In Love with George Eliot

by Kathy O'Shaughnessy

  ‘I should’ve brought my coat,’ I say.

  ‘Here,’ he says. ‘No, please,’ — silencing my protests, as he takes off his jacket and gives it to me.

  ‘No really —’

  ‘Please,’ he says, in a matter-of-fact tone. Cautiously I take it. I can’t really make Hans out. Still, as we continue walking I realise I’m enjoying it in a simple way — maybe just the pleasure of walking with a man beside me.

  But periodically I’m still awkward in Hans’ presence. I tell myself the reason is our different temperaments: he’s one of those people who don’t have to fill a silence, I’m one of those who do.

  The three of us were meeting here, but Ann didn’t come; when I ask him why, he says she changed her mind, she went to the British Library. He doesn’t look at me as he says this.

  We keep walking, by the slopes with their leaning graves, down the path. The wind is beginning to calm down. By the gate I say: ‘I’m sending you that letter.’

  ‘I’ll expect it,’ he replies, with a nod of acknowledgement. He stands quite straight, I notice.

  At home, I click on my email, New Message.

  Hans, I type, here is the letter I want you to read. You may of course know it. It’s when Thornie has died and 9 months later Eliot is still unable to work. It’s to Lady Lytton, who is also bereaved.

  My dear Lady Lytton,

  I know now, from what your dear husband has told us, that your loss is very keenly felt by you — that it has first made you acquainted with acute grief, and this makes me think of you very much. For learn-ing to love any one is like an increase of property, — it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm.

  At present the thought of you is all the more with me, because your trouble has been brought by death; and for nearly a year death seems to me my most intimate daily companion.

  I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity, — possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.

  We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life — some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed — because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defence against passionate affliction even more than men.

  Five minutes later, I receive an email back: It’s beautiful. Is that why you sent it?

  I type: I think it’s her first heartfelt feminist plea.

  I press send.

  I email him again: Coming directly from her own experience. ie not ideas.

  I press send again.

  His email comes back: Are you wanting to do a class on this?

  I reply: Waiting to see what you think.

  His email comes: Totally.

  I smile. It’s typical of him. We don’t always agree, but he is open. We’ve been teaching the class on personal writing for three weeks, and I’ve enjoyed it. That evening, I’m thinking about Middlemarch and Marian’s delay in finding Dorothea, when looking at the Lytton letter, I suddenly think, surely this is the moment of change. Marian’s own experience of loving and losing in a mother’s way, and then being unable to work, has opened her to a new aspect of women’s experience.

  I open my laptop, click on New Message — then stop. I’m about to email Hans — again! Well, obviously, I say to myself. We’re teaching a class together.

  I realise why I like that letter. It’s the first stepping stone to Dorothea. A feminist awakening??

  Journey in the unconscious? from repressed self??

  K.

  I press send.

  14

  Marian did not know if she would ever write again. But at the end of the summer, she remembered her idea about a singer who lost her voice. Back at the Priory in September, she began it: Today, under much depression, she wrote in her diary, I begin a little poem the subject of which engaged my interest in Harrogate.

  Lewes, when she gave him the poem Armgart to read, was curious: he did not love her poetry, but he was always intrigued by the way her poems expressed her. It was if he had, under his care, a rare iguana who might at any moment display new, strange, fascinating colours on her skin, or a combination of feelings and thoughts previously unseen.

  But reading the first three lines, he felt his spirits sink. So, it was a verse drama.

  GRAF:

  Good evening, Fraülein!

  WALPURGA:

  What, so soon returned?

  A parody of Shakespeare! He could feel his dyspepsia starting. The Romola problem again. In Romola, the people spoke a stagey English because they were Italian. Here they spoke a stagey English because they were German.

  But he read on. And in spite of himself, began to enjoy it. In fact, he did enjoy it. At the end, he smiled. What a bald, peculiar little drama it was! Despite the portentous language, it had a living core. And it was oddly, explicitly political too, on that matter on which she was usually so conservative — women. In the poem, before the singer loses her gift, her suitor asks her to give up singing, give up her unwomanly ambition, and marry him.

  He found her in the drawing room, regarding him with that look he knew well: proud but beseeching. It never failed to move him.

  He thought it excellent — original — wonderful, in fact — etc. etc.

  ‘Did you?’

  He said he did.

  ‘And?’

  Lewes cleared his throat. He was thinking about her ambitiousness, wondering if she were shy about it, or ashamed of it.

  He asked her why she had made the heroine Armgart a great artist, who then lost her gift.

  ‘Life,’ was her reply.

  He understood.

  ‘Though not all women fail to achieve their ambitions,’ Lewes said, pointedly. He had a flashing intuition then of some complicated tension in Marian, that existed between herself and her own sex.

  ‘And yet,’ went on Lewes (he could not resist), ‘there is a fine description of Armgart’s, uh, ambitiousness, before her gift goes away.’

  He had said it — launched the word on the air.

