Then he wrote to say he’d decided to expand his publishing empire and buy the Westminster Review. He had to find backers, write up a prospectus. How he wished she were there to help him. Would she mind if he came up to Coventry to discuss it with her? He badly needed her advice.
The night before he was to arrive, she went out into the garden to collect herself. She sat on the swing in the soft, dark air. She mustn’t expect him to love her, she must somehow learn to survive. There must be some part of her that was worthwhile without the love of a man, some essence within her that wasn’t dependent on a man’s love, that would survive if she were alone. But perhaps he was coming to Coventry to beg her to return to the Strand? To tell her he didn’t care any longer about Susanna Chapman’s fits of temper and Elisabeth Tilley’s histrionics? That he needed her too much to let her go?
He arrived on the noon train and there he stood in the doorway at Rosehill, tall and lanky, his dark, lustrous eyes looking past Charles and Cara with an intense gaze to where she stood behind them, trying to be invisible.
At supper he talked about his plans to buy the Westminster, to make it again an organ for the most radical thinking of the time. He hoped Charles would be an investor.
Afterward he told Marian, “I’ve written up a draft of my prospectus. I have such difficulty putting my thoughts into words. Do you think you could look at it?”
She went over it. He was a terrible writer, his thoughts were unfinished, there were dashes everywhere, triads and dyads of adjectives and verbs, all in one watery volume. She began laboriously to try to render his words into coherent sentences.
The next morning, he asked her to go with him to Leamington, to see Kenilworth Castle.
It was a lambent spring day. They sat on the grass. Before them was the great sweep of green leading up to the soaring ruins of the castle, the gift of Queen Elizabeth to her favorite, Dudley, the skeletons of its Tudor windows outlined starkly against the bright blue sky.
“They say the queen really loved Dudley,” she remarked.
He chewed on a blade of grass, his long legs stretched out before him.
“He entertained her here for weeks on end,” she went on, “with parties and masques. They say he had his wife, Amy Robsart, murdered, to keep the queen’s love.”
“Ah, love,” he said, exhaling into the spring air. “Ah, beauty!…”
“The queen wasn’t beautiful,” she went on. “She had smallpox. They say she had so many teeth pulled that she put rags in her cheeks to fill them out. But they say that she did have pretty hands.” Here she looked down at her own hands, slender and delicate, her only good feature. “Yet he wanted to marry her. I suppose for the power.”
He lay back on the grass, resting his head on his arms. “Female beauty is such a mystery. It’s witchery.”
“Witchery?”
“I’m thinking of my own weakness, the way I’m so swayed by it.”
She knew what he was saying. He was sexually beholden to Elisabeth Tilley. And Mrs. Chapman overlooked it because she knew that the governess fulfilled his needs, and otherwise he’d leave her. Susanna could tolerate Miss Tilley because she had the governess in her power, she was her employer and she couldn’t manage the household by herself. But Marian was too much to bear. She was a different kind of threat. With her, he had a meeting of the minds as well, and he needed her if his firm was to survive.
But, why, why couldn’t he be “entranced” by her too? Why hadn’t nature made her attractive too?
She felt a burning behind her eyes. She couldn’t help it, she began to cry. He was gazing at the sky, but he heard her sniffle. “Marian, what’s the matter?”
Embarrassed to answer, she buried her face in her hands.
“You mustn’t,” he said. “This is terrible. Please …”
She shook her head, her sobs overtaking her.
“Tell me,” he urged.
“I wish I were beautiful,” she cried.
“No!” he said. “It’s not that. We just can’t go on. There’s war in the house. I can’t afford to lose Elisabeth. And Susanna won’t give me any peace. It can’t be like this between us anymore.”
He reached into his breast pocket, found his handkerchief, and dabbed at her cheeks. She could hardly stand his touch, it only reminded her of what it was like to be held by him, the comfort of his arms.
Then he said brightly, “If I buy the Westminster, perhaps you could be the editor.”
