Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  ‘Death is so terrible,’ he cried, ‘I cannot bear it! You don’t know, Helen – you can’t imagine what it is, because you haven’t it before you! and when I’m buried, you’ll return to your old ways and be as happy as ever, and all the world will go on just as busy and merry as if I had never been; while I –’ He burst into tears.

  The novel was published three months before Branwell’s death. Anne may have hoped that plain-speaking, even through one of her characters, would effect a cure. It rarely does – as legions of wives of alcoholics testify. Anne survived her brother by only a few months, dying decently, but tragically early, of the family complaint. One imagines she met her end more dutifully. A few months earlier, consumption had also claimed Emily – who had resolutely refused medical attention. Charlotte noted the fact bitterly: ‘It is useless to question her; you get no answers. It is still more useless to recommend remedies; they are never adopted.’ Emily is the most enigmatic of the writing sisters. No clear image of her remarkable personality can be formed. Branwell sneered at her as ‘lean and scant’ aged sixteen. She, famously, counselled that he should be ‘whipped’ for his malefactions. She evidently thought well of the whip and used it, as Mrs Gaskell records, on her faithful hound, Keeper, when he dared to lie on her bed. A tawny beast with a ‘roar like a lion’, Keeper followed his mistress’s coffin to the grave and, for nights thereafter, moaned outside her bedroom door. A second novel, substantially written by Emily, has not survived, but the solitary achievement of Wuthering Heights adds to her mystique.

  At thirty-five, Charlotte was the only child of the original six left alive. In 1849 she published Shirley, her ‘social problem’ novel, about the upheavals of the early Industrial Revolution, and the only one of her major works to be set in her native Yorkshire. This was followed, in 1853, by her most introspective work, Villette. The following year she married the Revd Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate since 1845. Though not loveless, how passionate the marriage was will never be known. She died of complications arising from pregnancy.

  FN

  Charlotte Brontë (later Nicholls); Emily Brontë (Jane); Anne Brontë

  MRT

  Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

  Biog

  J. R. V. Barker, The Brontës (1994)

  43. Maria Monk 1816–1849

  I must be informed that one of my great duties was to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them.

  There has been a successful campaign over the last half-century to identify, celebrate, and institutionalise an authentic ‘Canadian fiction’. One author – arguably the unluckiest novelist ever to write a bestseller – is signally absent from the roll of Maple Leaf honour. In 1836, the year that another young unknown, ‘Boz’, exploded on the scene with The Pickwick Papers, the North American reading public was entranced by The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice, and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal. First published in New York under the respectable Harper imprint, ‘Maria Monk’ went on to sell 300,000 in five years in pirate, ‘underground’ editions.

  Purporting to be ‘true confessions’, the Awful Disclosures was as much a work of unalloyed fiction as anything Boz wrote. The nuns of Hôtel Dieu, it supposedly revealed, served as concubines for lecherous priests in a neighbouring seminary. These robed rogues indulged a Sadeian taste for flagellation and bondage (passages from the divine Marquis’s Justine are irresistibly evoked). Tunnels from neighbouring monasteries facilitated the priests’ nocturnal ravishing and the resulting bastards of Mother Church were murdered at birth, the little corpses being thrown in a lime pit, after being baptised, of course. Sex Vobiscum. Sex is everywhere under the veil, the robe, under the cardinal’s hat and even, it is hinted, under the papal vestments. Pope Gregory XVI, it was implied, had made anal rape a specific priestly duty. His Canadian clergy undertook the task with holy relish.

  As the Awful Disclosures narrates it, Maria was a good little Canadian girl who – with the purest religious motives – took the veil, having converted in her teens from Protestantism to Catholicism. A horrible mistake. Only a couple of hours after taking her vows, Maria discovers the true nature of conventual devotions at Hôtel Dieu.

  when, as I was sitting in the community-room, Father Dufresne called me out, saying, he wished to speak to me. I feared what was his intention; but I dared not disobey. In a private apartment, he treated me in a brutal manner; and, from two other priests, I afterwards received similar usage that evening. Father Dufresne afterwards appeared again; and I was compelled to remain in company with him until morning.

