In Love with George Eliot

by Kathy O'Shaughnessy

  When now the Boy, whose childish Thoughts aspire

  To loftier Aims, and make him ramble high’r,

  Grown wild, and wanton, more embolden’d flies

  Far from his Guide, and soars among the Skies.

  The soft’ning Wax, that felt a nearer Sun,

  Dissolv’d apace, and soon began to run.

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Lewes, gulping down his tea. ‘The Dryden’s better!’

  ‘Tabuerant cerae: nudos quatit ille lacertos,’ murmured Marian. They are people like us, she thought, happily.

  ‘Do you think, Mr Congreve,’ asked Marian, ‘that it’s a tale of hubris? Or just ordinary human folly?’

  As they discussed this, it seemed to Marian that Maria’s dark eyes had become larger, darker still, and that she was smoothing her hair away from her forehead, as if to enable her to see Marian better.

  ‘Mrs Lewes,’ said Mr Congreve now, turning in his chair to face her. His face wore a look of concern. ‘I greatly enjoyed your pieces in the Westminster Review. I would be very sorry if you were no longer writing. Are you?’

  Marian hesitated. ‘Not at present.’

  ‘— Regrettable,’ said Mr Congreve, with a look of gravity.

  Soon the atmosphere lightened again. Lewes, Marian was relieved to note, was expressing his recent disillusionment with Auguste Comte and Positivism, in such a way that would not offend Mr Congreve.

  ***

  In a letter to his wife, Congreve wrote: I like what I see of her. It is rather unfortunate that they are so inseparable.

  In his journal, Lewes noted that Congreve had no respect for men of specialities, like himself; clearly, he’d been infected by his hero, Auguste Comte, in this way.

  7

  The Congreves quickly invited them to supper at their house; they soon began to meet regularly. And when Maria Congreve wrote suggesting a walk, Marian replied at once, accepting.

  They met at Wandsworth Common, strolling first around the lake, commenting on the newly planted oak saplings so regimentally spaced. ‘It’s an alien look for nature,’ said Marian. But on the right was a pussy willow whose buds were showing, in spite of the morning cold, and the new, lemon-coloured light of the year was invigorating. A flock of geese were crying as they flew over the lake, the raucous cries echoed across the water.

  ‘I must tell you,’ said Maria Congreve, smiling shyly, ‘that I always remember the first time I met you. In Coventry.’

  Marian asked her to tell her about it.

  ‘Well, your father was very ill, and of course, my father was his doctor.’

  ‘I remember! Dr Bury.’

  ‘I was coming towards your house, and I heard the piano through the open window. The playing was so musical, I couldn’t help feeling surprised. Beethoven, I think.’

  ‘Very probably. I love to play. Though,’ said Marian, turning her eyes on her younger companion, ‘I was always in a predicament when it came to playing.’

  ‘Predicament?’ said the younger woman.

  ‘I could make music with my fingers,’ explained Marian, as they walked round past the poplars, bending in the sunny cold breeze, ‘and when I played I was admired. Now you will laugh at me, but I loved that admiration so much, I came to feel that playing was a sin.’

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ said Maria Congreve, with a kindly smile Marian appreciated.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ agreed Marian. ‘But I had discovered I was moved not just by the music, but by the fact that I was moving other people. It was a sort of double experience.’

  ‘I think I understand,’ said Maria, evidently intrigued.

  ‘I became self-conscious. I had discovered a kind of ecstasy — a very dubious kind,’ went on Marian, smiling, ‘and of course, I was greedy for the admiration! Before playing, all I could think about was the prospect of being admired. I say this to you in confidence,’ she added, in a murmur.

  Instinctively, correctly, Marian guessed that her friend would not be alienated by this confession, but drawn to her for her honesty. ‘Yes,’ Marian went on, pensively. ‘Strange that the act of moving the audience actually heightened my own musical sensations. And yet, I see it as a good thing, to play for people.’

  ‘Indeed!’

  They walked in silence. Then Maria Congreve turned to her. ‘Are you often self-critical?’, she asked, timidly.

