Thornie’s death, Bertie was afflicted with similar wasting symptoms and died, leaving a widow and two small children. B
ertie didn’t even make it back to England in his illness; he died in Durban, at the home of John Sanderson, Thornie’s old friend, and his charming musical wife, Marie.
“He came into our house, looking like the ghost of his former self, quite suddenly one day and I shall never forget the shock it gave me,” Marie Sanderson wrote in a letter to Eliot. Bertie had been in good spirits, under the circumstances. He was gaining weight, and expected to recover. “We used to have pleasant talk about different things—Middlemarch for instance,” Mrs. Sanderson went on in her letter. In reading this, I ask myself what they said about the book, and what they recognized in it, and whether they spoke of Rosamond and Ladislaw spending their evenings in careless song.
Charles Lewes grew to become a pillar of George Eliot’s life, as she was of his. When the Times suggested in its obituary of Agnes Lewes that George Henry Lewes had abandoned her and the Lewes children for George Eliot, Charles came to the passionate defense of Eliot, whom he always called Mutter, the German word for mother. “George Eliot found a ruined life, and she made it into a beautiful life,” he said. “She found us poor little motherless boys, and what she did for us no one on earth will ever know.”
Charles and his wife, Gertrude, had only daughters, the youngest of whom, Elinor, married Ernest Carrington Ouvry, a lawyer. In her will, Elinor left the copyright to the works of George Eliot to one of her grandsons, Jonathan Ouvry. Jonathan is also a custodian of a few family relics, most of Eliot and Lewes’s possessions and papers having been sold at auction in 1923, after Gertrude Lewes died.
Now in his seventies, Jonathan is theatrical in demeanor. A former solicitor and a keen amateur singer, he is animated and twinkly of eye, the kind of person you can imagine, in his younger years, wearing a tail and tights and playing Mephistopheles. I visited him and his wife, Marjorie, at their home in London one warm afternoon in late summer, and while Marjorie prepared dinner, Jonathan showed me his family treasures: a portrait of another ancestor, Frederic Ouvry, who was a solicitor of Dickens’s; a book about Octavia Hill, the sister of Gertrude Lewes, who was a prominent activist on behalf of women; a memoir published by Charles Lee Lewes, George Henry Lewes’s grandfather, who was a well-known comic actor in the eighteenth century and who, Jonathan told me, originated the role of Young Marlow in Oliver Goldsmith’s play She Stoops to Conquer. It was exciting to discover these strands and traces of literary life married unexpectedly together and surviving, not in a museum, but in the comfortable domesticity of a London home.
Over dinner we talked about Jonathan’s children—Marjorie’s stepchildren—and my children, and the complicated bonds of family. After dinner we sat in the living room, where, on the mantelpiece, was a small leather wallet with the initials G.H.L. and the date of 1874 embossed upon it, a gift from Eliot to Lewes. Next to it was Eliot’s pen. It had a slim handle made from what looked like bone, and a tarnished metal nib. I asked if I could hold it, and when Jonathan said I could, I gingerly picked it up.
It felt heavier in my hand than I expected, and I thought of the labor it must have demanded. “Have you known the misery of writing with a tired steel pen which is reluctant to make a mark?” Eliot once wrote to a friend. I imagined her holding this pen, dipping it over and over into an inkstand, taking care against blotting or smudging, and I wondered which of her works she had written with it.
Jonathan’s older brother, David Ouvry, is quieter and less ebullient. He is a retired teacher of English and a devoted musician; when I visited him and his partner, Daphne, in their home in the Cotswolds he showed me his workshop, where carefully shaped pieces of wood waited to be assembled into a violin. The beautiful, rambling house, which was largely built in the sixteenth century, had an imposing fireplace in the dining room, large enough to stew a whole sheep in butter. In the living room, David showed me objects he had inherited. A lamp stood on a side table that had belonged to George Eliot, and on the wall near the grand piano hung a portrait, a pencil drawing, of a beautiful young woman.
She was Blanche Lewes, the eldest daughter of Charles and Gertrude, who was born in the summer of 1872, as George Eliot was finishing Middlemarch. After the birth, which followed Gertrude’s loss of a stillborn baby a year earlier, Eliot wrote with quiet exultation to her friend Maria Congreve. “This morning came the joyful news that Gertrude has a fine healthy baby—a daughter,” she wrote. “We have just been saying in our walk, that by the end of this century our one-day-old grand-daughter will probably be married and have children of her own, while we are pretty sure to be at rest.” Eliot added, “We have longed for more continuous warmth and brightness, and to-day may perhaps be the beginning of that one wanting condition.” She seems to be talking both about the weather—there has been “delicious sunshine” that day—and about the larger brightness offered by the baby’s new life: a granddaughter, unmodified by the qualifier “step,” fully claimed as family, promising continuation.