  According to Monk, she was immured in this papal brothel for seven years, at which point, unable to face the idea of her newborn babe (engendered by the Abbé himself) going into the lime pit, she resourcefully made her escape. (It is, incidentally, impossible not to be reminded at such moments of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.) The first edition of The Awful Disclosures finishes here but subsequent editions narrate Maria’s initial inclination to drown herself, having dutifully ensured the safety of her babe, and her later resolution to live and expose the evils of popery.

  What little truth of Maria Monk’s life can be recovered is sad. Born Catholic in Montreal, she was, reportedly, brain-damaged at the age of seven when a pencil was jabbed deep into her ear. From earliest childhood, she was sexually wayward and turned, in her teens, to prostitution. She never set foot in Hôtel Dieu, a wholly respectable institution. Aged eighteen, Maria’s mother had her incarcerated in Montreal’s Charitable Institution for Female Penitents. Spectacularly impenitent, she got herself pregnant and was expelled, then made her way down to the United States.

  In Boston, she witnessed virulent anti-Catholic riots and the burning of a convent. Riding this prejudice, she invented her fables about the Hôtel Dieu to explain her bastard child. It came to the notice of the press and she was written about in the New York newspapers in October 1835. By now she had embellished her fictions, claiming that, just before her lucky escape, she had been instructed to poison a fellow nun who had dared to resist the beastly sexual demands made on her. Overnight, Maria Monk (a happy name in the circumstances) was a Protestant ‘cause’, and living proof of Catholic licentiousness. The articles were followed up, a few months later, by The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. The narrative was actually ghosted by George Bourne and John Jay Slocum, two virulently anti-Catholic Presbyterian ministers. They profited handsomely from the book, quarrelling with each other furiously over their spoils, but Monk got not a cent – or what pittance she got she squandered.

  The narrative was quickly identified as a squalid sham, a confection put together from Gothic anti-conventual tales, pornography and doctrinal hatred. It was, in short, a novel – and not a very wonderful one (although the same could be said of another bestseller with a not dissimilar anti-Catholic animus, The Da Vinci Code). What was wonderful was its perennial appeal. For much of the nineteenth century The Awful Disclosures were circulated, hand to hand, as religious pornography, among the sectarian faithful. Like the similarly faked Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it was indestructible. Where there was anti-Catholicism, there – sure as night follows day – would be Maria Monk. Where there was anti-Semitism, there would be the Protocols.

  Monk’s later years were short and wretched. In summer 1837, she disappeared from public view, surfacing, momentarily, in Philadelphia where she claimed, preposterously, that she had been kidnapped by Catholic priests and had again escaped. Further disclosures by Maria Monk were published, but by now her credibility was fatally eroded. In 1838 she had another illegitimate child – father unknown, but certainly no priest. Now habitually drunken, she married, drifted back to prostitution (her husband having abandoned her) and was, finally, arrested in a brothel charged with ste
aling from a client. She died, raving, in a New York prison in summer 1849 – an institution which was as evil, one imagines, as that which she had invented in Montreal.

  FN

  Maria Monk

  MRT

  The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk

  Biog

  DCB

  44. George Eliot 1819–1880

  Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them – the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. George Eliot, on the kind of novelist Eliot is not

  In 1934, Lord David Cecil, in his belletrist monograph Early Victorian Novelists, observed, with a donnish sigh, that the dust lay heavier on George Eliot than on her great contemporaries: Dickens and Thackeray. That dust has been blown off (though quite a lot has landed on the luckless author of Vanity Fair) in the last eighty years. Two mighty winds are responsible for the de-dusting of George Eliot: 1. feminism, and its energetic search for female Shakespeares; 2. the rise of Ph.D.-sponsored ‘research’. What once looked like ‘dull’ is now Arnoldian ‘high seriousness’.

