After her mother died, she became more withdrawn. While caring for her widowed sixty-three-year-old father, she dutifully—though not happily—took over running the household, and felt like little more than a maid. But she used the seclusion to further her education. In what spare time she had, she read (and reread) widely: history, literature, poetry, philosophy, science, and music (she became an accomplished pianist), and studied Latin, Greek, German, French, and Italian. With her capacity for deeply felt emotion, she could not ignore the fact that daily life was constricting and pallid. Still, her emotional deprivation was offset by the riches of learning, of cultivating a powerful and capacious intellect. The hunger of the heart was sublimated into the hunger of the mind.
Always a thoughtful, contemplative girl, Mary Ann grew increasingly analytical and developed a keen interest in ideas concerning morality, modesty, and character. She was also intrigued by the conflict between individual will and the stifling demands of convention. “Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful,” Evans, as Eliot, would write in Middlemarch, widely regarded as her greatest work. “They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.” As a novelist, Eliot would prove to be an astute social observer, a historian, and a philosopher. Yet she also captured the despair of insatiable yearning, a condition she understood all too well.
The fervent desire to love and be loved, which had driven her back upon herself throughout her childhood, stayed constant even after it had been fulfilled. Despite her reputation as an author whose novels reflected her vast intellect, she was very much invested in matters of the heart.
The English poet William Ernest Henley, best known for his 1875 poem “Invictus,” once dismissed Eliot as “George Sand plus Science minus Sex.” Yet the heart, if not sex, was more present in Eliot’s work than is generally recognized. In Middlemarch she wrote (in the voice of her heroine, Dorothea Brooke) that “surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him—which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work, the life and death struggles of separate human beings.”
Even in her personal correspondence, such matters weighed on her mind, as in a letter to Lady Mary Elizabeth Ponsonby, the wife of Queen Victoria’s Private Secretary, with whom Mary Ann corresponded until Ponsonby’s death: “Consider what the human mind en masse would have been if there had been no such combination of elements in it as has produced poets. All the philosophers and savants would not have sufficed to supply that deficiency. And how can the life of nations be understood without the inward life of poetry—that is, of emotion blending with thought?”
That Mary Ann had such a propensity stemmed from the extreme loneliness of her growing-up years. “I have of late felt a depression that has disordered my mind’s eye and made me alive to what is certainly a fact (though my imagination when I am in health is an adept at concealing it), that I am alone in the world,” she wrote to a friend at the age of twenty-one. “I do not mean to be so sinful as to say that I have not friends most unreservedly kind and tender, and disposed to form a far too favourable estimate of me, but I mean that I have no one who enters into my pleasures or my griefs, no one with whom I can pour out my soul, no one with the same yearnings, the same temptations, the same delights as myself.” Four years later, in another letter, she reflected on her years of suffering: “Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.” She was absolutely convinced that “the bliss of reciprocated affection” was something she would never know.
Mary Ann had been marked early on as an ugly duckling, a characterization that would take on an even crueler edge for her as an adult. Someone once told her that she was, in fact, too ugly to love. Henry James called her the “great horse-faced bluestocking.” And her publisher, upon learning her identity, described her to his wife as “a most intelligent pleasant woman, with a face like a man.” Many went so far as to regard her as Medusa-like—not merely plain but hideous. She had a large head, a big nose, and unflattering physical proportions. She dressed badly. And she was rather humorless, a trait that added severity and heaviness to her face. She was the first to acknowledge her ungainly appearance, once describing herself as “a withered cabbage in a flower garden.” Still, she had kind eyes, and Henry James wrote of this “magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous” woman that “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.” Even her obituary in the Times, though praising her as “a great and noble woman,” could not refrain from mentioning her “irradiated features that were too strongly marked for feminine beauty.”
She had been raised in an intolerant family, which rejected those who didn’t readily fit in. Aside from her “ugly” appearance, she held, from an early age, provocative views that distanced her from her family, particularly her father. Although she’d read theology texts passionately and had gone through a lengthy period of religious fervor, she became disenchanted. Eventually, her love of science and her passion for rational thought took over; a love of Wordsworth began to steer her into Romanticism and away from God. Moreover, when she and her father moved to Coventry, in 1841, she happily came into contact with agnostics, atheists, and freethinking intellectuals. She became especially close to her neighbors Cara and Charles Bray, both of whom openly enjoyed affairs outside their marriage.