  ‘I am. I can’t work out if it’s a bad or a good thing,’ said Marian. She didn’t want to admit to her new friend just how prone to self-examination she was: to the point of sickness, she sometimes thought.

  The sun shone, and there was beginning to be some warmth in the air. Maria Congreve was wearing a scarf of brown merino wool, and her hair in ringlets: Mr Congreve, in spite of his Positivist intellectual interests, had a handsome face that matched his well-tailored jackets, and probably liked to have a pretty wife. And why not? What could be more natural — that link between the senses and the emotions? Why would beauty not please, and help along those developing feelings?

  She had a momentary return of her old melancholy. To change the subject she said: ‘Seeing you now reminds me of Cara and Sara. Cara Bray, and Sara Hennell. My dearest, oldest friends. Whom I never see,’ she added, with a melancholy laugh.

  ‘But of course. I know them too, as you must know.’

  They walked on.

  ‘As I was saying, I heard your piano playing that time, and then inside — so many books! I didn’t expect to see so much culture. You quickly divined that I wanted to learn German, which I’ve never forgotten.’

  At the suggestion that she had mattered already to this younger woman, Marian looked away towards the pond. She was almost ashamed of the relief and happiness she felt. She had missed female intimacy, in which personal experience could be talked about honestly.

  And yet — how honest was she being with Maria? Not at all! Her novel Adam Bede had just been published, on the first day of February. She was already working on a new book, about a mill, and a sister and brother, Maggie and Tom. None of this had she told Maria Congreve.

  Each day she waited at home for Lewes to come back, to hear the news about Adam Bede. Lewes went in to London, to editorial offices, clubs, drinking houses — he would catch the word as to how it was being received, and he would bring back the newspapers too. So far, no word at all. She had woken twice in the night. She struggled now to go back to the conversation.

  ‘And did you — did you get on well with the German?’ asked Marian.

  ‘Not as well as I would like. But I remember,’ said Maria, darting her a conspiratorial smile, ‘your famous argument with your father about religion!’

  Marian’s step slowed. Maria, she saw, was perceiving her as a rebel — a romantic, defiant figure.

  In Coventry, when she was nineteen years old, Marian had publicly renounced her faith, refusing to go to church with her father, which had caused a scandal. Her father had threatened to eject her from his house. They compromised: Marian would attend church with him, but think her own thoughts.

  These days she saw it differently: that earlier self seemed full of egotism and selfishness.

  They walked on to the great expanse of grass. ‘I often have disliked this Common,’ said Marian, changing the subject. ‘But today, walking with you, I find it charming.’

  ‘My father,’ volunteered her friend then, ‘always said that you must be a good person, because of the way you nursed your father.’

  Marian smiled, but with a certain tightness. Maria had to be referring to her stained reputation. They began leaving the Common, walking South towards the new shops. Maria Congreve said, in a low voice: ‘It mortifies me, that you, of all people — have been cut off from your very own family. And, my dear Mrs Lewes, both Mr Congreve and I feel for you. To us, it seems so extraordinarily wrong that your family should have cut you of
f. And the imbalance, between you and Mr Lewes. That he should be able to go out and visit as usual, while you,’ — and she broke off.

  ‘It would be natural,’ she resumed, ‘if you were to feel no love for your brother Isaac in the circumstances, who has so unjustly stopped communication. It would be natural,’ she went on, in a glowing tone, ‘to hate him!’

  Marian gave an incredulous laugh: ‘Hate him? Oh — that’s impossible.’

  Marian experienced the familiar inward shudder. It was as if she were able to turn herself inside out, and emerge re-made, though she caught her face in the mottled mirror of the engraving shop — her smile half-twisted, animal, as if with glittering effort. Her voice was guttural, proud, harsh: ‘My dear friend, narrowness, a want of knowledge, habits of feeling; I hold them in compassionate view.’

  She caught her difficult smile again in the glass.

  She proceeded breathlessly: ‘Ruskin opens the mind, read Ruskin, my dear Maria. This is how life is lived. Through feeling. I hold nothing against my brother.’