  Mary Anne (the name is spelt various ways) Evans was born the daughter of a land agent in the service of a member of the Warwickshire aristocracy. Mary Anne’s mother was her father’s second wife and, like him, of respectable working-class stock (Mary Garth’s father, Caleb, in Middlemarch is a fond representation of Robert Evans). She grew up devoted to her brother Isaac (unfondly recalled as Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss). Her upbringing was evangelical, dutiful, rural and allowed ample access to books. Scott, whom she first read aged eight, would be a major influence. On her mother’s death in 1836, she left school to take over running the house for her father and brother. A critical moment in her late adolescence was her principled refusal to accompany her father to church – an act of doctrinal, not filial, rebellion.

  She was already steeping herself in works of theology and in Wordsworth, with whom she had a lifelong congeniality. In Coventry, a city intellectually fizzing with literary coteries, she had what was, effectively, the best higher education a woman could get in 1840s England. She was invited, aged twenty-three, to translate D. F. Strauss’s work of biblical ‘Higher Criticism’, Das Leben Jesu, into English. The translation, for which she received £20, came out in 1846. In 1848, she met Emerson, which left a profound impression on her already formidable mind. On her father’s death in 1849, she received a small legacy of some £90 p.a., which allowed her to travel abroad. She had, at this point, renamed herself ‘Marian’, a name unassociated with the motherhood of Jesus.

  On the strength of her private income, she took up what was virtually unpaid work on John Chapman’s Westminster Review, the leading journal of ideas of the day (with, inevitably, a tiny circulation – most of us, Eliot once pungently observed, ‘walk about well wadded with stupidity’). She was probably romantically involved with Chapman and certainly was so with the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who at the last moment, was supposedly put off by Marian’s superficial lack of physical beauty. The third man in her life, George Henry Lewes – himself spectacularly ugly – was a philosopher, scientist, journalist and occasional novelist. He would become her lifelong consort, but never her husband. A practising free-thinker, Lewes had surrendered his wife to a journalist colleague. Having condoned adultery, legal separation was, at the time, impossible. Nevertheless, Marian defiantly called herself ‘Mrs Lewes’. The couple suffered ostracism, and much mockery behind their backs. There were no children: rationalists that they were, contraception is the likely explanation.

  Over the early 1850s Marian worked at her translation of Spinoza’s Ethics while Lewes worked on his life of Goethe: high minds in harness. On the side, Marian had begun dabbling in fiction, with the short stories which eventually became Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858. They were published under the pen-name ‘George Eliot’. This second identity was devised so as not to contaminate Marian’s serious writing, not to advertise her questionable (non-)marital status, and – most importantly – to draw a line between herself and ‘silly lady novelists’, about whose effusions she was scathing. The Scenes, which drew on her early life in Warwickshire, were well received, despite their unremitting realism (one, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, is the first study of female alcoholism in literature). Eliot was persuaded by Lewes, and by their sympathetic publisher, John Blackwood, to progress to a full-sized, three-decker novel, Adam Bede (1859). Set in the rural Midlands at the period of the Methodist revival, the novel was sensationally popular with library readers. It was no longer possible to keep her identity secret (more so with impostors – all male – pretending to be her). But she retained the masculine pen-name for her fiction.

  At the same period, Eliot took charge of Lewes’s three sons. The Leweses were now secure financially. In 1860, Blackwood published The Mill on the Floss, the most autobiographical of Eliot’s novels. Despite some objection to the near seduction of Maggie Tulliver in the third volume, the work confirmed Eliot’s standing as one of the leading novelists of the day – and, without question, the leading woman novelist. After some shorter efforts, including the crystalline moral fable, Silas Marner (1861), Eliot’s next novel – her great work as she projected it – was a tale of fifteenth-century Florence, Romola (1862–3). She was offered the highest-ever payment for a novel until then, £10,000. Her historical research was exhaustive: she went into the novel, she said, a young woman and emerged the other end an old woman. But despite the fortune it earned her, and the labour she put into it, Romola remains her least read work.

