In Love with George Eliot

by Kathy O'Shaughnessy

  He had not anticipated the extent of her research.

  When they had begun their next Italian trip to research Romola, she had written to John Blackwood, and Lewes had registered one sentence in particular. They were going abroad, she’d written, to Italy, with grave purposes. Grave purposes! It was his first inkling that his suggested subject might pull her down. Not only that: he had seen that steady, serious look on her brow — she, who’d just regaled the public with the exquisitely original, felt, lived Silas Marner — where she was, among numerous other things, damn funny! Like Mozart with his Papageno, Shakespeare with his Falstaffs, his Touchstones, his Bottom — she could enter and animate at all levels, high and low socially. But he had seen at once in that aloof, stern look —

  Yes, the research.

  Tennemann’s Manual of Philosophy. Sismondi, Vicissitudes of Florentine Government. Hélyot’s L’Histoire des ordres monastiques, Machiavelli, Nardi; Buhle on Ficinus’ philosophy; Savonarola’s Sermon (fair enough); Lastri; Manni — ah — this was just the beginning. She’d acquired, on an ill-omened day, a reader’s ticket for the British Museum. By this time, Lewes was beginning to suffer dyspepsia at her constant depression, her reiterated conviction that she couldn’t write the book. She continued meanwhile to immerse herself in the biographies of Savonarola and Medici; naturally Vasari; histories of Italian literature — but then she began foraging in the original works of Sacchetti, Filelfo, Petrarch, Mach, Politian, Marullo, and others. She scoured old bookshops for stray volumes; read rare books on the state of Greece in the Middle Ages; and he could still remember the day she admitted she was occupied with a plan of rational mnemonics in history.

  In these years, from early in the decade, both their health and spirits had suffered. ‘I began it a young woman; I finished it an old woman,’ she liked to say. Her spirits — and his — were tested.

  Each day she would say to him, over supper, that she was ‘utterly despondent’ and on the verge of giving up the book; when she did eventually seem to be getting going, he spotted her poring through books of old Tuscan proverbs. He could only raise his eyebrows. Yes, she’d been buried in antiquities, which she then had to vivify. When would she start writing it? In a period of desperation, he had written to Blackwood, before the latter’s visit in 1861: Polly is still deep in her research. Your presence will I hope act like a stimulus to her to make her begin. At present she remains immoveable in the conviction that she can’t write the romance because she has not knowledge enough. Now as a matter of fact I know that she has immensely more knowledge of the particular period than any other writer who has touched it: but her distressing diffidence paralyses her.

  This between ourselves. When you see her, mind you care to discountenance the idea of Romola being the product of an Encyclopaedia.

  John Blackwood had risen superbly to the occasion, bringing with him, in his next visit, his wife, for the very first time — which went to the heart of things, as most wives avoided visiting Marian. Marian could not hide her pleasure.

  Slowly, agonisingly, she wrote it.

  When the book did come out, he was careful to shield her from reviews that were not favourable; but inevitably, the letter he didn’t manage to stop in time was Sara Hennell’s, who crept in with complimentary phrases, but managed to sneak a small sting in the tail, viz., that Romola was an idealised, rather than realistic portrait. Marian was plunged into self-doubt. Soon another letter came from Sara. He had begun reading it aloud; but glancing ahead, craftily pretended to lose it over toast, butter, hot coffee. He decided to take action.

  My dear Miss Hennell,

  Your letter to Marian was sent down to us with a batch to Littlehampton, where we are staying, and by good luck I had the reading of it aloud, and having seen the ‘windup’, was enabled to suppress that, and afterwards to ‘mislay’ your letter.

  I have run up to town on business and will tell you why I ‘mislaid’ and suppressed that portion of your letter. After the publication of Adam Bede Marian felt deeply the evil influences of talking and allowing others to talk to her about her writing. We resolved therefore to exclude everything as far as we could. No one speaks about her books to her, but me; she sees no criticisms. Besides this general conviction, there is a special reason in her case — it is that excessive diffidence which prevented her writing at all, for so many years, and would prevent her now, if I were not beside her to encourage her. A thousand eulogies would not give her the slightest confidence, but one objection would increase her doubts.

