The Honeymoon

by Dinitia Smith

  In the late afternoon, when George came home, she said, “Can I read you something?”

  “I’d be delighted.” He hung up his things and settled himself in the armchair.

  “All right,” she began, and read him the scene of Mrs. Hackit in the farmhouse.

  “Yes?” she asked, when she’d finished

  “You’ve got the very things I was doubtful about. You can write dialogue. But what happens next?”

  “His parish is poor. He invites this countess to live with his family. He has a sweet wife but she takes ill.” She tapered off, losing confidence.

  She must have looked disappointed for he quickly interjected, “I no longer have any doubt about your ability to carry it out. Oh, Polly,” he said, “just keep going. Please! You have it in you.”

  After a week, she’d come to the end of the story. Once again, she sat him down and read to him — her voice thin, her words rushed with nervousness — the scene of Milly’s death. “Amos drew her towards him and pressed her head gently to him, while Milly beckoned Fred and Sophy …”

  She looked up for his reaction. He was wiping tears from his eyes with his fist. She kept going. “They watched her breathing becoming more and more difficult, until evening deepened into night, and until midnight was past. About half-past twelve she seemed to be trying to speak, and they leaned to catch her words.

  “ ‘Music — music — didn’t you hear it?’ ”

  Her own eyes flooded with tears now. George kissed her. “I think your pathos is better than your fun,” he said.

  And so it began. George wrote to his publisher, John Blackwood, in Edinburgh, enclosing a story written, he said, by a very shy friend whom he couldn’t name. Would Blackwood be interested in publishing it in his magazine?

  A few days later came Blackwood’s response. “Amos Barton” “is unquestionably very pleasant reading,” he wrote. However, he said, he’d have to see more of this unnamed writer’s stories before he published anything. And he did worry that there wasn’t enough action.

  When George read Blackwood’s letter back to her, she collapsed in disappointment. George wrote again to Blackwood defending her story, and Blackwood relented. “I have so high an opinion of this first Tale,” he wrote, “that I will waive my objections.”

  When George showed Marian the letter, she jumped up and down and clapped her hands.

  In January, there it was in the magazine, her own words, in the ineradicable medium of print. Without her name on the story, of course, as was usual. A secret. That was the way it was done. But it had begun.

  Chapter 13

  All because of him. Without him there would have been nothing. He cosseted her, comforted her, shielded her, warning Blackwood that his anonymous writer friend was “unusually sensitive” and of a “shy, shrinking, and ambitious nature.”

  “He is so easily discouraged,” warned George. Yet more stories followed: “Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story,” a love triangle set against the backdrop of Cheverel Manor, based on Arbury Hall; and “Janet’s Repentance,” about an alcoholic lawyer who dreadfully abuses his wife, in a town similar to Nuneaton. Blackwood collected them all in one volume under the title Scenes of Clerical Life.

  “I want it printed under a pseudonym,” she insisted to George. “I can’t bear to have my real name used. I can’t bear the scrutiny.”

  “Probably it must be a man’s name,” he said. “If the critics know it’s a woman it’ll never be taken seriously.”

  “Yes,” she said. “ ‘George,’ ” she said, smiling mischievously. “I will be ‘George’!”

  “ ‘George’?” he repeated.

  “Yes. ‘George.’ ”

  “I’m very honored,” he said, with a laugh. “But not ‘George Lewes.’ I can’t take credit for your work.”

  “What about ‘Eliot.’ ‘George Eliot’?” she said. “A nice, simple name, easy to say.”

  “Madame George Eliot, then,” he said, bowing to her.

  The publication date for Scenes of Clerical Life was January 8, 1858. A few days later, George came bounding up the stairs, tripping in his eagerness. “I’ve got some very pretty news for you.” He reached into his coat and drew out a copy of the Times.

  “Read it!” he commanded. He stood smiling, watching her. “… a sobriety which is shown to be compatible with strength, clear and simple descriptions and a combination of humour with pathos in depicting ordinary situations …” It was a review of her book.