  In the early 1860s the Leweses were rich enough to move into a luxurious house, the Priory, in St John’s Wood. George Eliot was now a ‘Victorian Sage’, and in the furious debate over the second Reform Bill she intervened (on the Conservative side) with her ‘social problem’ novel, Felix Holt, The Radical (1866). Reform stuck in her mind, and she returned to the earlier 1832 Bill in the novel that is regarded as her masterpiece, Middlemarch. In it, she wove into one design two originally separate stories: that of an idealistic young woman, Dorothea Brooke and that of a scientifically adventurous doctor, Tertius Lydgate. The completed novel ponders many of the issues that had preoccupied Eliot throughout her life: above all, what constitutes the life well lived? Our final view of Dorothea Brooke (as of Dinah Morris, in Adam Bede) is ambiguous.

  In 1876 Eliot published her last novel, Daniel Deronda. Despite its preoccupation with Judaism (typically, Eliot learned Hebrew by way of preparation), the work was immensely successful. In the same year the Leweses purchased a large country house, the Heights, near Haslemere. But Lewes, whose health was chronically poor, died in November 1878. An inconsolable Eliot devoted the remainder of her shattered intellectual energies to editing his Problems of Life and Mind – a book which posterity would gladly exchange for another ten pages of Middlemarch, describing in clearer detail Dorothea’s later life after marrying Ladislaw. Finally, in 1880, she married John Walter Cross, twenty years her junior. In unclear circumstances, Cross appears to have attempted suicide by jumping into a canal in Venice during the wedding trip. A few months later, on 22 December 1880, Marian died of a kidney disorder. She left a little under £43,000.

  Cross’s pious George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885) is a prime example of the Victorian whitewash biography. It did not, however, whiten the reputation of the adulteress novelist in unforgiving eyes. It was not until 1880 that Westminster Abbey finally relented and allowed a commemorative stone to be laid alongside such exemplars of moral virtue as Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

  FN

  George Eliot (née Mary Anne Evans, later ‘Marian’)

  MRT

  Middlemarch

  Biog

  R. Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (1996)

  POSTSCRIPT

  45. G. H. Lewes 1817–1878

  Mr Eliot.

  George Eliot lived the years of her great creativity under the shadow of he
r consort (she called him ‘husband’), G. H. Lewes. Posterity has cast Lewes, with ever-deepening obscurity, in her shadow. But their lives, and achievements, are intertwined. And, little read as he is nowadays, he deserves an honoured niche in the history of fiction – not merely as a helper of genius, but an innovator.

  Lewes was born into a theatrical family and went to school haphazardly, leaving at sixteen. Like many Victorians, he was a heroic autodidact and intellectual ‘amateur’. It was an exciting century to be curious and none was more so than Lewes. He enrolled as a student of medicine in his teens but gave up the profession because of his sensitivity to others’ suffering – not even a mission to mend it could overcome his sensitivity. This was not entirely a moral failing. Like Eliot he believed ‘sympathy’ to be a mark of civilisation and its extension a gauge of progress; for her, the novel was a principal instrument for the instilling of sympathy – awareness of other people’s ‘equivalent centre of self’. From his medical training Lewes took ‘physiology’ – the organic relation of parts – as a prime element of his thought. Other elements were the philosophy of Spinoza and, pre-eminently, the developmental ‘sociology’ (‘positivism’) of Auguste Comte, whose ‘third state’ foresaw a utopia brought about by growing human enlightenment.

  Lewes spent two Lehrjahre (1838–40) in Germany, at a period of European ferment, and returned, with Carlyle, Britain’s main disciple of Goethe, whom he met in Weimar. On his return in 1841, he married Agnes Jervis, whose tutor he was. At the time he was supporting himself as an all-purpose journalist, expounding his sternly free-thinking views. In line with his rational, increasingly bohemian, philosophy he did not resent his wife forming a liaison with Thornton Hunt, the son of Keats’s patron, Leigh Hunt, and in 1850 Hunt and Lewes set up the journal The Leader, one of the most powerful higher journalistic ventures of the period, though never remunerative.