by Rebecca Mead
Henry James happened to call on Eliot the day that Thornton Lewes had returned from Natal, a moment at which she can be excused for not looking her best, but as well as delivering a tour de force of disparagement, James described something else about Eliot’s looks. A first impression of her hideousness, he said, soon gave way to something else entirely. “Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her,” he continued. “Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.”
Others noticed the same effect, including Sara Jane Lippincott, an American author who met her at Chapman’s in June 1852, not long after Eliot had arrived in London. Lippincott listened as Eliot, Chapman, and others—they may well have included Spencer—discussed science and ethics. “Miss Evans certainly impressed me at first as exceedingly plain, with her aggressive jaw and her evasive blue eyes,” she wrote. “Neither nose, nor mouth, nor chin were to my liking; but, as she grew interested and earnest in conversation, a great light flashed over or out of her face, till it seemed transfigured, while the sweetness of her rare smile was something quite indescribable.” Ivan Turgenev, a friend of Eliot’s, said that she made him understand that it was possible to fall in love with a woman who was not pretty.
I can’t pretend to be above caring about Eliot’s physical features; so much attention has been paid to the subject that one longs to know what she looked like, if only to find the words to repudiate Henry James. I feel defensive on her behalf: plain women, after all, have always found partners to love and to be loved by, else there would be far more solitary people in the world. They have even, on occasion, been sought out. George Eliot turned down a marriage proposal when in her midtwenties, from a young man who was an artist and a restorer of paintings. She was introduced to him while she was still living in Coventry, and after just three days’ acquaintance he proposed, via her brother-in-law, Henry Houghton, Fanny’s husband. The young man told Houghton that he found Miss Evans the most fascinating person he had ever met, and that he hoped it was not too bold of him to seek to marry a woman of such superior intelligence. After the proposal Eliot came to see the Brays, Cara reported in a letter, “so 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.” Within a few days, however, Eliot’s impressions of the young man had changed, and she wrote to him to break it off. In Cara’s paraphrase, “She 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.”
She chose her as-yet-unformed career over marriage—and whether or not she thought she might have another chance of marrying, she knew that anyone she did go on to marry would, like the portrait painter, have to appreciate her for her mind and pursuits, rather than for more conventional feminine attributes. Eliot met few of the expectations of women in her age, or in our own for that matter. The public continued to refer to her as “George Eliot” long after her true identity was revealed, as if she were a hybrid creature, neither properly female nor male. She wasn’t mannish—when describing her, her contemporaries insisted on emphasizing her femininity—but she wasn’t an ordinary woman, either. Bessie Rayner Parkes, whose father, Joseph Parkes, a lawyer and politician, was sufficiently impressed by Eliot in the early 1850s that he often invited her to dinners, described how she appeared in those early years in London. “She used to wear black velvet, then seldom adopted by unmarried ladies,” wrote Parkes, who recalled that her father would escort Eliot down the great staircase of their house on Savile Row, “the only lady, except my mother, among the group of remarkable men, politicians, and authors of the first literary rank. She would talk and laugh softly, and look up into my father’s face respectfully, while the light of the great hall-lamp shone on the waving masses of her hair, and the black velvet fell in folds about her feet.” It’s an evocative description of Eliot as a distinguished young woman holding her own among distinguished older men, an equal to the company, in full possession of herself.
The National Portrait Gallery’s Public Study Room is in an annex behind the museum, and when I went there, a selection of its holdings had been brought out at my request. I settled down at a large table with a magnifying glass in hand and began my necessarily compromised attempt to set eyes on Eliot. One image showed her much as she must have looked when she met the picture restorer—a small watercolor painted by Cara Bray in 1842, when Eliot was twenty-two. She had fair curls, a long nose, a firm mouth, and intelligent eyes. “I am glad to hear that you approved dear Mrs. Bray’s picture,” an ironical Eliot wrote to Sara Hennell. “I should think it is like, only that her benevolence extends to the hiding of faults in my visage as well as my character.”
There was a photograph for which she sat in 1858, the year she turned thirty-nine—after the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life but before the revelation that the well-known journalist Marian Evans was the George Eliot who had authored them. I could see why in her later years, Eliot told admirers who requested her photograph that she didn’t have one to give. Her face is disproportionately long, with a substantial nose and a heavy chin that isn’t at all concealed by the hand she is resting it upon. Her lips are open in a forced smile, revealing a glimpse of craggy teeth. Whenever I’d seen this photograph before, in reproduction, it had made me cringe to imagine the session during which it was taken, with the photographer requesting that she adopt a pose of simpering femininity. But there in the museum’s archive I thought I could detect a merry spark in her eye, and I imagined her in the studio with Lewes, sharing their delicious secret as she posed for what would, in later years, be reprinted as a portrait of the novelist George Eliot.
