The little girl was Maggie Tulliver. She has a brother, Tom, whom she adores. Like Isaac, Tom has “cheeks of cream and roses.” Tom is bossy and they squabble, as all brothers and sisters do. Maggie is keenly intelligent, but she can only go to school for a year because it’s her job to take care of their elderly father. Tom, however, gets a good education and succeeds in business.
As always the writing, the process of creating a story from the recesses of her mind, from her fragile memories, went slowly.
George came in with the post. “Something from Barbara,” he said. “I thought you’d want to see it.” She had told no one but George what she was writing, but Barbara knew she was struggling with a new book. Barbara had written a little note of encouragement to her, and enclosed a drawing of Parizade, the princess from The Arabian Nights, Parizade, who demanded to be educated like her brothers, to be allowed to hunt like them. Barbara had evoked their mutual love of The Arabian Nights to cheer her up.
Marian hung the drawing up above her desk for inspiration, and wrote to thank her. “Parizade has a mysterious resemblance to the heroine of the book I am writing,” she told her.
She went on with her work. There would be aunts in the novel, her mother’s sisters, the Pearsons. She made Aunt Mary into Aunt Glegg, a sarcastic old bat, whom the children hate; Aunt Elizabeth became the weepy, valetudinarian Aunt Pullet; and Aunt Ann, thin, sallow, and rich, was Aunt Deane. Sweet revenge.
Young Maggie is attracted to wealthy Stephen Guest. They spend the night on a boat on the River Floss — but they do nothing wrong. Tom learns about it and disowns her, just as Isaac had disowned Marian.
At the end of the book, the river floods, swelling into an immense tide, moaning in restless sorrow like an angry god. Brother and sister are reconciled, but they drown together, locked in an unbroken embrace.
On the morning of March 21, she finished. In her journal she wrote, “Magnificat anima mea!” — “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” from the Evening Prayer.
“George Eliot is as great as ever,” wrote the London Times reviewer. The Mill on the Floss earned her twice as much as Adam Bede.
Three days after she finished the book, they set out for the Continent. “It’s time for you to know the boys,” George said. He had sent his sons to the Hofwyl School in Berne to get them away from the chaos in Agnes’s house. It was an idealistic place, with rich and poor pupils alike, in which they learned their lessons through farming, but George missed his boys sorely.
They were teenagers now, and he had explained the situation with Marian to them. He’d begun to mention Marian in his letters, and then gradually to refer to her as “Mother” — Agnes was always, respectfully, “Mama.” It was decided that Marian should begin to write to them herself. She sent them little gifts: for Charley, the eldest, who was sixteen, a watch, and for Thornie, the middle boy, who was fourteen, a copy of Adam Bede. To Bertie, the youngest, at eleven, she sent a pocketknife with a corkscrew. She suggested to George that she sign her letters to them Mutter. “Perfect,” George said. “It acknowledges that you are not quite their real mother, but you are a mother to them.”
They wrote back to thank her for their gifts, charmingly. Charley signed his letter “Yours affectionately, Charles Lewes.” Thornie began, “For the first time do I seize the pen to begin a correspondence which is to be lasting which affords me much pleasure.” Little Bertie wrote poignantly, “I long to come back to England again, it is 3 yearys that I have not seen England.” “Poor little fellow,” George had said. “He was very ill as a child and I’m afraid he’s a bit ‘slow.’ ”
“Thornie’s most like me,” George told her. “He’s a devil, very high-spirited, I’m afraid. I hope he won’t be too much for you.” And indeed, soon Thornie was revealing his true colors, entreating her in his letters to persuade his father, “Schnurrbarttragende alte” (whiskery old man), as he called him, to increase his allowance.
Now she was finally going to meet them. They traveled through Italy toward Switzerland. In Florence, George was reading the guidebook when he said, “You should write a novel about Savonarola.”
The idea caught her — here was a chance to confront the evil of absolute morality, the pain it caused, what it had done to her, as manifested in the cruel rigidities of the country life of her childhood, in Isaac’s pitiless judgment. “We’ll research it together,” he said.
