The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives

by Diane Johnson

  DIANE JOHNSON is a novelist and critic. She is the author of Lulu in Marrakech and Le Divorce, among other novels, and of a memoir, Flyover Lives. She lives in Paris and San Francisco.

  VIVIAN GORNICK is a Manhattan essayist, memoirist, and critic. She is the author of some twelve books written in all of these genres. Her newest book (fortuitously) is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader.

  Mary Ellen at thirty-seven, drawing by Henry Wallis

  THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE FIRST MRS. MEREDITH

  and Other Lesser Lives

  DIANE JOHNSON

  Introduction by

  VIVIAN GORNICK

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1972 by Diane Johnson

  Introduction copyright © 2020 by Vivian Gornick

  All rights reserved.

  First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2020.

  Cover image: George Meredith, illustrated manuscript page (adapted); courtesy of Diane Johnson

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Johnson, Diane, 1934– author. | Gornick, Vivian, author of introduction.

  Title: The true history of the first Mrs. Meredith and other lesser lives / by Diane Johnson ; introduction by Vivian Gornick.

  Description: New York City : New York Review Books, 2020. | Series: New York Review Books classics | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019047022 (print) | LCCN 2019047023 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374451 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681374468 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Meredith, Mary Ellen, 1821–1861. | Authors’ spouses—Great Britain—Biography. | Novelists, English—19th century—Biography. | Meredith, George, 1828–1909—Marriage. | Wallis, Henry, 1830– | England—Social life and customs—19th century.

  Classification: LCC CT788.M378 J64 2020 (print) | LCC CT788.M378 (ebook) | DDC 942.07092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047022

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047023

  ISBN 978-1-68137-446-8

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Frontispiece

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Contents

  Preface to the 2020 Edition

  Introduction

  List of Illustrations

  THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE FIRST MRS. MEREDITH

  Dedication

  Preface

  Family Tree

  Notes

  Brief Lives

  Images

  A List of Manuscripts Used

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  PREFACE TO THE 2020 EDITION

  I FOUND Mary Ellen Meredith’s letters to her lover Henry Wallis hidden in a paint box under a bed at Vera and Cliff Whiting’s house in Purley, Surrey, in 1970 or so. The Whitings had only recently moved in; they had inherited the house intact with all its jumble in the box room. “Go ahead and look in there,” Vera said. “I have no idea what’s there, among all that junk. I really haven’t had time to look at it, we just piled it there to go through later.”

  In the box room were cartons and papers and rolls of things she’d inherited from an aunt who had worked for Mary Ellen and Henry’s son, Harold (who was called Felix). Vera had seen Felix in his old age, and she thought she might have a distant childhood memory of old Henry himself, who died in 1916. There was also a sideboard that had belonged to Henry, and the table and candlestick we see in his most famous painting, The Death of Chatterton, for which George Meredith had been the model. The Whitings had planned to clean out the box room but hadn’t done it yet. Luckily.

  Since 1968, on brief visits to England, I had been looking for traces of Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith, resenting on her behalf the way she was always dismissed in biographies of George Meredith: the unhappy wife who left him and, of course, died, as if death were the deserved fate for Victorian wives who broke the rules. Now I had tracked her down, via wills and deeds in Somerset House, to the Whitings, who now had Harold’s house in the suburb of Purley, and its contents.

  When I shook the paint box and heard a muted thump I had an excited sense of certitude, of something within that would reveal her at last. The packet consisted of tiny envelopes tied with red string, a half dozen letters from Mary Ellen to Henry, which he’d saved all his life. Frantically I copied them out. I’m not sure where the originals are now. Were they sold? Thrown out? Does her grandniece Sally have them? Such is the fate of letters, which surface, sink, are all too often the fuel of a bonfire. These letters, so small, in a tiny hand, would only be a moment’s flame.

  Vera Whiting was a beautiful woman in her seventies when I met her. In her youth she had sat for Augustus John and other artists; this was her only connection to the art world. Cliff, her second husband, an RAF pilot, had been wounded in World War II and, when I knew them, was cheerfully retired, in his comfortable chair, pensively smoking tiny cigarettes he rolled himself. Their life was a quiet one, in the little house in Purley where I found the letters. Vera would often invite my children to tea and give them excellent cookies, so their affectionate memories match mine.

  What luck for me that Vera and Cliff hadn’t consigned all the papers to the removal man, for as an inheritance it didn’t look promising: a lot of old papers and a few folders of watercolors, property deeds, letters to museum directors. (Wallis in his later years was a collector of ceramics and had donated valuable pots and tiles to the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert.) And it was good luck that Wallis was himself an artist, had a painter’s eye, and had painters as friends.* Under the bed were drawings by Rossetti, Beardsley, Burne-Jones; a Meredith manuscript page with the little doodles reproduced on the cover of this book; a few dozen small watercolors, charcoals, and oils by Wallis himself; Mary Ellen’s lapis lazuli drop earrings (Vera gave these to me) and her pink parasol.