  He was doing his best.

  The owl hooted again: Lewes went to the small gilt-edged mirror that hung near the door. Holding his candle up, his reflection startled him: his eyes looked sunken, his mouth leering, long hair receding further than he had realised (he put a hand up to touch it), his face was all light and shadow, a map of hills and dells. On impulse, he leaned forward and drew his lip up and back, like an animal baring its teeth. What a sight! He had a disturbing flicker of some other image.

  His own work was exploring the connection between animal and human kind, the nervous system being the case in point. But when would he find the time, and the will, for that just now? Polly’s was the weight. Timoleon was what she must avoid. An ancient topic spelled disaster. Leaving the room, he realised why that mirror image had shaken him. An echo of Thornie’s newly sunken face. His son, prematurely aged.

  He went and stood in the silent cool dark landing outside Thornie’s bedroom, and listened. Silence. Thank God.

  But now, today, Thornie out of pain, he’d had a couple of whiskies, and was on the way to recovery. He could smell roast beef rising from downstairs; the light chinks from the dining room suggested that Amelia was preparing the luncheon table, setting out wine-glasses; he’d better remind them to uncork the red; passing Amelia at the foot of the stairs, he said,

  ‘Amelia, would you remind Grace that a bowl of horseradish would not go amiss?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Also — has Mrs Lewes mentioned that we have an addition coming to the household? A nurse, Amelia, a nurse. An extra pair of hands. To help us through these choppy waters! Charlotte Lee is the name.’

  ‘Does she have experience, sir?’ asked Amelia, in a prim voice.

  ‘Plenty, Amelia; great shovelfuls of it,’ — and he walked up the stairs. Amelia — good girl — could be tiresome — Marian too receptive to servants’ moods —

  Climbing the stairs, his mood continued to revive. After luncheon, the house would be filled with people: fine talk, laughter; cake; alcohol; tea. What a contrast to those quiet days in Wandsworth! He finished the stairs two at a time. Knocked on Polly’s study door, went in.

  Funny — nothing like last night.

  ‘My dear — how are you? How’s the masterwork-to-be?’

  Marian had turned a drooping face to his, but then she began, in her elegant grey moiré dress, and the soft lace and velvet in her hair, reluctantly to smile. (It was part of her charm that although her moods sank deep, she did, usually, respond to him.)

  ‘I’m researching.’

  ‘Researching?’

  ‘Grote on Ancient Greece,’ she went on. ‘For Timoleon.’

  ‘Ah! Ah.’

  Then: ‘An important story.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Marian, gravity returned.

  The gravity was disturbing. Already he could feel his stomach react.

  ‘But what about Middlemarch?’ he said now, boldly.

  ‘What about it?’

  Her expression was strange, both imperious and hopeless. He asked her, was it set some time ago.

  She laughed joylessly, even irritably, saying he knew very well when it was set, why was he asking her this?

  ‘True, true,’ said George, finding himself blushing, which was unusual for him. ‘True! Thirty, nearly forty years ago. I do feel, Polly — that the more — recent —
time — and close setting, viz., our provincial England, is perhaps,’ — he was gesticulating in the air now, his old actorly ability renewing itself as he made expressive shapes with his hands — ‘more fecund terrain, my dear Polly.’

  He was babbling.

  ‘More fecund? Than the Ancients?’

  She was regarding him in genuine puzzlement.

  George had to laugh.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, though, Polly; your Middlemarch is a genuinely ambitious idea!’

  ‘Ambitious?’

  He had forgotten. She often associated that word with a grosser kind of egotism.

  ‘George — I want to move people, stir them to their best. Mr Huxley put it well. About Silas Marner —’

  ‘Yes yes,’ said George, hurriedly. ‘A book to do great good to people.’

  The doorbell had just rung.