David and I ascended the stairs and passed a framed portrait of George Henry Lewes, drawn by a friend, Rudolf Lehmann, in 1867, when Lewes was fifty. It was a copy of one that is in the collection of the British Museum, and I had seen it reproduced many times before. In it, Lewes has thinning hair and extravagant beard; his brow is furrowed and his eyes are intense, like Thornie’s in his schoolboy portrait. “Every time I look at it I see different things,” David told me. “I think I see a more sensitive face than I used to.”
Upstairs, David led me to a bookcase, and I stooped down to look at the volumes ranged upon it: first editions of all of George Eliot’s novels, inscribed by the author to Charles Lewes and Gertrude. David pulled out Middlemarch. He’d reread the novel recently, he said, and then astonished me by saying that rather than using a battered paperback he’d read Charles and Gertrude’s copy. “It was very nice to do that,” he said, with a quiet note of satisfaction. Thornie had written that “good novels bear re-reading.” The book that Eliot had given Charles hadn’t become a relic after all: it was a useful thing, still being used.
David handed Middlemarch to me, and I opened to the inscription. “To Charles & Gertrude Lewes,” it read. “Their loving Mutter gives this book of hers, which was coming into the world and growing along with their little daughter Blanche.” The inscription to Charles and Gertrude was deeply touching, tying the cherished birth of the girl in the portrait downstairs at David’s house with the labor Eliot had spent on her own literary offspring.
But Middlemarch also grew as Thornie was dying, and now when I read about Fred Vincy and his unformed hopefulness and Will Ladislaw and his chafing restlessness—and when I am up to my ears in boydom, as three big and one small clatter on the stairs of my house, or spiritedly recount their adventures over the dinner table—I see Thornie Lewes inscribed within its pages, too. I was wrong in my twenties, when I thought that Middlemarch had nothing to tell me about being a stepparent—and not just because I was being too literal-minded about what was represented in the book and what wasn’t, and failed to see how Eliot’s intelligence might illuminate situations she had not explicitly described.
A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book. Now when I read the novel in the light of Eliot’s life, and in the light of my own, I see her experience of unexpected family woven deep into the fabric of the novel—not as part of the book’s obvious pattern, but as part of its tensile strength. Middlemarch seems charged with the question of being a stepmother: of how one might do well by one’s stepchildren, or unwittingly fail them, and of all that might be gained from opening one’s heart wider.
Chapter 4
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Three Love Problems
“A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men.”
—MIDDLEMARCH, CHAPTER 39
In a review that appeared in the Athenaeum on March 30, 1872, in advance of the publication of “Three Lo
ve Problems,” the fourth book of Middlemarch, the writer suggested that toward the end of the third book “a riddle is put” which “ought to be the hinge of the tale.”
The reviewer does not elaborate, nor return to the idea in later reviews. (Middlemarch, being published serially in eight five-shilling parts, was also reviewed serially in some periodicals.) But the reference must have been to a charged exchange that takes place between Dorothea—now Mrs. Casaubon—and Lydgate. The doctor has been called to Lowick Manor, the Casaubon residence, because Mr. Casaubon has suffered what appears to be a heart attack.
Lydgate and Dorothea withdraw to the library. The shutters are closed, and as they sit in the gloom Lydgate suggests to Dorothea that, although her husband seems to be recovering, ongoing vigilance against overexertion is required. He must not work as hard as he has done, nor may he restrict his occupations so exclusively. Perhaps, Lydgate suggests, they might go abroad. “Oh, that would not do—that would be worse than anything,” Dorothea responds. As tears roll down her cheeks she tells Lydgate that nothing will be of any use to Casaubon that he does not enjoy. Lydgate is deeply touched, yet wonders what her marriage must be like: “Women just like Dorothea had not entered into his traditions.”
Then Dorothea begs Lydgate to advise her. “You know all about life and death,” she tells him. “He has been labouring all his life and looking forward. He minds about nothing else. And I mind about nothing else.” Eliot underlines the importance of this exchange not by showing the reader how Lydgate responds in the moment, but by telling how he sees it later, in retrospect. “For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal—this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life,” she writes.