  I was able to suggest that the Whitings sell their valuable paintings and drawings. They were naturally delighted at the unexpected windfall, more than 50,000 pounds at the time, the equivalent of 750,000 pounds today, from sales at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s. They also donated a number of pieces to the Tate Britain, which owns The Death of Chatterton, and to other public collections, an entirely happy denouement. For me, it was an experience of friendship, for the Whitings and I remained close until their deaths in the 1980s. I cannot remember their reaction to this work when it was first published in 1972, but it must have been approval, as they loaned me the beautiful drawing of Mary Ellen and the other things to reproduce in the original edition of this book.

  —DIANE JOHNSON

  2020

  *Wallis’s life and works are described in the impressive book Henry Wallis: From Pre-Raphaelite Painter to Collector/Connoisseur, by Ronald Lessens and Dennis T. Lanigan. Lessens and Lanigan establish the breadth of the accomplishments of this unfairly forgotten Victorian painter.

  INTRODUCTION

 
ONE OF the great feminist novels of the nineteenth century is George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways. Published in 1885 when Meredith was fifty-seven years old, it features a protagonist drawn from his evergreen memories of Mary Ellen Nicolls, the bold, beautiful, intellectually gifted woman who’d been his first wife. I mention Meredith’s age because while his marriage to Mary Ellen had ended a good twenty-five years earlier, he had never ceased to brood over her—her presence is invoked in novel after novel—but it was only now in his late fifties, and with this novel, that he felt impelled to do literary justice to a woman born long before the time in which she might have fulfilled her youthful promise without penalty or punishment.

  Virginia Woolf thought George Meredith the most grown-up of Victorian novelists. He not only knew what love could do to a man and a woman equally matched in brains, will, and spirit—what they might actually say and do to themselves and to each other—he put what he knew on the page. Many writers of his time understood what Meredith understood, just not as incisively. It was very simple, really: love, when it threatens to compromise a protagonist’s inner integrity, becomes the enemy. In Diana of the Crossways he created just such a situation, only this time the protagonist was a woman. It is Diana in whom the need to own one’s soul becomes more of an imperative than the need to love or be loved. This was a piece of intelligence Meredith possessed to as great if not greater a degree than D. H. Lawrence or Henry James or Edith Wharton—and it was through his life with Mary Ellen that he had come by it.

  •

  She was born in London in 1821. Her father was the poet and novelist Thomas Love Peacock, her mother the daughter of a provincial Welsh clergyman. Peacock’s was the generation of the great English Romantics—Shelley, Keats, Byron—and while Peacock himself was a writer of considerably lesser talent, he shared with these literary greats a view of life devoted to adventures of the mind and spirit, a politics that was democratic, and an open-heartedness that included a progressive take on the place of women in society. Mary Ellen, the oldest and the favorite of Peacock’s four children, was raised to believe that as the smart, educated, high-spirited person she was, she had every right to expect a more exciting life than the one usually reserved for the typical Victorian woman of her class; the one who, as Diane Johnson instructs us, was “innocent, unlearned, motherly, and . . . notoriously dull company both at the dinner table and in bed.”

  Yet, when she matured there was really nothing for Mary Ellen to do except become a governess or get married. So of course she got married: in 1844, to Edward Nicolls, the wild, sexy son of a general in the Royal Marines. Eddy brought out the wild and sexy in Mary Ellen and for two glorious months they lived on passion; then Eddy drowned trying to save another man from drowning and that, as Johnson briskly puts it, “was the end of him.” Mary Ellen came home to her father, a twenty-three-year-old pregnant widow. Now she was really restless: “In a day when resignation was the approved posture against adversity, Mary Ellen was no good at resignation.” Four dreary years later she met George Meredith and, for our purposes, the rest is history.

  Mary Ellen was twenty-seven and George twenty when they met, but the age difference was the least of it. She was still a lively young woman up for the great adventure of life, while he, although his mad pursuit of her had promised much, lapsed back into what he’d been before they were married: a brooding neurasthenic fussy about his food, obsessed with achieving literary success, and hardly ever wanting to leave the house. On top of these vital differences regarding a shared life, they were perpetually dogged by the poverty (George refused to get a job) which forced them to live in cramped quarters a couple of hours from the city. Yet, surely we can all agree that Mary Ellen bore the larger share of a burdensome existence. George, after all, had his writing, and the occasional trip to London if he wanted it, plus the promise of a growing reputation to stabilize him, while she had only suburban isolation, child-rearing, and nothing substantial to occupy her. The sheer fact that George could go out into the world at will while she could not took a heavy toll on their love.