Soon afterward, Mary Ann renounced her faith and stopped going to church. Rather than give up her newfound principles, she told her outraged father that she would leave home and make her own way in the world. He made no effort to stop her. She eventually returned to care for him, and even attended church again, but their last years together, until his death in 1849, were difficult. “My life is a perpetual nightmare,” she confided to a friend, “and always haunted by something to be done, which I have never the time, or rather the energy, to do.” While serving as her father’s nurse, she did read aloud to him a recently published novel, Jane Eyre, by a writer called Currer Bell. And in his final months, she managed the frivolous task of translating Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
This period was yet another that led her to ruminate on notions of obligation versus independence, fulfilling duty versus chasing desires. In Romola, her historical novel set in fifteenth-century Florence, she would explore the question of where “the duty of obedience ends and the duty of resistance begins.”
How Mary Anne, Mary Ann, or Marian Evans—full of secret ambition but lonely, prim, and lacking confidence—transformed herself into George Eliot is a remarkable story. She often felt that she’d been given the mind of a man but not his opportunities. At thirty-one, she was numb, still grieving after her father’s death, revealing in a letter that “the only ardent hope I have for my future life is to have given to me some woman’s duty—some possibility of devoting myself where I may see a daily result of pure calm blessedness in the life of another.” Around this time, she became Marian, another in a line of appellation shifts. And somewhere, “George Eliot” was patiently waiting to meet her.
Charles and Cara Bray had introduced Marian to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who commented on her “calm and serious soul.” Her provincial world had expanded considerably. And with the support of Charles, she began writing book reviews (anonymously) for the newspaper he owned. She was still about a decade away from publishing her first novel. But one friend was
wise enough to observe of Marian at thirty-two that “[l]arge angels take a long time unfolding their wings; but when they do, soar out of sight. Miss Evans either has no wings or, which I think is the case, they are coming, budding.” She was right.
Charles also took a great interest in Marian’s head—or, to be more specific, her skull. As a keen believer in phrenology, Bray introduced Marian to one of its leading proponents in London. “Miss Evans’ head is a very large one,” the expert astutely concluded. He added in his assessment that “the Intellect greatly predominates” (true), and that “in the Feelings, the Animal and Moral regions are about equal; the moral being quite sufficient to keep the animal in order.” That sounded about right, too. Most promising of all, he said, “She was not fitted to stand alone.”
Companionship would come later. For now, Marian was writing and editing for London’s Westminster Review. However, there was one small snag in her newfound work. As Eliot’s biographer Brenda Maddox has noted in her lively account, “A female editor was as unheard of as a female surgeon; to be known to have one would have done no service to the review.” While, in her own way, Marian was becoming entrenched in London’s intellectual circles (the rare woman to have done so), she had to keep quiet about it. She was there, she was known socially, but her name could not be attached to the work she produced. Still, for the first time in her life, she experienced a real sense of popularity and demand for her presence. Young women she encountered, dazzled by her supple mind, developed crushes on her.
Considering her privileged position, Marian was more than happy to comply with the discretion demanded of her, and was even helpful in suggesting how to manage the situation. She told her boss that it might be best if “you are regarded as the responsible person, but that you employ an Editor in whose literary and general ability you confide.”
This rush of good fortune was cold comfort, however. She still lacked a husband, and she wanted one. But meeting a man named George Lewes would prove transformative. She could never legally marry him, but their relationship would become the most significant of her life. He was a prolific author, two years older than she, and they’d gotten to know each other better through a friend. She didn’t know much about Lewes’s personal life, but her first impression of him was that he talked too much. Soon she admitted, “He has quite won my liking, in spite of myself.” She found out that he was unhappily married, the father of four sons, and that he had a well-earned reputation for promiscuity. It was public knowledge that his wife, Agnes, had been having an affair with a friend of his, too. Lewes was even “uglier” than Marian, with a pockmarked face, an unkempt mustache, and unfashionable clothing, all of which she found off-putting. Even his friends called him “Ape” and declared him the ugliest man in London. (Charlotte Brontë, however, once remarked that she saw something of her sister Emily in him.) Henry James found him “personally repulsive.”
Lewes was cosmopolitan and Evans was provincial; his family, with its background in theater, was as flamboyant as hers was listless and austere. But by March 1853, she was already telling a friend that she found Lewes “genial and amusing,” and that he had “won my liking, in spite of myself.”
Within a year, they were living together—and she started calling herself Marian Evans Lewes. Though he was still married to Agnes, Evans was able to confide to a friend, “I begin this year more happily than I have done most years of my life.” Divorce was out of the question for Lewes, but both he and Marian, despite their trepidation about whisperings of their supposed immorality, charged forward in their relationship—living together “in sin” and hoping that her reputation in particular would not suffer irrevocably. They were prepared to lose friends to preserve their love, and did. “I have counted the cost of the step I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation of all my friends,” she wrote. “I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself.”
