by Rebecca Mead
Lewes died just six years later, in November 1878, at the age of sixty-one. Eliot was devastated. At first, she shut herself away, howling with grief, wishing that she, too, could die; she did not even attend his funeral, in Highgate Cemetery. Her diary for the period contains little but fragmentary quotations about loss from Shakespeare, Heine, Goethe. “Weary and heavy laden,” she wrote. “Head miserable and heart bruised.” When she felt able to work the only thing she wanted to do was to prepare for publication Lewes’s unfinished Problems of Life and Mind—the act of devotion that Dorothea could not bring herself to perform for Casaubon. She sorted his papers. “Wrote memories, and lived with him all day,” she wrote that January. “Read in his diary 1874—‘Wrote verses to Polly—Wrote verses on Polly.’ ” Those verses have not survived: perhaps she packed them up with the letters he wrote to her, which were buried with her upon her own death.
But her extremity of grief abated, and after it did so, she did something that almost all observers have considered even more shocking than eloping to Weimar. Seventeen months after Lewes’s death she married John Walter Cross, a family friend and their financial adviser, who was twenty years younger than she. They had first met in Rome in the spring of 1869, and later Cross recalled his impressions of her then: the low, earnest, musical voice, the abundant auburn-brown hair, the kindly gray-blue eyes, constantly changing in expression. A woman’s hands can betray her age more than any other feature, but Cross remembered hers as remarkable: finely formed, and so thin as to seem translucent.
Cross, whom Lewes and Eliot had long addressed as “nephew,” had been one of the few friends admitted during the first weeks of her widowhood. He, too, had recently been bereaved, his mother dying only ten days after Lewes. Within a few months, they began to read Dante together. She saw him often at Witley, in Surrey, where she and Lewes had bought a country house just two years earlier. In London they visited the National Gallery and the British Museum together. “This constant association engrossed me completely,” Cross later wrote. “A bond of mutual dependence had been formed between us.” The quality of Eliot’s dependence is shown in a letter she sent Cross less than a year after Lewes’s death. “Through everything else, dear tender one, there is the blessing of trusting in thy goodness,” she wrote. “Thou dost not know anything of verbs in Hiphil and Hophal or the history of metaphysics or the position of Kepler in science, but thou knowest best things of another sort, such as belong to the manly heart—secrets of lovingness and rectitude.”
She told almost no one of her impending marriage, only issuing a few vague warnings. “When I act in a way which is thoroughly unexpected there are reasons which justify my action, though the reasons may not be evident to you,” she wrote to one friend. After the wedding, which took place on the sixth of May at St. George’s, Hanover Square, she wrote brief notes to a few intimates, but offered no explanation of her actions. “I can only ask you and your husband to imagine and interpret according to your deep experience and loving kindness,” she wrote to one friend. In Middlemarch, Celia asks Dorothea to explain how she fell in love with Ladislaw. “No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know,” Dorothea replies. Eliot asked her friends to extend to her the imaginative sympathy with which her books were charged, and which they sought to nurture.
She knew, though, that anyone who could not feel with her might well judge her, both on grounds of infidelity to Lewes’s memory, and because of the unusual age gap between herself and her new husband. The gossip came. One contemporary noted that Eliot had been buying new clothes for her wedding journey, unkindly remarking that everything possible had been done to make her look not too unsuitable a bride for a man of forty. Eliot had anticipated in literature the kind of censure she received in life. The citizens of Middlemarch criticize Dorothea’s two marriages, observing that she had first wed a sickly clergyman old enough to be her father, then, less than a year after his death, renounced her estate to marry the clergyman’s young, impecunious cousin: “She could not have been ‘a nice woman’, else she would not have married either the one or the other.”