“The editor? Why not you?”
“Because you’re a far better editor than I am. And I’ll still have to run the publishing side of the firm. I couldn’t pay you right away. But I could give you free room and board at 142.”
He went on. “You could also write for the magazine. I could pay you a contributor’s fee. You could do a regular column on foreign literature.”
For a moment, a surge of happiness blotted out her misery. “I’d like that, very much. But … will Miss Tilley and Mrs. Chapman ever allow it?”
“I’ll explain to them I need you for the firm, but only on the most proper terms, of course. They’ll have nothing to be concerned about anymore, the firm is the most important thing.”
“I see,” she said. But what did he mean, “the most proper terms”? That he was willing to give up their intimacy so she could do his work for him?
“I’ll tell them we’ve taken a solemn vow,” he said.
At this she stood up and began walking away from him, her mouth tight, furious.
He caught up with her. “Will you do it, Marian? Then I can tell them? Then you can come back to London,” he said, knowing that this, at the very least, was what she longed for.
Perhaps the scar from this wound would be a barrier defending her from doing the same thing again, from being wounded by someone else. She nodded. She would come.
He returned to London while she stayed in Coventry and continued rewriting his prospectus. The Westminster would carry on all the best traditions of its heyday, she wrote; it would be radical, but mindful that real change is “the result only of a slow and peaceful development.” Her own belief exactly.
The magazine would question Christian dogma, but be respectful of the importance of religion to morality. It would be against religious discrimination, in favor of free trade, judicial reform, and the vote for women.
The first week in June, she finished the prospectus and Chapman sent it off under his own name to potential investors.
But if she was going to be the real editor of the Westminster Review, she told Chapman, it had to be a secret. No woman had ever been editor of a literary journal, investors would never stand for it. And she wanted to be hidden from view. In fact, she couldn’t bear to be known. If there were mistakes, if the magazine failed, no one would know she was responsible. Why not simply tell investors, she suggested, that he had an editor whom he couldn’t yet name, but in whom he had absolute confidence?
It was agreed that they’d keep it a secret.
He wrote to say that he’d told Susanna and Elisabeth about their “solemn vow,” and that he couldn’t run his company without her. They’d relented, and agreed to let her return to the Strand to help him keep it going.
By the way, Chapman added, the writer George Henry Lewes had called to express his high opinion of her article on Greg’s Creed of Christendom. After it was turned down elsewhere, Chapman had sent it to Lewes, who had published it in the Leader, the radical weekly Lewes had cofounded with the journalist Thornton Hunt. She’d written it unsigned, but Chapman had revealed her name to Lewes.
Chapter 8
Marian Evans was now the secret editor of the Westminster Review. She moved back to London to the Strand and stayed away from Chapman as much as possible, up in her own room or in the office downstairs in the back of the house. They kept the door open to reassure Susanna and Elisabeth Tilley that all was proper. He never ventured upstairs to the third floor anymore.
So this would be her life. She’d be a worki
ng woman. There would be no man for her, and she would survive. She had her “job,” and was good at it and it satisfied her, and with her allowance from her father’s estate she could just manage. She didn’t need a man or a family. There were other women like this, women of talent — Harriet Martineau, for instance — who were in charge of their own lives, who didn’t need men to shape them. There was a life here for her in London, people around her who were brilliant and engaging, who could be her friends.
Perhaps she was capable of taking a lover without loving him, or thinking at least that she loved him. She thought of George Sand, who’d apparently made love to many men. Did Sand really love those men, did she really give herself to them completely? Or was she somehow removed from her own body, detaching herself from true and profound intimacy, so that ultimately, it didn’t matter to her as deeply as it did to other women whom she was with? Marian realized that she could never do that, separate herself from her own body. The only way she could completely give herself was if the act was inextricably bound with her emotions. In the end, she didn’t understand women like Sand. They were incomprehensible.