More appealing, though no more flattering, was a pen-and-ink drawing of Eliot in profile, sketched by Lowes Cato Dickinson when he spotted her at a concert at St. James’s Hall in London in 1872. This was the closest I could get to seeing what Eliot looked like when Middlemarch was published. I looked hard at the bump on her nose, the lower lip drawn up over her teeth, and the faintest play of amusement at the corners of her mouth. In this drawing, she looked like someone it would be good to talk with.
The Frederic Burton chalk drawing, the one that had gone over the fireplace at the Priory, had been laid out for me on a table in its gilt frame. It showed her at forty-five, close to my own age, and was more or less life-size. I leaned over it and scrutinized it as I might scrutinize my own reflection in an unfamiliar mirror, examining the incipient droop of the eyelids and the trace of a line emerging on the right cheek. This is what it is like to look at one’s face in middle age—to see teeth that were painstakingly realigned in youth stubbornly shifting back to their origins; to see the encroaching furrow on the brow, no longer erased by a subtle muscular relaxation. To me, George Eliot’s face looked kindly and not remarkably unattractive, Henry James notwithstanding, though perhaps I am predisposed to find her less than classically beautiful features sympathetic. “You’ll be a good-looking woman when you are grown-up,” the mother of a pretty, blue-eyed friend told me when I was ten or so—with, I suppose, the best of misplaced intentions—and I have never forgotten it. “To be called an ugly thing in contrast with that lovely creature your companion, is apt to produce some effect beyond a sense of fine veracity and fitness in the phrase,” Eliot writes in Middlemarch.
William Hale White, her fellow resident at Chapman’s, said that the likeness by Sir Frederic Burton was good, “but it gives permanence to that which was not permanent in her face. It lacks the generality combined with particularity which we find in portraits by the greatest masters.” In Middlemarch, Will Ladislaw characterizes the deficiencies of painting, as compared to description. “The true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection,” he tells Adolf Naumann, his artist friend, after they have spotted Dorothea in a gallery in Ro
me. “I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.” I looked at the insistent imperfection of the Burton portrait of Eliot for a long time, trying to imagine the animating spark, the light of intelligence and comprehension flashing from her brow, trying to hear her voice.
IN those days in the early 1850s when William Hale White got to know Eliot, she made repeated references in her letters to her looks: “I am getting as haggard as an old witch under London atmosphere and influences,” she wrote to the Brays. This self-consciousness coincided with her budding friendship with Herbert Spencer. “I am going to the Opera tonight to hear the Huguenots. See what a fine thing it is to pick up people who are short-sighted enough to like one,” she wrote. She and Spencer saw each other almost every day, and it became a common assumption among their circle that they would marry. “All the world is setting us down as engaged,” Eliot told the Brays, though she reported the fact without pleasure, calling the gossip “a most disagreeable thing if one chose to make oneself uncomfortable.”
Spencer was made extremely uncomfortable by such gossip. He had advanced views about marriage, and in his recently published book he had argued for the necessity of equality of rights between husband and wife, and imagined a future in which “women shall have attained to a clear perception of what is due to them, and men to a nobility of feeling which shall make them concede to women the freedom which they themselves claim.” Under such circumstances, Spencer argued, married life “will not be characterized by perpetual squabbles, but by mutual concessions.” Spencer recognized that in terms of intellect and sensibility, Eliot made him a good partner, but there was also an element of marital attraction less easily theorized. He later wrote in his autobiography that “physical beauty is a sine quâ non with me; as was once unhappily proved where the intellectual traits and the emotional traits were of the highest.”
After Eliot’s death, Spencer gave an account of their quasi-courtship in those early months of 1852, in an exculpatory letter to E. L. Youmans, his publisher in America. He had liked her company very much, Spencer explained, and since he had free tickets to the theater and concerts, she had become his regular partner. However, he began to have qualms about what the frequency of their excursions might imply to Eliot, since, he told Youmans, “I could not perceive in myself any indications of a warmer feeling.” He wrote to Eliot in an attempt to head off trouble, delicately suggesting that he was afraid she might be falling in love with him, and advising against it. “Then, afterwards, perceiving how insulting to her was the suggestion that while I felt in no danger of falling in love with her, she was in danger of falling in love with me, I wrote a second letter, apologizing for my unintended insult,” he continued. Eliot “took it all smilingly,” he reported, and forgave him his rudeness.