Isaac Evans, Eliot’s provincially minded brother, saw events from a different if equally conservative perspective. Now that she was at last legally married, no matter to whom, he wrote to her to offer his congratulations. Eliot’s biographers have scourged Isaac for his woefully conventional and unsympathetic stance toward his sister, and he certainly doesn’t emerge from the story of her life looking good. But on my visit to the Nuneaton museum I was moved to discover that, after her death, he had labeled the case in which she had saved their father’s eyeglasses: “My father’s spectacles kept by George Eliot.” At the end, he acknowledged who she really was.
The most gratifying response to the unexpected turn of events came from Barbara Bodichon. “Tell Johnny Cross I should have done exactly what he has done if you would have let me and I had been a man,” Bodichon wrote. “You see I know all love is so different that I do not see it unnatural to love in new ways—not to be unfaithful to any memory.” The marvelous Bodichon was the kind of friend we might all hope to have, or strive to be: warm and generous and intuitive. She added that, from all she knew of Lewes, she was sure he would be glad for Eliot.
Charles Lewes, Eliot’s stepson, who gave her away at the wedding, said the same thing. He told Anne Thackeray Ritchie, the novelist’s daughter, that his father had not a grain of jealousy in him, and would have wanted Eliot to be happy. To Ritchie, Charles also reported a comment of Eliot’s, which stands as an unarguable justification for having done what seemed so implausible: if she hadn’t been human with feelings and failings like other people, how could she have written her books?
THOSE who cared best for Eliot approved of Cross; literary posterity has been less generous. Scholars have been frustrated by his destruction of the early portions of her diary—the pages dating from 1849, her trip to Geneva, until 1854, when she and Lewes left for Weimar, have been excised—and for the sanitized version of Eliot which he presented in his selections from her letters and journals in his Life, a book which William Gladstone disparaged as “a reticence in three volumes.” He wasn’t her intellectual equal: his one literary production outside of the biography was a volume published in 1893 with the unprepossessing title Impressions of Dante and of the New World, with a Few Words on Bimetallism. (This book begins, winningly enough, with an apology: “I confess that it is difficult to find a valid excuse for republishing old magazine articles, and in my own case I cannot plead that any host of admiring friends has put pressure on me to collect mine.”)
Perhaps, having become accustomed to veneration in the later years of her literary celebrity, Eliot liked having an adoring acolyte—although it doesn’t seem that she made the Casaubon-like demand that he compile her biography after her death, the book being Cross’s own enthusiastically embraced project. Or perhaps, as the scholar Rosemarie Bodenheimer has persuasively argued, Eliot knew she needed a caring and invested manager, particularly after seeing how complicated her affairs had become after Lewes’s death, when she had distressing difficulty accessing the money she had earned because it was all in a bank account under Lewes’s name. The marriage may have been surprising, even to its participants, but it made a certain kind of sense as well.
One lurid detail of Eliot and Cross’s brief life together threatens to overwhelm their marital history, as the obituary of a politician will be dominated by the retelling of the embarrassing personal indiscretion that besmirched an otherwise distinguished reputation. While on their wedding trip, a month’s meandering tour through France and northern Italy that brought them eventually to Venice, Cross jumped from a window into the Grand Canal. In his Life of Eliot he said that the poor air in Venice and the lack of exercise there were to blame. Contemporary gossips and later biographers have speculated that his illness was grounded in psychology, evidence that the scandalous marriage was indeed a dreadful mismatch of temperaments and desires.
> Cross’s plunge is perplexing, and to admirers of Eliot it remains embarrassing—an anomalous digression in what can otherwise be cast as a heroic life’s journey. Many critics have been tempted to assume a position of post-Freudian superior knowledge, and to suggest that there must have been a compensatory element in Eliot and Cross’s attraction for each other, a submerged desire that was elusive to the participants and that could not survive the ordeal of a bedroom scene. This approach seems to me to be both arrogant and inadequate, and not just because Cross and Eliot had survived bedrooms all across Europe before they got to Venice. Whatever hidden or repressed motives may have influenced Cross’s wish to marry Eliot are obscure to us, given how little we know about him, but the suggestion that he sought in Eliot a mother-replacement—and was horrified to discover that his mother-replacement made sexual demands—seems a little too quick, and too pat. What we do know is that Eliot was the author of the most psychologically penetrating novels yet written in the English language, and while all of us are capable at any age of acting upon impulses we don’t understand, it seems to me unlikely that Eliot would blunder into a marriage under such a tremendous psychological misapprehension, about her own motivations or about Cross’s.