  Bright, passionate, and equally egotistical, they lived together for eight stormy years; delighting and tormenting each other for much of that time, but feeling ever more shredded by a situation that year by year made of them adversaries rather than allies. Mary Ellen, especially, felt oppressed, and just when life was beginning to seem intolerable, she actually did the unthinkable: she bolted; had an affair and left the marriage. (Lest you think this affair an act of reckless impetuosity, Johnson cautions us to keep in mind “at all times that the women we are concerned with conducted their lives . . . while entirely encased beneath their gowns in . . . a chemise, a corset, a camisole over the corset, up to six petticoats, . . . a vest or undershirt, stockings, garters, and, depending on the decade, a whalebone crinoline or bustle. . . . Whatever we are able to make of Mary Ellen’s adulterous behavior, we will not be able to excuse it on the grounds of impulse.”)

  She was thirty-seven years old. Soon enough she was pregnant, separated from her lover, and mortally ill with kidney disease. Three years later, at the age of forty, she died: alone and with almost no one in attendance at her burial. But no surprise here, Johnson reminds us, “as every Victorian knew, if you have sinned you cannot, cannot possibly, expect to die surrounded by your family and friends.”

  For the rest of his long life Meredith would stiffen in humiliated rage at the mere mention of Mary Ellen’s name. Yet the memory of his own bad behavior haunted him and what men and women in love did to one another became his great preoccupation. In the flesh Meredith was a proud, angry man, almost always on the defensive; but as he was also a great writer, in his work honesty compelled him to abandon self-justification. (Johnson disagrees with me on this point, but for now we’ll let that go.) In 1862, a year after Mary Ellen’s death, he wrote Modern Love, the astonishing fifty-sonnet poem based on their time together. In this poem he wanted badly to trash her but the knowledge of his part in their mutual failure made him uneasy enough to realize that if he laid all the blame on her the poem would lose power. He could not help but see that he and she, like most husbands and wives, had each accumulated a bill of grievance under whose spell both had acted outrageously. Love, the poem concluded, was not a benign experience: not for him and certainly not for her. To his credit, what Meredith brooded on for the next quarter of a century was how best to imagine how it had been with her instead of himself. The key word here is “imagine”: the thing no one else in the world had thought to do about Mary Ellen Meredith until Diane Johnson came along, a century later, and conceived the brilliant idea of doing just that.

  •

  The first time I read The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith (sometime in the late 70s) I was sitting in the blazing sun on a Caribbean beach, the book propped on my knees, and was surprised, whenever I looked up, to see that I wasn’t surrounded by the fog and cold of 1840s England. If I’d been asked then to explain what I thought the book was about, I’d probably have been struck dumb: all I knew was that the writing had cocooned me inside an atmosphere of emotional damage and existential heartbreak that felt large. The second time I read the book, some twenty years later, I was still susceptible to its atmospheric appeal, but now I marveled at how cleverly its author had woven together the few known facts about its major characters with the social constraints under which they lived, and the chinks in that society’s armor that left just enough room for our protagonist to take her plunge into the formidable unknown. Now, some thirty more years have passed and I have returned to see what further magic this most unusual of biographies could work on the ever-returning reader.

  This time around I saw—and could not fathom how I had not seen it before—that no life she came across, however peripheral to her story, was “lesser” to Diane Johnson. There are innumerable places in the book where she is describing something that involves one or another of its major characters—an accidental encounte
r, an unexpected event—and, of necessity, her account includes mention of a servant, a farmer, a passing acquaintance. Inevitably, she stops to muse on that figure, even if it is only for one knockout sentence, and when she does the angle of vision shifts. Of a sudden the narrow urgency into which our protagonists have locked both us and themselves backs off. The human landscape has rearranged itself.

  Towards the end of a long, exploratory passage on Thomas Peacock’s enduring capacity for amorousness Johnson tells us that on a day when he was old, he received an unexpected letter from a lady who’d known him years before. This woman has caught a glimpse of him walking through Grosvenor Square, and she cannot resist the impulse to contact him. “I never can think of you otherwise,” she writes, “than as that young and brilliant personage we used to know . . . when you used to repeat poetry, drink champagne, and seem not to have a single link to heavy earth.” The letter comes from a country vicarage and is signed “ever your affectionate Clarinda Atkyns.” The reader assumes Johnson will now return to Peacock, but she does not. The letter writer has captured her promiscuous attention and, as though talking to herself (as well as us), Johnson lets the passage conclude itself thus: “Who, poor lady, was she, and what had her life been, to write so wistfully to this old man, from Ombersly Vicarage, Droitwich?”

  For a split second my heart stopped. I could see the vicar’s wife standing somewhere on the Square, catching a flash of Peacock (no longer Mary Ellen’s father, now the young Tom) striding casually through her past—and in that moment she became as important as Peacock himself. Her inclusion in the anecdote seemed to replicate brilliantly what all the great literary flaneurs of the time—Baudelaire, Dickens, Gissing—were noticing when they took a walk through the newly created nineteenth-century crowd: the fearful drama of fractured attention. In rapid succession, one’s eyes were drawn now here, now there, as though compelled to register every glimpse (great or little) of people in the throng whom one hadn’t seen in years, or had no wish to see, or would not ordinarily know even existed. The experience was unnerving.