  The moment between them, as they stood there in the street, these two women, was intensely awkward; Marian noticed that Maria Congreve was twisting her foot this way and that like a child — as if she were wishing to run away.

  Marian had a sorrowful sensation, inside herself, like rain. She had told too much, pushed them into a closeness for which they weren’t ready. And then, as if the world and she were forming a brief unity, drops of water sounded on the pavement, small repeated pattering sounds, and the pavement was staining with the drops. Rain was falling; her friend, Marian saw, had no protection. Silently, she held out her parasol, and Maria Congreve, as if it were strangely incumbent on her to obey, stepped closer and they stood together in the falling rain under the parasol.

  Soon after that, they parted.

  Back home, Marian secreted herself in the bedroom, and went over carefully what she had said. Maria Congreve had mentioned Isaac, but why had she, Marian, mentioned Ruskin? Maria Congreve had no idea that she was writing, no idea what she was talking about, no idea that she was waiting constantly to hear about Adam Bede.

  When Lewes came to see her, to ask her how the walk had been, he found her in bed with a headache.

  8

  At Marian’s request, Blackwood had sent copies of Adam Bede to Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Froude, Owen Jones, Charles Kingsley, Richard Owen, and Mrs Carlyle. She was, she admitted to herself, aiming high. Reports from Blackwood trickled through: a cabinet maker had commented how real the scenes in the carpenter’s workshop were. Good, good, but he was a cabinet maker. In her time at the Westminster Review, she had become acquainted with distinguished men and women.

  After weeks of waiting, a letter arrived whose handwriting Marian recognised: Mrs Carlyle. With fluttering fingers, she tore it open:

  Dear Sir,

  I must again offer you my heartiest thanks. Since I received your Scenes of Clerical Life nothing has fallen from the skies to me so welcome as Adam Bede, all to myself, ‘from the Author’.

  Oh yes! It was as good as going into the country for one’s health, the reading of that Book was! — Like a visit to Scotland minus the fatigues of the long journey, and the grief of seeing friends grown old, and Places that knew me knowing me no more! In truth, it is a beautiful and most human Book! Every Dog in it, not to say every man woman and Child in it, is brought home to one’s ‘business and bosom,’ an individual fellow-creature! I found myself in charity with the whole human race when I laid it down.

  In the darkened hallway, Marian peered to read the last three sentences again.

  ‘George! George!’

  She found him in the drawing room, and gave it to him. ‘She’s a percipient woman, I must say!’ he said, when he finished.

  Marian murmured: ‘I found myself in charity with the whole human race when I laid it down.’

  She might have achieved what she wanted.

  ‘A masterwork, eh?’ said Lewes, beaming.

  ‘George — please.’

  Five days later, she heard the familiar sound of George’s key in the lock. He came in with the mysterious but brimming air of a Father Christmas, silently handing her The Athenaeum journal. The reviewer declared Adam Bede a work of true genius. They hugged, laughed, Marian cried a little, then left the room, reappearing in her coat.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Marian was going to walk, she left quickly, she wanted to walk alone. She did not want to go to the flat Common. She would make for the wilder, hillier Richmond Park, which she knew better and preferred.

  It took longer to get there. By the time she reached it, the temperature had dropped. Walking made the blood turn round her system, but in any case she had an uncontrollable tingling in her limbs. The word Genius had been pronounced, everything was opening, opening wonderfully: how arrestingly beautiful the bare black trees were in their shapely clustered gathering on the hill; how good, sharp, fresh, the air smelled here in the park, away from the streets. She could smell burning leaves, she didn’t know where from.

  How extraordinary, that her innermost yearning was bearing fruit — actually coming true. So they did see her fineness, her quality. And now, only now, she could admit she wasn’t entirely surprised. The previous month she had read again the great scene where Hetty confesses to the preacher Dinah. The emotion had risen in her own throat, the tears pricked at her eyes; it’s good, she had thought, better than good; life as life, awkward, breathing, particular. Everything working in concert, plot, character, the live tissue of feeling.