  8

  By the afternoon the drawing room was full. Lewes noted Barbara’s long dress approvingly: magnificent choice of colour, deep rose. Stanley, Mr and Mrs Howard, Alice Helps, Frederic Burton, Edward Burne-Jones. And Mrs Georgiana Burne-Jones, so neat and petite-looking. Though if gossip was correct, he could not help feeling sorry for her.

  ‘Fine gathering.’ Lewes recognised the terse tones of Herbert Spencer, turned to see his old friend’s lofty forehead and beak-like nose. They shook hands.

  ‘All the better for having you here,’ said Lewes, rocking slightly on his heels. ‘You’ll have some claret?’

  Amelia produced a glass of red. ‘Remarkably good,’ said the philosopher, in his curt tone.

  ‘It’s become a slight hobby of mine,’ said Lewes, modestly. ‘Wine, I mean.’

  ‘Really. Really. Well — splendid.’

  ‘You know everyone here, don’t you? I don’t think I need to ask you that!’ laughed Lewes.

  He liked supervising these gatherings. Their Sunday afternoons at home, with their swollen numbers, were famous across London, making the extra teapot and further cups and saucers essential. Often Lewes, a little the worse — or better, he liked to think — for the whisky, would look round at the artists and journalists and intellectuals, a ferociously well-known bunch of people, and feel like a successful theatre impresario, who each week pulled off an improbable yet delightful entertainment. And every Monday, like clockwork, Lewes noted in his diary the long list of agreeably illustrious individuals who had attended. And Marian in good spirits for at least two days afterwards. That was the point, of course.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Spencer was saying. ‘Oh — not perhaps everyone. Who’s that?’ he asked — rather rudely, thought Lewes.

  ‘Burne-Jones. The painter, you know —’

  Lewes couldn’t suppress his pride in front of Spencer, whose circle of friends would include scientists and intellectuals and philosophers; but not those wilder, more sought-after flowers of the social field: artists and writers.

  ‘I don’t know,’ responded Spencer, shortly.

  ‘His wife is a great friend of Polly’s. The Burne-Jones,’ repeated Lewes, meaningfully. ‘Edward Burne-Jones.’ It was impossible Spencer hadn’t heard of him! ‘The group of artists, you know. Morris, Rossetti — a little incestuous,’ he said, lowering his voice, and making insinuating movements with his eyebrows. Spencer’s face relented, and as Lewes took him to see the wine below the stairs, it occurred to Lewes, contemplating the wine, that if Spencer had taken up with Polly when he could have done, all this could have been his! That is, of course, if he’d been able to cajole, encourage, praise. Unlikely.

  ‘Most impressive,’ Spencer was saying. He was on his knees, peering at the lowest bottles. ‘Chateau Lafite … Good lord! You’ve got a Chateau d’Yquem!’

  ‘Yes, well … you must know, Polly’s books are rather remunerative.’

  The understatement of the century, reflected Lewes, complacently. For Romola alone, she’d netted £5,000, and that was just English sales. And if she could only start this new provincial novel —

  ‘One hundred times more so than anything yours truly could make!’ he quipped in Spencer’s ear, and was pleased to see Spencer’s features once more relax.

  ***

  Marian looked round her contentedly, she said to herself she was recovered.

  She had found herself disturbed when Charles, Lewes’ oldest son, had returned from holiday. Charles had fainted when he saw Thornie, so altered by sickness, and had tended him gently since. The contrast, in Marian’s mind, with Isaac was excruciating: still no word after all these years. But now, seated with Barbara in the bow window, she had drunk a glass of wine, and more importantly, guests had come with reverential warm glances and extraordinarily admiring words, and she was transformed.

  Barbara had asked after Thornie, and Marian had stated gravely that having a sick person in the house was necessarily to suffer change. ‘We are thankful to have friends,’ she finished earnestly, ‘who can provide the happiest distraction.’

  (How ponderous she sounded! She made herself sit up straighter.)

  ‘Now,’ said Marian, aiming for a more buoyant tone, ‘I’ve finally been reading Mr Mill, and am as appreciative as you might have hoped.’

  ‘Aha!’ crowed Barbara, with a victorious smile. ‘The Subjection of Women! It’s well argued, isn’t it?’