My own inclination is to step back from the bedroom—as a Victorian novelist would have been obliged to do—and to let the event stand in its singular, perplexing strangeness, one episode in Eliot’s life, but not its defining one. I prefer, instead, to notice the strange consonance of Cross’s leap into the canal with the deaths by water that recur in Eliot’s novels: characters drown in Adam Bede, Silas Marner, and Daniel Deronda, and, of course, The Mill on the Floss. That novel famously ends when Maggie Tulliver, who has been shamed by an attempted and then aborted riverboat elopement, drowns in the floodwaters of the river powering the mill in which she grew up. Unlike her creator, Maggie cannot escape the provincialism of the world she has been born into.
I prefer to reflect upon something that occurred to me while visiting Eliot’s childhood home, where a small pond has now been dug to suggest the one that inspired the Red Deeps in The Mill on the Floss—that for all the time Eliot spent living by ponds or canals and visiting seashores, it’s unlikely that she ever learned to swim. She never experienced that sense of physical freedom, moving with and against the waves: the elemental awe, the exhilarating solitude that for me is a summertime commonplace. There are areas of experience we take for granted today that for Eliot and her contemporaries were unavailable or obscure. Whatever she and Cross discovered about themselves and each other in their marriage must surely be in some ways unavailable or obscure to us.
What is clear is that Eliot’s letters from her wedding journey are those of a woman surprised by joy, and held by it. In Paris they went to La Sainte-Chapelle and to the Luxembourg museum, neither of which Cross had ever seen; they wandered the Champs-Élysées, “looking at our fellow mortals who seem, like ourselves, immensely improvable,” and enjoying the late-spring blossoms everywhere. Near the city of Chambéry they gathered roses in the garden that had belonged to Rousseau. In Turin they stayed in a palatial apartment with blue satin draperies and marble baths. Her letters to Cross’s family are barely short of blissful. “We seem to love each other better than we did when we set out, which seemed then hardly possible,” she wrote to one of her new sisters-in-law.
Letters to Charles Lewes were similarly filled with enthusiasm for the sights she and Cross were seeing and the companionship they were sharing, though her reported happiness was not entirely without qualification. She had but one regret in seeing the beauty of the Alpine foothills, she said, and that was that Lewes had not seen it. “I would still give up my own life willingly if he could have the happiness instead of me,” she wrote.
To Barbara Bodichon, the least prejudiced, most broad-minded auditor she knew, Eliot attempted to articulate what this marriage meant to her, coming when she thought that her life might as well have been over. “Deep down below there is a hidden river of sadness but this must always be with those who have lived long,” she wrote. But in spite of that sadness, she said, she was able to enjoy her renewed life. She felt that she would be a better creature—less selfish, more open—than she could have been had she remained in solitude. “To be constantly lovingly grateful for the gift of a perfect love is the best illumination of one’s mind to all the possible good there may be in store for man on this troublous little planet,” she wrote. Her novelistic powers had taken root in the fertile soil of her domestic happiness with Lewes, and she had no faith in her ability to produce anything else without re-creating, as best she could, that sense of connectedness and interdependency.
Eliot’s sudden death from kidney failure in December 1880, seven months after the wedding, obviated the question of whether life with Cross could prove as generative as her union with Lewes. Cross was left, as he wrote to a friend of Eliot’s immediately upon her death, “alone in this new House we meant to be so happy in.” That house, in which they lived together for just three weeks, was 4 Cheyne Walk, on the Embankment in London—an impressive terraced structure behind a high locked gate, which today has swagged curtains visible through its graceful Georgian windows and artfully pruned shrubs in its front garden.