  Was anybody else doing what she was doing? she asked herself — she could admit this now — as she began striding up the low hill. Her realism struck deeper than Dickens’ and Thackeray’s. Dickens, a master dramatist, was also the master of caricature, for good and ill. Weren’t both a little crude beside her? Then there was Trollope. Storyteller of the first order, excellent dilemmas, human, yes, so inventive, true, yes; but some of his women! With exceptions, such as Glencora, they tended to be ciphers, stretching out the plot and providing the rote pleasures of romantic fiction. A subtlety, a psychic dimension, a reality missing.

  Her odd life, she thought, had worked to her advantage. She knew working people from her childhood life in Warwickshire, cultured people also. She knew the delicate indices of class, from the obvious to the scarcely perceptible; the way voices were decoded: hadn’t she carefully moulded hers on successive teachers’, and then Sara Hennell’s? She once had a Midlands accent. She knew her comprehensive social canvas.

  And then, in her ostracised life, lonely now, so aware of being held in disrepute — writing had offered her the freedom to speak, which felt beautiful. In passages outside the drama she, the anonymous Marian Evans, had spoken directly to the reader.

  In real life she spoke to so few people.

  In the distance deer appeared, beside a clutch of trees, as still as if caught in a painting. It began to rain, the deer disappeared in an equally dream-like instant, she took shelter under two great elms. The rain grew heavier, percussive on the leaves, a thick constant drumming sound, enclosing her as in a house of sound. When it stopped, she drew her coat round her shoulders, and hesitantly emerged. Already the dark sky was splitting open to show floating gaps of blue; in the west, the clouds had broken to allow a weak low sun to shine across the park. The green glass glistened with an irradiated, unnatural brightness. Surveying the scene, she knew a luxurious pleasure in the beauty and her own sense of solitude and power, which felt a little dangerous. What was that danger?

  A wind began to rise, clouds broke once more, and then came the toll of bells. There in the distance, distinctly silhouetted in the mellowing light, was the dome of St Paul’s.

  ***

  Good reviews kept coming, the book was selling; everyone, according to Lewes, was talking about Adam Bede and its mystery author. The mystery author continue
s a mystery, said Marian, sourly, to herself. This morning, she had raised herself out of bed when it was still dark, lighting the oil lamp, to take up her pen.

  She was working on the Mill book, about Tom and Maggie, brother and sister. For the third day running, she set the pen down after less than ten minutes. Four days earlier she had opened a letter from her sister Chrissey. An initial burst of joy had given way to sickening bouts of sadness. Chrissey had been ill with consumption for the last eighteen months and didn’t expect to live long. Chrissey expressed regret at cutting off contact with her. Marian had clenched and unclenched her hands. Because of Isaac’s influence, almost certainly, suggestible, good-natured Chrissey had fallen into line; which meant that Marian had been unable to offer help to her. The thought of Chrissey in bed, impoverished, widowed, and the five children — they used to be six, but little Katie had died — made Marian rise abruptly from her chair and pace round the room.

  Nor could she visit the dying Chrissey: a letter came from her daughter, saying that a visit might be too much for her mother. Each time the post came she dreaded further news.

  As for the praise that was heaped on Adam Bede: ‘I am like a deaf person,’ she wrote to John Blackwood, ‘to whom someone has just shouted that the company round him have been paying him compliments for the last half hour.’ The praise was aimed at George Eliot, but who was that?

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Lewes.

  Marian was laughing until she sounded hysterical; Lewes was patting her on the back, pausing only when she grew calmer. Now she had tears in her eyes.

  ‘My dear,’ said Lewes thoughtfully. ‘In two weeks’ time, Herbert Spencer will be in London. Let’s invite him to lunch. Here you are, with this succès d’estime on your hands, and we can’t tell anyone, let alone celebrate! But Spencer knows. We’ll have him round.’

  9

  A fortnight passed, and the day of Spencer’s visit arrived. After discussing the lunch menu with Caroline, Marian hurried out of the house. She had arranged to spend the morning with Maria Congreve in Kew.