  ‘True,’ she said, examining her fingernails with great care.

  Ah, Polly. Lewes had thought he read her soul when he read Armgart’s defence. Not only of the woman-as-artist, but of her, Polly’s, determination to have fame as her just reward for her gift. He turned back to the manuscript, and read aloud, in the somewhat stagey voice of the poem, Armgart’s plea:

  Shall I turn aside

  From splendours which flash out the glow I make,

  And live to make, in all the chosen breasts

  Of half a Continent? No, may it come,

  That splendour! May the day be near when men

  Think much to let my horses draw me home.

  And new lands welcome me upon their beach

  Loving me for my fame.

  There it was, naked. Polly admitting she wanted fame as her reward — more, she loved it. She, woman artist that she was, guilty of her unwomanly ambition had finally put aside traditional feminine modesty.

  That is the truth

  Of what I wish, nay, yearn for. Shall I lie?

  Pretend to seek obscurity — to sing

  In hope of disregard? A vile pretence!

  And blasphemy besides. For what is fame

 
But the benignant strength of One, transformed

  To joy of Many? Tributes, plaudits come …

  Lewes was fascinated to note that somewhere in his dear Polly’s consciousness, being a great artist ranked close to divinity. What else could that word blasphemy be doing? Fascinated, too, to read her fear of being just ordinary — the millionth woman in superfluous herds.

  Herds, with perhaps a reference to breeding. No danger there.

  In November, a month later, Marian began writing a story, one she’d always wanted to write. It was about a Miss Brooke, a woman who wanted to do something with her life, other than marrying and raising children. The lines came easily, and as she wrote, Marian knew that her opening sentence would take hold of the reader — it had such instant, kinetic charm.

  Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

  It took her three months, however, to realise that she had kept to her great theme of the ordinary heroic, the noble intentions that don’t reach fufillment; that she had, in fact, found the missing part of Middlemarch. Now, although the fire was a little close, she had drawn the theme of ambition near, and stepped into it with her woman’s feet. At last Lydgate had his great female counterpart, Dorothea.

  Casaubon, James Chettam, Celia and Mr Brooke all quickly followed.

  Part Three

  1872

  What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?

  Emily Dickinson, Amherst, USA

  1

  On a Sunday morning in November, Lewes was walking round Regent’s Park. The day was cold but brilliantly clear, he went at a brisk pace. It was a triumph, he said to himself, a complete triumph.

  From the moment Middlemarch had been published, it had been a sensation. For the whole of the last year it had come out in bi-monthly and monthly instalments.

  He had his own theory about her success. She had given a picture of life so true that readers saw themselves there, but her narrative voice made the truth bearable. She sympathised, she understood; she seemed to say: if life is hard, and God uncertain, we can still help each other.

  Still, it was, he admitted to himself, as he found himself out of breath, and the tall houses of Park Crescent came into view, almost odd. The tone was so reverential. It is almost profane to speak of ordinary novels in the same breath with George Eliot’s, the Telegraph had said, and he did enjoy quoting that line. But there was an odour about it all the same.

  The letters! He knew, because he opened the post each day himself. Letters and gifts poured in — not just from people in England, but from Europe and America too. The roar of her fame was sounding all over the world. Recently a letter had come from France, with no address on the envelope, simply:

  George Eliot

  the well-known authoress

  Londres

  Middlemarch had made them money, too. He was considering giving the investments to Johnny Cross. It had been Johnny’s idea, a promising one in his view — Johnny was now such a trusted, close family friend, they’d started calling him ‘Nephew’.

  The Sundays had expanded even further. Browning, Darwin, Joachim … on Monday mornings, Lewes enjoyed himself jotting down the names of all the distinguished people that had visited the day before — art collectors, aristocracy, artists, writers, philosophers, the younger Oxford and Cambridge intellectuals — very distinguished, there was no hiding it. Everyone bringing their wives. Marian sat in her usual place, he supervised carefully.

  But in fact, he reflected, walking home, a reverence had been detectable before Middlemarch. He kept a folder of the most extravagantly praising letters. He treasured the one from the Pierce woman in America. Dearest — You will not be bored by another love-letter — a little one? It is three whole years since I wrote to you before, and you sent me such a grave, kind, precious little answer. O how wise thou art! Where didst thou learn it all?

  The worshipful tone, the biblical language, had an excellent effect on Polly’s mood. Except that on some days, nothing seemed to help. In this respect, not a great deal had changed.

  2

  Armgart, Marian thought, had been prophetic. Her fame had crescendoed. Everywhere they went, people wanted to know her, to shake her hand, kiss her cheek. Sometimes people cried. In conversation with Lewes, she humorously deprecated these incidents, but to herself she felt that the charged and grateful praise were her due. Yet why did she wake often filled with such suffusing sadness? Her years of isolation were over, she had done what she set out to do; why could she not remain happy? She had always thought if she achieved her ambition on this scale, her mood would be steady. But here she was — with a bitter-tasting mouth, in bed, the curtains half drawn.