  She stood there limply. “Oh, God.” And then, falteringly, “Maybe this means I can go on.”

  “Bollocks! It means you have no choice.”

  Blackwood had sent presentation copies of the book to prominent people. Charles Dickens wrote complimenting the author on his “marvels of description,” but he swore that no man could have written it.

  Blackwood was beginning to wonder who his author really was. One Sunday he was visiting London from Edinburgh, and he came to supper to discuss with George the business of “George Eliot’s” publication.

  Blackwood was about forty, with light, Celtic skin, thin lips, a twinkle in his eye, and a broad, Scottish accent. George, of course, introduced him to “Mrs. Lewes.” As always, she attempted to stay in the background, not wanting to be noticed.

  “Will I ever meet the real George Eliot?” Blackwood asked.

  George looked at her. “Would you excuse us a moment?” he said. Blackwood nodded.

  She left the room and George followed her into the hallway.

  “Should I?” said George.

  “Yes,” she said, fearfully.

  They reentered the parlor where Blackwood stood waiting.

  “May I introduce George Eliot?” George said.

  “My goodness!” Blackwood cried, with a broad smile. “I am delighted.”

  After a moment of laughter, in which he shook her hand vigorously at finally getting to meet his author, Blackwood said, “But I think we should keep the nom de plume. I like the mystery of it. It will spur sales.” And so it was decided.

  Always, George propped her up. He cut bad reviews out of the newspapers and handed them to her with holes in them. He even kept good reviews from her if they referred back to a negative one.

  Success emboldened her, gave her courage. That May, she forced herself finally to tell Isaac that she was now living with George. “I have changed my name,” she wrote, “and have someone to take care of me in the world.”

  A week passed. Silence. Then, a letter from Mr. Holbeche, the solicitor: her brother, Isaac, was so “hurt at your not having previously made some communication to him as to your intention and prospects that he cannot make up his mind to write.” When and where was she married? Isaac wanted to know. She could only write back the truth. “Our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond. He is unable at present to contract a legal marriage …” Within days came a letter from Chrissey saying that Isaac had forbidden her ever to speak to Marian again.

  Holding the letter in her hand, she saw Isaac in her mind’s eye, tight-lipped, vengeful, cold, once the bright little boy she’d adored beyond anyone in the world. He’d cut her off as if her love for him was meaningless, as if he’d never felt the warmth of her little arms around his neck, or heard her calling after him, “Wait for me, Isaac!”

  She didn’t understand. Was Chrissey right that he was punishing her simply because he was jealous of her intelligence, for being independent of him?

  His anger had gone to that part of her that would always be within her, forged in her childhood: the gossipy ways of the little country town in which she’d been raised, its strict etiquettes of love and courtship, the shame of a woman unable to resist her sexuality and who succumbs to it out of wedlock. It was as if she were naked now, for all the world to see.

  She remembered that terrible story Aunt Elizabeth, her father’s sister, who was a Methodist minister, had once told her. Aunt Elizabeth worked in a prison where she met a young wo
man who’d given birth to a baby out of wedlock, and then in shame and terror had abandoned it. The woman realized what she’d done and she ran back to save it, but by then the baby was dead. She was accused of murder and sentenced to be hanged. Aunt Elizabeth had prayed with her for forgiveness and accompanied her to the scaffold.

  She told George the story. “Do you think I might make a novel out of it?” she asked.

  “I think that’s a grand idea,” he said.

  “You always say that about everything I do!”

  He took her in his arms. “I cannot help it if I live with genius,” he said.

  It would be a country story, filled with the scent of hay and the sweet breath of cows. She created a character, Adam Bede — like her father, tall and strong, a carpenter, a moral man. Adam falls in love with Hetty Sorel, but Hetty is in love with the local aristocrat, Arthur Donnithorne.

  As she composed the story, she tried to remember everything about the minutiae of country life. When, exactly, did the foxgloves bloom? She looked it up — July 3. And when was the hay harvested? July 13.