One Friday evening after her return, at the Chapmans’ soiree, she looked up and saw a stooped, rumpled-looking young man standing uncomfortably over her, silently staring at her. He had a high, domed forehead and big sideburns. It was Herbert Spencer. He was a subeditor at the Economist, which had offices across the street from 142.
She tried to make conversation with him, but he answered only in monosyllables. She told him she’d read his book, Social Statics, which Chapman had just published. That brought a flicker of interest to his eyes. Spencer had a new theory, based on Linnaeus and Lamarck, called social evolution, that human beings were infinitely perfectible and would evolve progressively and that the state would eventually wither away.
He told her he was writing a new book on “the evolution of human psychology.” Suddenly he became voluble. “I’m positing the theory that people’s mental faculties, like their physical selves, evolve under the influence of the environment. And because of selection. Ultimately, I’m arguing, this will lead to the highest development of reason.”
She suggested he read Mill’s System of Logic, and also Comte, if he could read French. “I think you’ll find them useful,” she said. “Especially Comte. You’ve got quite a lot in common with him.”
He looked at her strangely, no doubt surprised that she, a woman, knew these books.
“Perhaps,” he said uncertainly. “My French is almost nonexistent.”
Meanwhile, she and Chapman were preparing frantically for the first issue of the new Westminster Review. She suggested to Chapman that Francis Newman write an article on the extension of the franchise, and William Rathbone Greg on “Relations Between Employer and Employed.” The Oxford professor Edward Forbes could do an essay on shellfish, and George Henry Lewes on the Baltic-German mystic, Julia von Krüdener, who had had such an effect on Tsar Alexander. Perhaps Carlyle could be persuaded to write on the hereditary peerage, she said. These were splendid ideas, Chapman thought.
One morning in early autumn, she stood in the pouring rain across the street from Carlyle’s house on Cheyne Walk while Chapman went inside to try to get the great man to contribute to the magazine. She couldn’t go in because they had to preserve the fiction that Chapman was the magazine’s editor. After a half hour Chapman emerged from the house. “He doesn’t seem very interested,” he said gloomily.
They searched the shops for books to review in the magazine. At William Jeff’s Bookshop in the Burlington Arcade looking for foreign works, they ran into George Henry Lewes, who’d published her Greg essay. Chapman introduced her. Lewes was a jack-of-all-trades, a journalist, critic, novelist, and playwright. He’d also written a Biographical History of Philosophy, intended for a popular audience, which had done very well. He was a little man with a big head; his wiry black hair stuck out all around a pockmarked face, and his bushy eyebrows nearly met across his forehead.
Lewes had given Spencer’s Social Statics a very good review in his magazine, the Leader. “We are eternally grateful,” Chapman said to him.
“One must always review one’s friends’ books well!” Lewes said, laughing. Marian thought he looked like a miniature Mirabeau. “And,” he said to her, “thank you for your excellent review of the Greg for the Leader.”
She thanked him and turned back to searching through the books on the table.
As they left, Chapman muttered under his breath, “Carlyle calls him the Ape. He’s so shaggy and he never sits still.”
“That’s cruel,” she said.
“And despite it all, he’s rather a rake,” Chapman said. “He and his wife have an arrangement, I believe.” She thought no more of it.
At the next Friday soiree at the Strand, to her surprise, Herbert Spencer came up to her again. “I read the Mill. It was useful,” he said, as if reluctantly granting her something. “I managed to get through some of your Comte. But I didn’t think much of him.”
“Oh dear, why? He’s not my Comte, anyway.”
“Too limited. He says we can only accept as evidence that which we can see in front of our eyes. How can you have any philosophy with that?”
“He isn’t saying you can’t intuit things. He’s just reinforcing the validity of human perception.”
“I suppose I sympathize with him there. I’m with him on natural law, but there are some things that are simply unknowable.”