  Lewes came in. He had a review she might like to see, he said. The editor of the Academy had kindly sent him a proof.

  Marian took it, but with a certain gloomy reluctance. No reviewer, she’d long ago realised, would understand what she had actually done.

  She began reading, and then started to feel interested; paused at this sentence, and read it again.

  Middlemarch marks an epoch in the history of fiction in so far as its incidents are taken from the inner life, as the action is developed by the direct influence of mind on mind and character on character.

  It was, she had to admit, a genuinely penetrating remark.

  To say that Middlemarch is George Eliot’s greatest work is to say that it has scarcely a superior and few equals in the whole wide range of English fiction.

  ‘Well!’ laughed Marian, elation spreading through her like a drug. ‘Well! Who is he — this —’

  ‘This genius, you mean?’ laughed Lewes, excitedly. ‘H. Lawrenny. I’ve read him before — always pithy, incisive. I might ask Appleton about him.’

  Lewes sent a note of enquiry. A reply came the following day: the reviewer was a Miss Simcox. H. Lawrenny was a pseudonym.

  ‘A woman,’ said Marian, unable to conceal her surprise. It was unusual for a woman to write with such unforced intellectual assurance. Marian read it now in the manner of a detective. No, she couldn’t immediately think of a single woman — herself excepted — who could write with such lucidity. Simcox went on to say that the conversations between Mary Garth and Rosamund, will show to those curious in such matters, better than all Mr Trollope’s voluminous works, how girls in the 19th century discuss the matters in which they are privately interested.

  Marian couldn’t suppress a smile at this deprecatory remark about dear Anthony. And the final sentence was the clue to the writer’s sex. What man would mention girls discussing matters in this century in which they are privately interested? Lewes put his head round just then. ‘Reading it again, eh! I think,’ he added, in a careless tone, ‘I might ask her to drop by this week. Or maybe,’ he added, thoughtfully, ‘you could write to her. Just a line or two.’

  3

  Three miles away, in No. 1 Douro Place, Kensington, upstairs in a bedroom, Miss Edith Jemima Simcox was staring at a note, in the handwriting of the great genius herself, asking if she would care to come to tea this Friday. She had re-read it and re-read it.

  Edith Simcox was a diminutive figure, thriftily wrapped in a blanket as she sat at her desk. But at this moment, as she looked outside, even the great misshapen Sycamore tree, branches bare, bent as if a hand had twisted and pulled them in strange directions, looked not ugly, but wonderfully, beautifully interesting.

  Writing under the pseudonym ‘H. Lawrenny’, Edith experienced a peculiar, delightful freedom. Authoritative, sweeping sentences issued from her pen, like those of an Oxford Don. And on this last occasion of reviewing Middlemarch she had worked harder than ever before. She had wanted to convey something of her own mind, Edith Simcox’s mind. Age: twenty-eight years. State: spinster. Occupation: writer, housekeeper. Education: officially little (brothers, self; missed Girton by three years)
. Yet: considerable. Knows languages: Latin, German, French, some Italian. Interests: literature, philosophy, social justice.

  Type of person: solitary.

  The Academy was known to be one of the few journals Mr Lewes permitted his wife to see. Edith had seized her chance. Outside, the clouds were a thick dark grey, but they broke just then in the northwest. A portion of this light, like lacquered honey, lit her room. It was here, last summer, she’d begun reading Middlemarch, and not wanted to move for eight hours. Sometimes she had tears in her eyes. Her most private wonderings had been given form.

  After she had written her review, she found herself remembering a day in summer when she was a child. She played with her two brothers so often she was called the third boy. At one point she threw the ball high into the blue, and wondered where it would land.

  ***

  Friday arrived: the morning seemed to go terribly slowly, and then too fast. It was noon now, and in some agitation, Edith tried on two pairs of boots. Usually she gave no thought to her footwear, but today she stared, then chose the brown ones: shabbier, but better quality.

  At two-fifty she was standing in front of The Priory. So, this was what it looked like. A high wall, a wooden gate, two-storey house set back. She pulled the bell, the gate clicked open. Edith made her way forward, but she could hardly think, her heart seemed to be beating not just in her chest but in her ears.

  From a dark hallway she was shown into the sitting room. A maid was lighting lamps, three figures stood up noisily as she walked in, two were advancing. She recognised the man with the red face and curly hair at once as the famous novelist Anthony Trollope, and guessed that the man with the moustache and lively voice was George Henry Lewes.

  ‘So you’re the mystery reviewer!’ Lewes was exclaiming.

  Lewes peered forward in surprise. Small, bespectacled, youngish, with a nervous pursed mouth: hair inefficiently pinned up, wisps everywhere. Holding herself upright as a doll. From behind the men, Marian also looked curiously at this new guest, her brilliant reviewer. She clearly gave no thought to her clothes: dress, worsted cotton it looked like; boots decidedly sturdy; lower part of her skirt dark with rain. Even her face was wet, spectacles covered in droplets.