The next morning they set out through the hot, narrow streets of Florence for the San Marco monastery, where Savonarola had lived. At the door, a monk, dressed in a cloak and hood, slightly bent over, stood guard. Seeing her, he addressed George, “I am sorry, Signor, but women are not allowed inside.”
“As if there’s anything going on under those skirts of his,” George whispered.
“Not to worry,” she told him. “I’ll wait here.” So she stayed in the outer cloister studying Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion while George went inside and made notes for her on what he saw. “From the refectory a spiral staircase leads to (room) … Savonarola’s cell 5 paces long 4 broad …” Then they went to the Magliabecchian Library, where they saw Savonarola’s manuscripts, written in his tiny handwriting. But they could remain in Florence only a few days because they had to go on to Switzerland to see the boys. As they left, she said to George, “I have all these facts, but what is my story?”
“You will find it,” he said, with certainty.
They arrived in Berne, and in the morning George hurried to the Hofwyl School to fetch his sons. She waited in the hotel lobby. What would they think of her? Would they dislike her because their first loyalty was to their real mother, Agnes? What did one say to teenaged boys?
When they entered the hotel, George led the way, followed by the three of them in descending order, Charley solemn and round-faced, Thornie with a quicker, bouncing stride, little Bertie lagging shyly behind.
“This is Mutter,” Charley said, formally introducing them one by one. Each politely shook her hand.
Immediately, as she gazed upon them, she felt love surge through her. They were his flesh. She could see him in them, in Charley’s dark eyes, in the shape of Thornton’s face with his high cheekbones, in Bertie’s full mouth. They had come from him.
“Perhaps we should show Mutter the school,” George suggested.
The school occupied a group of structures built on a hillside in the shadow of the Alps.
“This is the classroom,” Charley said in a most grown-up way. “In the summer we work mostly on the farm and have only one hour of class each day.”
Thornie poked his brother. “Oh, Charley, this is so boring!” he said. “Let’s go to the museum. I want to show her my stuffed birds.”
Charley poked him back, annoyed, and soon they were jostling each other and it was becoming a shoving match. “Stop now, this minute!” George commanded. “Let’s show Mutter our best selves.” He added apologetically, “We call Thornie ‘Caliban.’ ”
They followed Thornie to the school’s museum, which was filled with specimens of plants and animals. “Those are my birds,” Thornie said. “See, I stuffed them myself! It’s my desire to be a naturalist.”
Little Bertie said nothing, and as they stood there, Marian put her arm protectively around his narrow shoulders, and he let it rest there.
In the afternoon, like proper parents, she and George had tea with the headmaster Dr. Müller and his wife, to discuss the boys’ future.
Charley was seventeen now. It was time for him to leave school and take up a profession. They would bring him back to London with them. Thornie wasn’t a very good pupil at all, and could use additional instruction, would follow soon to London. Little Bertie was very slow indeed, and he would stay behind for now.
At home in London, away from the teasing influence of Thornie, Charley was sweet and solemn and carefully behaved, as if he were afraid they would send him back to Switzerland. He was so polite and grown up, trying not to disturb them when they worked. In the evenings, she and Char
ley played duets on the piano, and sometimes chess. Charley was one of those beings to whom goodness comes naturally, she thought. She was becoming a mother.
A month later, rambunctious Thornie followed. They needed a larger home to accommodate them all, and they found a house in Blandford Square. It was near the Smith mansion, though Barbara spent the cold months in Algiers with Eugène.
Marian was up to her ears in “Boydom” now. But she didn’t mind.
The boys needed a profession. George knew Anthony Trollope, a stout, big-bearded, hearty soul, who worked at the Post Office, writing on trains as he traveled around the country as an inspector. George asked if he could help Charley find a position at the Post Office, and Trollope readily agreed. But Charley had to pass the civil service exam first. His spelling and grammar were rather weak as a result of all his years in a Swiss school.