  Blackwood kept asking what she was writing, but she refused to tell him. “I can’t bear him to say anything negative,” she told George. “I’ll be so disheartened I won’t be able to go on.”

  She read parts of it aloud to George. “Adam’s too passive,” he said. So she wrote a scene where Adam gets into a fistfight with Squire Donnithorne in the woods.

  Hetty becomes pregnant with Donnithorne’s child. She has the baby, but, as in Aunt Elizabeth’s story, she abandons it. She hears its cries and she too runs back to save it, but it’s too late. She’s tried for murder and comforted by the exquisite lay preacher, Dinah.

  When Adam Bede was published, the Times wrote that the author “takes rank at once among the masters.” The book sold ten thousand copies in one year; it was printed in America and translated into German, Dutch, Hungarian, French, and Russian. None other than Leo Tolstoy called it the “highest art flowing from the love of God and man.” Rumor had it that Queen Victoria loved the novel so much she read it aloud to Prince Albert in bed at night.

  But along with success must there always come some punishment? Only a month after Adam Bede was published, Chrissey wrote that she was ill with consumption. It had now been two years since she’d heard a word from Chrissey, on Isaac’s orders. “How very sorry I have been,” Chrissey wrote, “that I ceased to write and neglected one who, under all circumstances, was kind to me …” Chrissey had lost two more of her children, Fanny from typhus, and Robert, making his way to Australia to find work, had drowned at sea.

  Of course, she wrote back to Chrissey saying she still loved her and had forgiven her for everything.

  A few days later Chrissey’s daughter, Emily, wrote to say that her mother had died. Isaac had taken Chrissey from Marian long ago, but still she mourned. Gone was the sweet sister of her youth, her big sister, who had comforted her when she was a cold and frightened little girl at Miss Lathom’s.

  Because of Adam Bede, for the first time in their lives they had money. They leased a house of their own, Holly Lodge in South Fields. They bought new linens, crockery, and carpets from a wholesale store on Watling Street. The house was yellow brick, three stories tall, and airy, with bay windows, though it was semidetached, surrounded by other houses. There was only a low hedge of laurel and holly between it and the road. But she and George could each have a study now.

  Few visitors came, and rarely any women because of their unmarried state. Marian wasn’t sorry. She’d have preferred excommunication to having to sit through visits with frivolous women. Of course Barbara Smith came, but Barbara wasn’t afraid of anything.

  A miracle had occurred for Barbara. After she had visited them that summer in Tenby three years before and confessed her torment over John Chapman, her father, Ben Smith, had whisked her and her sisters away to Algiers to get her out of Chapman’s reach. There, Barbara had met a French-Algerian doctor, Eugène Bodichon, and she, who had so loved The Arabian Nights, had fallen in love with the tall, dark-skinned man. The doctor proposed. Barbara eagerly accepted. Again, her father had protested the marriage, worried that the doctor was another fortune hunter. Barbara insisted that she was going to marry him anyway — she was over twenty-one now, twenty-seven in fact, and her father couldn’t prevent the marriage. Ben Smith set up a trust protecting her money from the doctor and reluctantly gave the marriage his blessing.

  They had a small wedding in London. One summer evening, after the wedding, Barbara had brought Eugène to meet Marian and George. The doctor was exotic-looking, with thick black hair, but his English was poor. During supper, Barbara, her cheeks flushed, had mostly talked for him, about his work treating the indigenous people of Algiers, about his book on how the French settlers were vulnerable to native diseases. All the while, the doctor had gazed at her with a smile on his face, watching her, but, Marian felt, anxious to be elsewhere. “Eugène says he can’t bear to live in London,” Barbara said, “so we’ve reached a compromise. We’ll live in Algiers in winter, where I’ll have a studio and paint, but we’ll spend our summers here in London because of the heat.”

  After supper, they had taken a moonlight cruise on the Thames to Twickenham, and all the while, Barbara, who was tall herself, never took her eyes off Eugène. It was clear that she had succumbed at last to “the Master Passion.”