Both she and Lewes had already experienced their own forms of social persecution and were familiar with its toll. Yet they lost family, too: Marian had waited a few years to reveal her relationship to her siblings, and when she did, her brother Isaac (whom she adored) cut her off and encouraged his sisters to ostracize her. Defiant, she referred to Lewes as “my husband.”
“We are leading no life of self-indulgence,” she wrote, “except indeed that, being happy in each other, we find everything easy.” Further, she insisted that she wasn’t prepared to settle into someone else’s notion of a virtuous life. She could be only herself. “Women who are satisfied with light and easily broken ties do not act as I have done,” she wrote. “They obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.” She paid the penalty without complaint or regret.
It is fair to say that without this passionate, supportive partnership, which would last until Lewes’s death in 1878, George Eliot would not have been born. Lewes offered Evans a kind of love she had never known, unquestioning and absolute. (Despite rumors of his infidelity, there is no known evidence.) He wasn’t an entirely enlightened man—after all, he had once claimed condescendingly that even the best women writers were “second only to the first-rate men of their day”—but he did heartily encourage her to write a novel. Journalistic work provided money but little satisfaction. “It is worth while for you to try the experiment,” he urged her—and finally, in 1856, she confided in her journal: “I am anxious to begin my fiction writing.”
She embarked on this phase of her writing career by sending stories to John Blackwood, editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine; the first was published in January 1857 under the name “George Eliot.” She didn’t send the pieces directly to Blackwood—she submitted them via Lewes, who was already a regular contributor to the journal, as an added buffer. A month later, she wrote to Blackwood’s brother and colleague, William: “Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.”
Eliot was, of course, not the first woman to adopt a male pseudonym: the Brontës had done it, and so had the French writer George Sand, who was much admired by Eliot. But she felt that her controversial subject matter—depicting the lives of clergymen in her own native county of Warwickshire, and invoking autobiographical ideas about religion, faith, and unrequited love—demanded secrecy. Not only that, but her social position was shaky enough because of her unconventional living situation. She was already infamous.
It turned out to be a good thing that she’d kept her identity hidden, as Blackwood wrote to Lewes (in a letter whose subtext was none too subtle): “I am glad to hear that your friend is, as I supposed, a clergyman. Such a subject is best in clerical hands.”
In 1858, Scenes of Clerical Life, which contained the stories serialized in Blackwood’s magazine, was published in two volumes, under the name George Eliot. She was now a real author, and asked her publisher to send review copies to contemporaries she admired, including Dickens, Ruskin, and Tennyson.
The first part of her new pen name was inspired by her devoted partner (and was also the name of her uncle); the surname “Eliot” was chosen simply because she thought it was a “good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” “Under what name could she have published her fiction?” wrote a critic in 1999, referring to her various names. “It is clear that neither ‘Evans’ nor ‘Lewes’ would have done. Her invented title became the only fixed point in a shifting world of reference.”
When John Blackwood showed up at Lewes’s flat one day, hoping to meet the esteemed Mr. Eliot in person, the couple broke the news to him in a rather playful way. “Do you wish to see him?” Lewes asked. He and Marian left the room, then walked right back in—and Blackwood was introduced to the man (woman) himself.
He was more than gracious about it, and happy to keep their secret safe. In 1859, with the publication of Adam Bede (a masterful depiction
of rural domestic life, whose title character was based on her father), Marian kept her gender and name private—though not for long. For one thing, too much of the story was recognizable, with identifiable characters; her brother Isaac read it and said that no one but his sister could possibly be the author. But the greater issue, as had been true for Charlotte Brontë with Jane Eyre, was the book’s success: Queen Victoria was a fan. Dickens raved, “I cannot praise it enough,” even though Adam Bede had outsold A Tale of Two Cities. Alexandre Dumas called it “the masterpiece of the century.” And the Times declared that the mysterious author ranked “at once among masters of the art.” Critics loved Adam Bede, and so did the public—a rare feat. The novel was a huge best seller. People wanted to know who George Eliot was, and false “authors” came forward to claim the glory. One man from Warwickshire insisted that he had written Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life, and that he’d been cheated out of royalty payments.
Marian’s efforts to hide her identity were increasingly in vain. It did not escape the notice of the Leweses’ friends that their purchase of a large house, filled with new furniture and staffed by servants, happened to coincide with the launch of George Eliot. One friend wrote to Marian saying that she would “go to the stake” if Marian was not George Eliot. She received a warm, open, but stern reply from the author: “Keep the secret solemnly till I give you leave to tell it, and give way to no impulses of triumphant affection.” Lewes added to the letter that “you mustn’t call her Marian Evans again; that individual is extinct, rolled up, quashed, absorbed in the Lewesian magnificence!” From those who did realize the truth, the author pleaded for discretion. “Talking about my books,” she explained, “has the same malign effect on me as talking of my feelings or my religion.”
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