George and Marian tutored him every day, dictating aloud to him so he could perfect his English. He earned the top score in the exam and got a job as supplementary clerk, second class. Eighty pounds a year!
Dear Thornie was another matter. His desired career as a naturalist seemed impractical, given that he wasn’t a very good student. There were jobs opening up now in the colonies, and George decided that the East Indian Civil Service would provide an opportunity for him. The civil service exam for India was very competitive, and it would take a year to prepare for it. It was decided that he would do his preparation at the Edinburgh High School, where George knew the headmaster, Dr. Schmitz.
Immediately upon hearing he was to go to Edinburgh, Thornie imagined his adventures there, “kicking up rows. Perhaps I’ll run away to Sicily and make a glorious name as a fighter with Garibaldi.” Dr. Schmitz announced that he didn’t want the boy staying in his house, as he had two daughters. He was to board instead in the house of the classics master, Mr. Robinson.
Marian, forty-one years old, was for the first time be a mother. The boys were teenagers, and it was different entirely, of course, from caring for a young child. But with Charley, especially, who lived with them, the love had been kindled within her. She called him “our son.” She was so grateful that he accepted her, and, she felt, he loved her too. Perhaps he’d missed proper mothering, having spent so much time away from his own mother, who was no doubt preoccupied with her hordes of babies. What would it be like to have a baby now? To be older and suddenly have a child?
She imagined a man, her own age, suddenly having to care for a child. She remembered riding in the gig with her father and seeing that grim, stooped-over weaver walking on the side of the road, the boys taunting him while he ignored them. The sight had always stayed with her.
What if the man was, say, a member of a religious sect who’d been wrongly accused of a crime? Perhaps stealing funds from his congregation? He’s engaged to marry but the woman rejects him. He’s driven out of his sect, and settles in a little country village. There, he lives a lonely life, hoarding his money. Until … until, one winter night, in the middle of a snowstorm, a golden-haired child wanders out of the cold into his cottage. Instinctively, he knows what to do, feeds her some of his porridge, warms her by the fire, takes off her wet boots.
Silas Marner was the easiest of all her books to write. Before it was even published Blackwood had subscriptions for 5,500 copies.
They had developed a habit of fleeing England for the Continent now at the end of each book, to avoid the reviews, the possibility of poor sales. The Italian book was still brewing within her; they would go to Florence to do more research.
As soon as they reached the city, she came down with fever and headache. She lay in bed in the hotel room alternately burning up and freezing. George had a fire made but it did no good. He lifted her from the bed and took her in his arms. “Here, dance. Dance with me, that’ll warm you up.” And he held her whole weight and frantically tried to move her about the room with him, but she couldn’t stand up long enough to dance. He laid her back on the bed and covered her with yet more blankets. “A bit better now,” she said.
He rubbed her arms through the blankets. “Sometimes I think my principal task in life is to keep you warm,” he said.
At length she recovered and resumed her research. She studied ancient manuscripts, made notes on medieval clothing, streetlights, barbers, observed a silk weaver. George made pencil sketches of costumes the characters would wear. She poured through Tuscan proverbs — what was a sajo, the Tuscan tunic, like? How was the scarella, a purse, worn?
“A romance can’t be written from an encyclopedia,” George warned. And he was right. She had no story. She took to calling her notebooks her “quarries.” “Perhaps if I dig hard enough I’ll come up with a diamond,” she said.
They returned to England and she kept up her research, reading biographies of Savonarola, histories of monastic orders. But there was still no story. She had never felt so depressed. She would never be able to write another novel. To try to allay her depression, George took her for brisk walks in Regent’s Park to the Zoological Gardens; as they walked they discussed the book.
There came a new crisis, a letter from Thornie saying that one night he came home from the theater late, and Mr. Robinson had locked him out of his room. “I did what you would have done in my place,” he wrote to George, “knocked him down.” The landlord wanted to throw him out. Dr. Schmitz intervened and somehow he was allowed to stay.