  Now, two years later, Barbara, off for her annual winter sojourn in Algiers, had come to Holly Lodge to say goodbye to Marian.

  “This is an improvement over your old rooms in Richmond,” Barbara said. “You used to complain you could hear each other’s pens scratching when you worked.”

  “But the houses are so close together,” Marian said, “and the windows are so big. I feel as if everyone can see into our lives here. They know everything about us.”

  Barbara intuited what she meant. “What if George tried to obtain a divorce on the Continent?” she asked, no doubt in the excitement of her own marriage and wishing the same for Marian. “Perhaps it would be legal in England. Then the problem would be solved.”

  Later, after Barbara had gone, Marian told George of Barbara’s suggestion. “I’ll get on it at once in the morning,” he said. “I’ll speak to the solicitor.”

  But when he came in the next afternoon, his face was downcast. “I’m so sorry, my darling.”

  “He said no!” she cried.

  “Yes,” he said, taking her hands. “He says there is no such thing as an international treaty about divorce. Wherever we might get one on the Continent, it wouldn’t apply here.”

  She turned away angrily. “What does it matter?” she said. “We’re more married than most people who were wed in a church.”

  He caught her wrist and spun her around. “And nothing,” he said, fiercely and finally, “and no one, can ever rend us asunder.”

  Another of their visitors at Holly Lodge was Herbert Spencer. George loved Spencer, that brilliant, eccentric fellow. And what did she care anyway about the hurt Spencer had inflicted on her, she who was so bathed now in George’s love? She had told George of the episode — she kept nothing from him. “If it hadn’t been for him bringing you to the Princess that night,” George said, “we wouldn’t be together. That was the first time we really spoke.” Spencer was such a sad, aggrieved person these days, he felt his genius was unrecognized. He was writing his autobiography, though he was a very young man still. She couldn’t stay angry at the odd soul who simply lacked the human capacity for love. They asked him to dinner and he was grateful, though apparently totally unaware of the pain he’d once caused her.

  Ever since the publication of Adam Bede, the public’s curiosity to know the real George Eliot had intensified. Someone from Coventry said that Isaac had recognized their father in the character of Adam. And there was a madman from Nuneaton, one Joseph Liggins, who was going around insisting that he was actually George Eliot, and the author of both Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede.
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  It was impossible to keep the secret up any longer. They began to tell friends that George Eliot was none other than Marian Evans, a country girl from Warwickshire who had educated herself to become one of the most famous authors in the land, and soon the word spread. But they decided she would retain the pseudonym “George Eliot” on future books, as that was the name on her first great success.

  It had been two years now since Isaac had cut her out of his life. Sometimes the hurt and anger faded, and then it arose again without warning. How could Isaac keep away from her this long? He had inherited their father’s terrible capacity for anger, the ability to separate himself from what he loved out of the principles ingrained in him by his little country world. And Chrissey was gone now. There was no one now whom she could call brother or sister, she had no real family.

  She sat in the conservatory window at Holly Lodge in the bleak, winter silence, looking out, thinking about him. Before her was a wide view, it was almost countryside, not quite, all the way to Wimbledon. The leaves had gone from the trees, there was only the brown grass, the cold that she so hated. George was in his study, working on a series of essays he was calling The Physiology of Common Life. They were descriptions of the nervous, digestive, and respiratory systems of different species. He wanted it to be clearly written for the common reader, but also of interest to scientists.

  As she sat there staring out the window of the conservatory, she began to imagine a woman such as herself sitting in a window, thinking about the past.

  She turned to her little table, and wrote the words “I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of —” She saw in her mind’s eye the little mill at Arbury, the turning wheel, jets of water spurting out of it. “Dorlcote Mill,” she’d call it. A girl was standing there. “That little girl was watching too,” she wrote. But it was no small stream, as it had been at Arbury, it was a mighty river, the River Floss, she’d call it.