I walked there one rainy afternoon through the dauntingly elegant streets of Chelsea. I lived in this neighborhood once, for a few months, working for a British newspaper when I was in my midtwenties. It was a period of professional turbulence: the job in London was better than the one I had in New York, but I had hated to wrench myself away from my New York life, and I returned within a year. It was also a period of personal confusion: romantically speaking, at least, I was tripping over myself with conflicting impulses toward commitment and toward freedom. I hadn’t yet discovered the two conditions need not be mutually exclusive, and that I might find freedom within commitment.
As I now walked through the wet streets with my head down and umbrella up, recalling that melancholy and lonely time, I pictured my husband on the other side of the Atlantic, imagining him reading on the couch in our living room, under an enormous mahogany bookcase that must have been installed more than a century ago. This bookcase was one of the reasons my husband and I wanted to buy this particular house—it was one of the things that made us think it could be a home to us, our first together, and we filled it with the books that we merged into one collection. A year later we celebrated our wedding in this room, with friends dancing to a band that my husband had recruited from a subway platform. I thought of him, and of Eliot’s sober, moving characterization of the conditions of marriage, its demand for self-suppression and tolerance; and I remembered what it is sometimes easy to forget in the busy midst of marriage, that I had promised my husband the support and love that Eliot and Lewes found in each other, and that I was grateful for all the ways he granted me that, and more.
This was an area of London that was once home to all sorts of writers and artists, though judging by the property values it seems unlikely that many remained. Houses were marked with plaques for their illustrious former inhabitants. On Tite Street there was one for Oscar Wilde, who lived there with Constance, his wife, while eventually finding other interests elsewhere; and another for John Singer Sargent, who lived alone, very private about his private life. On Cheyne Walk, a few doors down from Eliot’s address, is the house to which Dante Gabriel Rossetti moved after his wife, the painter Elizabeth Siddal, died of an overdose of laudanum. I thought about the often complicated personal lives of artists—about those who have needed to be free of personal encumbrances, or whose spouses have suffered neglect, humiliation, or worse. Perhaps the model of the artist who is willing to sacrifice all for his or her art—the artist who is not culpable for his or her domestic ruthlessness, because it is in the pursuit of something so much more significant—is the one to which the most romance is attached.
Domestic and familial ties are time consuming, and it’s easy to imagine all the things that might be accomplis
hed with fewer of them, particularly after breaking off midparagraph to cook a child’s dinner, or setting work aside to help a partner worry over his or hers. But I find Eliot and Lewes’s model of a life of work embedded in a life of domestic commitment much more appealing. It gives me greater hope for my own life, with all its obligations. Having endless hours of free time in which to create is hardly useful if most of those hours are spent in a paralyzing torpor of loneliness, overwhelmed by anxieties about that loneliness lasting forever, as I am surely not alone in having discovered.
Eliot wrested for herself an alternative course. Her best work began in being beloved, while middle age granted her an expansion rather than a diminishment of possibility. I cannot exactly call this a comfortable doctrine: the physical and mental exigencies of growing older deny us the prospect of ease, as Eliot knew, too. But even so, I think, it is one worth trying to believe.
Chapter 7
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Two Temptations
“I had once meant to be better than that, and I am come back to my old intention.”
—MIDDLEMARCH, CHAPTER 66
One day on my journey through Middlemarch, I found myself in Coventry with an hour or two to spare, and so I went to a bookstore in a pedestrian shopping center to see if it stocked any volumes about the city’s most celebrated author. I was looking for something local—something that I might have missed in my varied hunts through the holdings of secondhand booksellers and the shelves of academic bookstores.
The store was part of a national chain, and had a chain store’s usual priorities: plenty of cookbooks, and shelves filled with established bestsellers. There was, as I expected, a section dedicated to Eliot, though I was surprised at how small it was, and at the simple, hand-lettered sign on it, that read “George Eliot was born in Nuneaton and grew up in Coventry.” I thought she deserved something professionally printed, at least.