I find it impossible to read Spencer’s apologia, issued thirty years after the fact, without feeling pity for his bumbling ineptitude. The greatest thinker of his generation was less gifted in the sphere of the emotions, and the pileup of embarrassing letters and conversations belies the dignity of expression that is rendered in the marble bust in the National Portrait Gallery. He was a clueless young man, and she was a proud young woman. To the extent that Eliot took his preemptive rejection “smilingly,” it must have been a rueful smile. “We have agreed that we are not in love with each other, and that there is no reason why we should not have as much of each other’s society as we like,” she wrote to Charles and Cara Bray, and there is an unnatural brightness in her tone, a forced good humor. She gave a more bitter, prickly response to Spencer himself. “I felt disappointed rather than ‘hurt’ that you should not have sufficiently divined my character to perceive how remote it is from my habitual state of mind to imagine that any one is falling in love with me,” she wrote.
The handful of letters that Eliot wrote to Spencer that spring and summer were considered by the trustees of his estate to be so incendiary that when they were given to the British Museum in the 1930s a prohibition was put upon publishing them, or even acknowledging their existence, for fifty years. They were finally published in full a few years early, in 1976, and they make for extremely painful reading. It is possible to see in them the unraveling of Eliot’s hopes, such as they were, for marriage to Spencer, and the expression of her conviction, at thirty-two, that she was unlikely to find anyone else to whom she would be more than just a convenient companion for theatrical outings.
That summer, when temperatures had risen to eighty-nine degrees in London and Eliot had escaped to the seaside resort of Broadstairs, she acidly countered a suggestion from Spencer that she had taken the cooler weather with her. “No credit to me for my virtues as a refrigerant,” she wrote. “I owe them all to a few lumps of ice which I carried away with me from that tremendous glacier of yours.” Still, she attempted to persuade him to join her on the coast, where she was spending several weeks. “I have had a loathing for books—for all tagging together of sentences since I came,” she said in appeal. “You see I am sinking fast towards ‘homogeneity’ ”—a reference to Spencer’s theories—“and my brain will soon be a mere pulp unless you come to arrest the downward process.”
She seems to have reneged on her side of their agreement that they were not in love. “I know this letter will make you very angry with me, but wait a little, and don’t say anything to me while you are angry,” she wrote that July, in a letter free from ironical jabs. “I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, that you will always be with me as much as you can and share your thoughts and feelings with me. If you become attached to some one else, then I must die, but until then I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me. I do not ask you to sacrifice anything—I would be very good and cheerful and never annoy you. But I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions.”
Her abjection is deeply upsetting, even more than a century and a half after the fact. How could she—the remarkable young woman who was the intellectual equal of the celebrated politicians and writers at Joseph Parkes’s dinner parties—have thought so little of herself? Yet her despair is also utterly recognizable, particularly to anyone who has pursued a demanding career and lived alone into her early thirties, and has wondered if she might always be alone.
And Eliot’s letter is not all abjection. At the end there is a remarkable turn, in which she regains her self-possession and issues what now reads like an ultimatum to posterity. “I suppose no woman ever before wrote a letter such as this—but I am not ashamed of it,” she writes. “I am conscious that in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar-minded women might think of me.”
This last letter she sent from her exile on the coast is a pitiful grasp at an inadequate object. But it seems to me that it’s more than that, too—that it’s also a deliberate plumbing of the depths of self-abnegation. The glacial Spencer may have been unable to “perceive in myself any indications of a warmer feeling” toward Eliot, but Eliot sought to experience even her rejection at full emotional volume. I know which of them I would rather be. The price of the experience of love is the pain that love can cause, but that pain’s dividend is a wider range of emotional knowledge and comprehension—an understanding that might, in the future, be recalled and relived, transformed in the pages of a book.
“PLAIN women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science,” Eliot writes of Lydgate early on in Middlemarch. For Lydgate, like Spencer, beauty is a sine qua non, but for him beauty must also be accompanied by charm and subservience. “He held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore
a man’s preeminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in,” Eliot writes. Even a beautiful woman like Dorothea doesn’t meet his standards, being altogether too inquiring and thoughtful: “The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.”
And what is Lydgate’s ideal woman? “An accomplished creature who venerated his high musings and momentous labours and would never interfere with them; who would create order in the home and accounts with still magic, yet keep her fingers ready to touch the lute and transform life into romance at any moment; who was instructed to the true womanly limit and not a hair’s-breadth beyond—docile, therefore, and ready to carry out behests which came from beyond that limit.” He believes the beautiful Rosamond Vincy to be the embodiment of these virtues, but after marrying her discovers that she is the very opposite of compliant. Having been instructed to the true womanly limit but not beyond it, she is incapable of imagining herself living in any other fashion than that for which Mrs. Lemon’s school has prepared her.