  Marian agreed. At the same time, she thought, Barbara must understand that when it comes to the position of women, my own position is odd, at the least. To change the subject, Marian asked Barbara what she’d been saying about Mozart, when they had earlier been interrupted.

  ‘Oh!’ said Barbara. ‘It’s Mozart’s sister that intrigues me. Nannerl. No — my thesis is quite simple,’ — and she summed up her point: that Nannerl had also been a musical prodigy, and in different circumstances, with the identical degree of cultivation and encouragement, doubtless she too would have been another Mozart, another Wolfgang Amadeus.

  ‘Doubtless?’ queried Marian. ‘Ah — but Barbara — your statement begs so many questions.’

  And this was neither the time nor the place, Marian reflected, to raise the fundamental questions of biology, as giving rise to those conditions of life, which were not to be transcended with lightning ease or speed. ‘In what utopia,’ said Marian gently, ‘would Nannerl be raised? Who would be having and raising the children? Until we have a separate third race, of breeders’ — why not indulge the fantastical! — ‘this is an insurmountable part of most women’s lives, is it not?’

  Barbara was regarding her gravely, her jaw looking set. ‘My dear Marian, this is surely no way to foster change. In this year of all years —’

  ‘You have done so much!’ cried Marian, impulsively reaching for her friend’s hand. ‘The first university college for women!’

  ‘Girton will open later this year,’ said Barbara, flushing with pride. ‘I am accomplishing something. Along with Miss Davies.’

  Marian hesitated before saying, ‘You know Miss Davies came to see me last week.’

  Barbara flinched, but said, ‘She has been an indomitable force for good.’

  Marian watched her friend as they sat on the ornate Biedermeier sofa. Marian knew all about Barbara’s efforts, alongside Emily Davies, to rally people and money for Girton. But there were tensions between Emily and Barbara. As Barbara was known for her fiery support of the suffrage, Emily had excluded her from certain committees, so as not to put off potential backers.

  ‘You know, the college is Anglican,’ said Barbara abruptly.

  Marian did know: Miss Davies was Anglican herself, and had fought to make the college so.

  ‘It goes against the grain,’ admitted Barbara. Every bit of money her family gave was to institutions undefined by religious allegiance. And they had lost support from Unitarian friends.

  ‘It may be,’ said Marian, ‘that you and Miss Davies are a perfectly pragmatic coupling. I cannot think M
iss Davies has your personal persuasive warmth, and — charisma. But she is tenacious, isn’t she? Like one of those terrier dogs,’ she added, smiling at her own comparison.

  Barbara laughed out loud. ‘I’m so glad to hear you say that! Between you and me, she hasn’t an ounce of humour —’

  ‘— dour as a grey day,’ agreed Marian at once, twinkling.

  The words were hardly out of her mouth, when Marian turned to look anxiously around the room.

  ‘Still,’ said Marian quickly, ‘I find much to respect and like about her. I certainly don’t want to be unduly dismissive —’

  ‘My dear Marian,’ cried Barbara, laughing and shaking her head, ‘you’d think the Inquisition was on your path! No, what you say is true. Emily Davies is as dour as a grey day. As a grey day,’ she repeated with relish.

  Marian laughed thinly. She didn’t like to hear her flippant words taken up so readily. She had the constant fear that any uncharitable remark would instantly live on outside her presence, like a live creature that could not be controlled. The floating live remark would then substitute for her in other peoples’ minds. You could not rely on people to place a reported comment in a broader, more elastic, tolerant context. Fortunately, a couple had just entered the room, the Rector Mark Pattison and his wife, Emilia Pattison. Marian drew Barbara’s attention to them.

  The small-built, studious Mark Pattison had been endlessly at work on the renaissance scholar Casaubon. His wife, said Marian, was twenty-seven years younger.

  ‘And I always have,’ went on Marian in a low voice, leaning closer to Barbara, with her most secretly amused smile, ‘the wicked but irresistible idea, when I am sitting with them, however fond I am of them both, that I am witnessing life wedded to death.’