At ensuing gatherings, Spencer continued to seek her out. He’d stand there tongue-tied, but the moment she asked about his work, he became talkative and monopolized her attention. He had a strange, unconventional mind, unlike any she’d ever encountered. He was unmarried and her own age. He seemed to appreciate her intellect, but also to be drawn to her as a woman. Sometimes, at the Friday evenings, when she played the piano, she could get him to sing along with her. He would jolly up, as if relieved that someone had shown him how to be normal. She saw in him then the possibility of happiness and laughter.
On another Friday evening, she noticed a tall, full-bodied woman with full long golden hair and a proud carriage. The woman was with Bessie Parkes, whose father Joseph Parkes had funded Marian’s Strauss translation. Bessie introduced Marian to her. The tall, golden-haired woman’s name was Barbara Leigh Smith.
Marian had heard of the Smiths. They were a “tabooed” family, immensely rich merchant princes who’d made a fortune in the whiskey business, among other enterprises. Barbara’s father, Ben Smith, had stood for Parliament and supported liberal causes. Her mother was Anne Longden, a milliner whom Ben had fallen in love with and impregnated five times. But he’d never married her. Perhaps he was against the marriage laws, perhaps the difference in social status mattered to him. Nonetheless he was devoted to her and his children. She had died when Barbara was seven, leaving Ben heartbroken. He lavished everything on his offspring. When Barbara was twenty-one he’d settled a generous allowance on her so she could be an independent woman and study art. Still, all the Smith children bore the stigma of illegitimacy.
Barbara and Bessie told her they had begun to devote all their efforts to the cause of women, the fact that women couldn’t vote, their poor access to education, and the property laws — once women married their property belonged to their husbands. Among other things, the two of them told her, they were protesting long skirts and stays, which imprisoned women’s bodies. They themselves had abandoned corsets altogether, they said.
They’d even composed a ditty about it, they said, which they proceeded to sing for her there and then at the party, arms linked, kicking up their legs. “Oh! Isn’t it jolly,” they sang,
To cast away folly,
And cut all one’s clothes a peg shorter
(A good many pegs),
And rejoice in one’s legs
Like a free-minded Albion’s daughter.
The people at the party turned to look at them and laughed. She laughed too, though it wa
s a bit much for her. She was embarrassed by their breaking into song in the middle of the party and talking about exposing their legs. If anything, she wanted to hide her body. She was afraid of showing herself, of being known.
She knew the condition of women was wrong, but Barbara and Bessie’s pronouncements were so shrill and absolute. Both of them came from rich, radical, freethinking families that gave them the confidence to rebel and declare themselves, she thought. She found herself getting into a heated discussion with them about women’s education. “If you open up education to women,” Marian said, “they’ll disdain their traditional work of taking care of children and their families.”
“But you’re educated,” Barbara said. “How can you deny the same thing to other women?”
“I had to earn a living, I had to educate myself. I have no husband.” And it was true.
She didn’t say this to them then — but the mere idea that women might disdain their roles as mothers, that children could be deprived of mothering, pained her. All her life she’d longed for a mother who would love her, comfort her, allay her sorrows. How could she wish to do away with a mother’s watchful protection, a mother’s unconditional love? She knew all too well the pain of its absence.
“I can tell we’ve got some educating to do here,” Barbara said to Bessie.
Marian smiled. “We’ll see,” she said.
From then on, the two young women attached themselves to her. They invited her to their parties and to their parents’ grand houses, where, dressed in her one party dress, of black velvet, she met more of London’s important writers and radical elites.
She drew close especially to Barbara, entranced by her bustling, take-charge nature, her animal spirits. Barbara was everything she wasn’t — fearless, headstrong, proudly tenacious. Barbara was determined to found a college for women at Cambridge, and she wanted to establish a women’s hospital with Bessie’s cousin Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in America. Barbara was especially adamant on the topic of “enforced feminine innocence.” “This whole idea of ‘protecting women,’ ” Barbara insisted, “means they forfeit their rights and duties as human beings.”
The Honeymoon Page 12