In Love with George Eliot

by Kathy O'Shaughnessy

  ***

  Before the guests dispersed, Marian had a chance to exchange words with the diminutive Georgiana Burne-Jones. Knowing the wild stories about her husband’s infidelity, she wished Georgiana, with her sad air, would confide in her. She saw a potential space for herself — to cleave closer to that friend, give succour, and so relieve that need.

  What need? she wondered.

  She wondered at its strength: what did she not innately possess, that she had such a need? It seemed to know no limit — to extend and extend. With this melancholy thought, she became aware of Barbara asking to see her study. She wanted to see where Marian did her wonderful work.

  ‘My wonderful work!’ sighed Marian, as she led the way up the stairs. ‘I hardly think so.’

  She opened the door. Barbara looked round appreciatively. ‘I know you are working on something at the moment, as you are always busy, but I will not ask what it is.’

  ‘I am completely unable to work.’

  Her voice came out stark and cold. It was past six in the evening, and her study, which faced East and was unlit, was in gloom. Yet Marian was thankful for the gloom. She didn’t want Barbara to register her face, could only imagine what she looked like in this kind of mood. Not just ugly, but vile — despairing.

  ‘My dear!’ said Barbara, who was, alas, looking at her, with peering, anxious, sympathetic eyes. ‘Come, it’s always difficult — work, I mean. Why — what’s this?’

  She was gazing in the gloom at the childish picture by Isaac: at the high line of blue sky, the low flat line of green grass, drawn in colouring pencil. ‘Is this by you Marian?’ she asked, in delight. ‘From when you were small?’

  ‘My brother. Age nine.’

  ‘Nine! It looks younger.’

  ‘He gave it to me. He was not a good artist.’

  Marian’s tone was flat.

  ‘You are back in the fold,’ said Barbara tenderly, and through the low light of the room Marian saw her friend’s frank blue eyes.

  ‘I am not back in the fold.’

  Barbara stared.

  ‘Why did you think that? What on earth made you think that? Have I said that to you?’

  ‘Why,’ stumbled Barbara, ‘I assumed — since you had his picture.’ Barbara stopped. ‘I should not have assumed that,’ she added, carefully.

  ‘But beloved,’ — and now Barbara came to her, opened her arms wide, and drew Marian to her. ‘They don’t deserve you,’ said Barbara, passionately, holding her tight, speaking in her ear: indeed, Marian could feel the warmth of her friend’s lips. ‘You must detach yourself, dear Marian; if Isaac will not accept you, you must cut the bond,’ she added pulling back, so she could see Marian’s face.

  The words sounded in Marian’s ear as from a curious distance.

  ***

  The morning after the gathering, Marian went to her study. No sound from Thornie, thank God.

  She concentrated on her doctor hero, her brother and sister, Rosamund and Fred. Brothers and sisters: it was always hard not to think of herself and Isaac, as she tried to sketch out scenes.

  No word from Isaac, all these years. Even with her fame.

  A cry from the garden; she looked: Thornie on his garden bed, Charles tending him. Marian watched Charles’ anxious, loving way of listening to Thornie, the head bent, glasses catching the light.

  Marian shut the window.

  She went back to her Middlemarch sketch, but soon after sank her head in her hands. What was it Barbara had said? She got up now, picked up that drawing by Isaac. It was, she thought resentfully, a constricted, empty, soulless little drawing, as bare as he was bare of human feelings. The branches of the spindly little tree bare, below that high strip of sky, above that sparse line of green. Why had she even kept it, reverenced it? In this false way? The detestable —

  Her head pulsing violently, she left the room.

  9

  Entering Marian’s study, Lewes stopped. The morning sun was streaming in, and through the dazzling light he thought he had mis-seen. Marian was crouched over in her chair, not facing her desk and the window, but half-turned from the window, so that he saw her in profile. She had a pair of scissors in her hand, cutting.

  ‘Polly! What are you doing?’

  She had in her hands the drawing by Isaac, yellow at the edges; but only half of it existed now; the rest had been cut away, shard by shard; on the floor were the slender fragments. And she was continuing.

  ‘My dear Polly —’

  That afternoon she went to bed, saying she had a headache, and for the two following days she was in bed. When, late morning each day, he came to bring her a cup of tea, she said she could never produce any good work again, this was the truth. He heard the litany. One, she must confront it and bear it; two, she had tried and failed. He spoke his usual encouraging words, but he didn’t persevere. He was weakened by the strain of Thornie and broken nights.

  Three days later, he woke to find the bed empty beside him. Polly was up. Not in the dining room either. After he had his own breakfast and coffee, he quietly mounted the stairs to the first floor landing, and saw a good sight: Marian’s study door was shut.

  With the lightest and quietest of steps, he went to his office. He said nothing at supper.

  It was the same the following morning. But this time, before noon, he went upstairs. Her door still shut. He bent to listen. He thought — he thought — he could hear the scratching of her pen. Carefully, he turned the handle. At last! Seated at her desk, facing the window, writing. She had started her novel. She must have heard him at the door, but she was continuing to write. He stole close to her shoulder, peered over.