But Thornie did poorly in his exam, took it again, and failed. So he announced that he was going to Poland to join the guerrillas and fight the Russians. Barbara Bodichon came to the rescue. “I have friends in Natal,” she told Thornie. “You know, they have big game hunting there? I will write to them for you.” He agreed to go and they sent him off with a rifle and revolver and letters of recommendation from Barbara.
It was sweet Bertie’s turn to leave Hofwyl. He was not the sort to be able to pass the civil service exam, and it was agreed that the best thing for him was to learn farming in Scotland for a while. Eventually, they would send him off to Natal to join his brother and perhaps farm there.
Depression dogged her, the inability to write her Italian novel. Then, one winter day in Regent’s Park, in the Zoological Gardens, no snow on the ground yet, just gray and brown everywhere, the pathways deserted, it came to her. “I think I’ve found my character!” she told George. “I’ll call her Romola, and I’ll make her look like Barbara, tall and forceful, with wonderful red-gold hair.” Romola would be the daughter of a blind scholar. She would fall in love with an ambitious philanderer, Tito — the whole story would be set against the background of Savonarola’s fanaticism.
Romola, she thought, was her best novel — simply because it had been the hardest to write. “I feel as if it was written in my blood,” she said. “I’ve finished it an old woman.” The publisher commissioned the artist Frederic Leighton to do illustrations for the book. The Spectator called it her “greatest work.” Queen Victoria gave it to Disraeli as a present.
They were rich. It was a new, miraculous state. Would they wake up one morning and find themselves poor again? They sent Agnes £250 a year now for her expenses, including her children with Thornton. With Agnes and his actual wife, Kate, Thornton Hunt had now fathered fourteen children. But he was always broke and hardly gave Agnes a penny.
They were able to acquire the forty-nine-year lease on the Priory at 21 North Bank. It was a fine house, with stained-glass windows up to the ceiling, a rose garden leading down to the Regent’s Canal, and, importantly, a red-brick wall surrounding it for privacy. They hired Owen Jones, who’d designed the interiors for the Crystal Palace, to decorate it.
“We’re going to have to gut the place,” Jones said, “and throw out your old furniture.”
“But we can’t afford that,” George objected.
“I promise, it will be a house fit for a great author,” Jones said, and they let him go ahead. He created a double reception room, with dark paneling, crimson drapes, and deep velvet chairs. He hung the origi
nals of Leighton’s drawings for Romola on the walls. She allowed Sir Frederic Burton to do a chalk drawing of her. He softened everything about her with a pinkish glow. George was enchanted by it, and had it hung over the mantel in his study. To cap it all, they purchased a magnificent new Broadwood piano made of gleaming burred walnut, with great hexagonal legs with roses carved on them. It was like a throne to sit upon.
They held a double party to celebrate, a housewarming and Charley’s twenty-first birthday party. “Mrs. Lewes, may I suggest — away with the black!” Jones said. “You must have a new dress for the party.” So she bought a dress of antique, moiré gray silk for the occasion.
It was a grand affair. Spencer came, and Trollope, his deep bellowing laugh audible all the way across the room. Leopold Jansa of the Beethoven Violin Quartet gave a violin recital, and Marian accompanied him on the piano. Then, “Happy Birthday dear Charley” rang out through the house.
After everyone had gone, she sank down exhausted in her reclining chair. “I am so happy. I’m afraid the gods will envy me.”
George, sitting opposite her with his Scotch, could only laugh. “There are no gods, my darling.”
They began holding regular “at-homes” in the new house, every Sunday afternoon from two to six. She’d sit in the low chair by the fire, wearing her black satin gown — he still couldn’t break her habit of black entirely — the green-shaded lamp shedding a soft light on her face, a wall of books stacked on the table as if to protect her. George would lead the guests up to her, one by one. They’d sit on the footstool at her feet. From across the room he’d keep an eye on them, and when someone was taking up too much of her time, he’d hurry over and whisk him away. Some people, she knew, thought she was haughty. But it was caution, fear.
The Honeymoon Page 19