  But it was not a novel.

  Silently, without even turning her head, Marian handed him the first page:

  I cannot choose but think upon the time,

  When our two lives grew like two buds that kiss

  At lightest thrill from the bee’s swinging chime

  Because the one so near the other is.

  He was the elder and a little man

  Of forty inches, bound to show no dread,

  And I the girl that puppy-like now ran,

  Now lagged behind my brother’s larger tread.

  ‘Why, Polly,’ said Lewes. Silent still, she handed him a second page:

  Long years have left their writing on my brow,

  But yet the freshness and the dew-fed beam

  Of those young mornings are about me now,

  When we two wandered toward the far-off stream

  With rod and line. Our basket held a store

  Baked for us only, and I thought with joy

  That I should have my share, though he had more,

  Because he was the elder and a boy.

  ‘My dear Polly,’ said Lewes, softly.

  By the third of July, Marian had finished her fifth sonnet. As she wrote, Barbara’s words sounded in her mind: You must detach yourself, dear Marian; if he will not accept you, you must not continue to be hurt; you must cut the bond.

  Barbara had meant well, but as Marian’s pen moved across the page, as the thoughts and feelings came, she knew she was doing the opposite of what Barbara had urged. She was stepping in and down, back to that early happiness. She blew on the embers so that it was bright, lit once more. Why, the best of herself had its roots here.

  Thus rambling we were schooled in deepest lore,

  And learned the meanings that give words a soul,

  The fear, the love, the primal passionate store,

  Those shaping impulses that make manhood whole.

  Those hours were seed to all my after good;

  My infant gladness, through eye, ear, and touch,

  Took easily as warmth a various food

  To nourish the sweet skill of loving much.

  There was
deep, sweet relief in her coursing tears as she wrote these lines. She had pushed aside ugliness, hatred, to give her oldest feelings voice. Entering the past as one might enter a childhood house in a dream: found the garden, the familiar place of grass and lilac bush, tree stump and the strange sunless part where the grass hardly grew. And Isaac, whose love was like the sun. Nothing now could take it away. It had bright, permanent form in verse. Ars longa, vita brevis.

  Over the days, as she wrote these sonnets, her headaches lifted. She slept better, she was restored in the morning. Her mind could move again.

  In the following days she began to sketch out scenes. Lewes saw the shut door of the study, kept his counsel.

  In the third week of July, she began writing Middlemarch.

  10

  Last summer Lewes had become acquainted with Clifford Allbutt at a meeting of the British Medical Association; following this, Lewes and Marian visited the young doctor at the Leeds Infirmary where he worked. Allbutt made an instant impression on Marian with his keenness, intelligence, ambition — the sense she had, in talking to him, that he desired to advance the medical field. Contemplating the notion of progress for her novel, as incarnated by an individual — even if the individual were eventually thwarted — she began to conceive Lydgate.

  Marian was deep in her imagined provincial world, moving from ideas to the central theme to her characters’ fine entanglements. Close after dawn, she arrived at her desk to sit in the complete quiet, aware of the garden outside, with its dense, particular early-morning quietness. She had been writing now for weeks. Today, as the light grew stronger, she deliberately put her mind back to that first meeting with Clifford Allbutt.

  There was a commotion below: a muffled cry, Ben barking. She tried to turn Thornie’s cries into mere sounds. She moved her attention back to what she had written today.

  At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known … For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown — known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbours’ false suppositions.

  There. She had said what she wanted to say. People were usually guided by a ‘cluster of signs’ — picking out what they wanted to pick out, to fit their own ‘suppositions’. But now Marian put her work down.

  She had her own fears about how people saw her. It amounted, she thought, to a sickness. Just now she was distracted by Cara’s visit last night. They had discussed Sara’s annoying qualities. But what if her remarks were repeated to Sara? She could not work now. She must write to Cara. With a half groan she pulled her notepaper towards her.

  My dear Cara,

  I feel as if I had been indulging in cruel gossip last night, and I cannot rest without entreating you again not to let my needless mention of trivialities have any consequences that can reach our poor dear S. I shall always welcome her affectionately on her rare visits, for the old regard is much deeper than any new and transient irritations.

  She was about to return to work again, but once more she hesitated, once more pulled out her notepaper.

  She had begun corresponding with Clifford Allbutt, the man who had inspired Lydgate, on exactly this matter — the danger of unpremeditated talk. My books, she wrote now, are a form of utterance that dissatisfies me less, because they are deliberately, carefully constructed on a basis which even in my doubting mind is never shaken by a doubt … my conviction as to the relative goodness and nobleness of human dispositions and motives.

  If Sara heard her remark, she thought, she would be as hurt as if it were Marian’s total feeling for her. But it was not, it was a mere fragment of the whole. As an artist, this was her task, to move the reader to see people in the round.

  ***

  The summer was going by. Thornie’s presence made the house fraught, but Marian kept working on the book. Yet in August she began to stall, and welcome visitors. Towards the end of the month, Emily Davies, Barbara’s Girton partner, came to see her. Marian was inevitably the focus of progressive women’s attention — the way she lived and still lived with Lewes, the fiction she had produced. But as she said to Lewes, she didn’t find it easy speaking her mind on the Woman Question.

  ‘Doubtless,’ he agreed. He was reading with his feet up, sipping a whisky.

  ‘They want your scalp!’ he added, irreverently.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘They want your scalp,’ he repeated, with relish.

  ‘They want my opinion,’ she sighed. ‘Or rather, they think they do. In fact they want me to agree with them.’

  Emily Davies arrived promptly at four. By the time they were talking in the drawing room, Marian had remembered why she always felt constrained in her presence: it was Miss Davies’ doll-like air of immobility, combined with the small, sharp, determined movements of her head when she’d abruptly look up, to take Marian in. She’d come to quiz Marian on her views about the syllabus for Girton as the college was soon to open. Marian listened attentively. Emily wanted the syllabuses of men and women to be the same. Marian was careful to think before she spoke. She knew Barbara wanted a slightly different syllabus for women, with greater emphasis on physical wellbeing, and an allowance made for the fact that the young women would not have received schooling of the same standard.

  ‘What,’ asked Marian now, carefully, ‘is at stake?’

  ‘Parity,’ was Emily Davies’ instant reply.

  There was passion in that quick response. Unexpected, in the composed face.

  ‘In the sense that they learn the identical things?’

  Emily Davies said yes, adding, in a rare flash of humour: ‘We might have more novelists like yourself!’

  Marian bowed her head to acknowledge the compliment.

  ‘Ladies — ladies — can I ask Amelia to bring anything?’

  It was George at his most jaunty, opening the French doors to the garden, to let in the sunny air, wearing his dandified floral waistcoat (an abberration, possibly; but Marian liked it). His hair, perhaps because of Emily Davies’ gaze, looked unusually long and dishevelled just then. Marian wondered if Emily Davies might think she had broken up George’s marriage. Many people still did. Clusters of perceptions died hard.

  Emily declined refreshment, and after George had left the room, Marian, having watched Emily talk to George, came to certain conclusions about Emily. She did not have the look of a woman who would fall in love. Too wrought in her determination: the eyes too watchfully focused: like a bird looking for a snail. Nothing else could come in. An absence, went Marian’s thoughts, of the feminine softness, or even susceptibility, or even the desire to play.

  Marian admitted to herself that in Emily’s presence, she felt proud, and even defiant, that she had Lewes, this creature of a different sex with his dandified waistcoat and lively mind, to love her.

  How strange it all was. Feeling, thinking, the two sexes: could it all fit, neatly? How did this jigsaw puzzle work?

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Emily Davies, suddenly emboldened, ‘we could have more novelists!’

  Marian said a vague ‘yes’, while she tried to sort out her objections, which were rising in a tide.

  ‘Although, my dear Miss Davies, I have a horror of mediocre literature — a horror of unnecessary books being written at all. I don’t think it good to write a novel that adds to that pile of mediocrity. Indeed, I was late to begin, precisely because I did not want to add to that great pile —’

  ‘But you did not,’ said Miss Davies, succinctly.

  The quiet four words, spoken in the warm afternoon air, formed a rebuke. For a moment, Marian thought she had underrated her interlocutor.

  ‘I take it,’ said Marian wryly, ‘you are saying, if little or nothing is attempted, we cannot know what might have been.’

 
‘Something along those lines.’

  Was there a ghostly sense of humour in that face?

  Marian tried to pick up her thread.

  ‘In my view, fiction should only be written if the writer has talent. So much work is produced by people who should not produce — whether women or men. Oddly enough, my husband was just reading a rather outspoken piece I wrote many years ago for the Westminster Review, that set out this view.’

  ‘What was the title of the piece?’ enquired Miss Davies, politely.

  Marian paused. Then she said, with a slight effort, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.’

  ‘Ah.’

  There was a silence. Ben was barking — if only he’d run in, create a distraction.

  ‘It was a provocative title,’ said Marian, blushing. ‘I was not attempting to pour mockery on our sex. What I objected to was this: because an author was a woman, bad work was indulged, even praised.’

  To herself she thought: I will defend the integrity of art before politics.

  To George later she relayed the conversation with Emily. She thought it was fine to have the same university syllabus for women as for men, but she didn’t like the idea of the two sexes becoming the same.

  She had been standing by the piano, leafing through music, but now two hands appeared, holding her breasts, gripping them. George right behind her.

  ‘There’s my answer,’ he was murmuring, into her ear.

  At which she turned round, kissed him; next they were kissing properly, forgetting for a moment about Amelia, Grace, Thornie — and for the first time in a long time, they made their way hand in hand up to the bedroom, intent only on each other.

  ***

  The following morning, as usual, Marian was roving over her conversation with Emily. She was curious now to read the piece she’d written thirteen years ago. She found it in Lewes’ study.