In Love with George Eliot

by Kathy O'Shaughnessy

  There was a wisp of dry hay or grass still threaded through the top of the brooch, that she plucked out now, and held out in the light; yes, there it was: and then she did remember it, the afternoon of the brooch, when they had pronounced themselves sisters. Cara and Sara were sisters, but she had been invited to join, a guest sister, as the brooch was pinned to her blouse.

  ‘I owe them a great deal,’ admitted Marian to herself, sitting there. She leant over to stoke the fire, which was flickering low, though outside the wind was still up. It was through Sara she’d acquired her first task of translating Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu; in fact, thinking about it now, everything had followed from meeting them: London, the Westminster Review — her translation her calling card — and George. For more than a decade, she had been treated as family. They had taken her with them on holiday: to Tenby, Geneva. They wrote to her constantly, as she wrote to them; her life was their concern. For years, Marian poured out her deepest fears, about being ugly and unloveable, how her fate was to be alone, as she repeatedly fell in love and was rebuffed.

  And then she had met Lewes. At this point she had become more private. Lewes’ reputation was bad — the debauched man with the weird marital history, who believed in Free Love: and not only was he married, he couldn’t divorce. When she considered living openly with Lewes, she discussed it with Charles Bray and John Chapman, but not with Cara and Sara. She said to herself: for their sake, I will not involve them, they are women.

  And deep in herself she was dreaming of Villette, which she had recently read: Charlotte Brontë’s heady brew of passionate love, unmoored from England; the town of Labassecoeur as odd as a region of the unconscious.

  On her last visit to Rosehill, late June, just before leaving England, there was one afternoon, talking in the garden, sitting as usual under the acacia tree, on the soft bearskin (she liked to lie on her side on it, knees curled up, propping her cheek up on her elbow), when mid-sentence, Marian stopped speaking. She had looked at the two dear women, a little as she imagined Crusoe, from the boat, regarding the island he was leaving forever. And had a sharp fear inside her chest — that she was going away, making this momentous change in her life, without saying a word to either of them. And then those sensations changed quick as the weather. Leaving her with an impression of the day’s heat, Cara wearing lace at her throat, her sleeves unpeeled on the warm day to the elbow; Cara’s arms, Marian had seen for the first time, having freckles.

  Before going, Marian packed up belongings to return to Sara: a print by Titian, Sara’s Hebrew Grammar and Apocryphal Gospels. She had told them simply that she was going abroad. I shall soon send you a good bye, for I am preparing to go to ‘Labassecour’:

  Dear Friends — all three

  I have only time to say good bye and God bless you. Poste Restante, Weimar for the next six weeks, and afterwards Berlin.

  Ever your loving and grateful,

  Marian

  Three months later, in a letter to Charles in which she described fully her resolve to stay openly with Lewes as his nominal wife, she mentioned Cara and Sara. I am ignorant how far Cara and Sara may be acquainted with the state of things, and how they may feel towards me. I am quite prepared to accept the consequences of a step which I have deliberately taken and to accept them without irritation or bitterness. The most painful consequence will, I know, be loss of friends. If I do not write therefore, understand that it is because I desire not to obtrude myself.

  Having posted the letter in the leafy streets of Weimar — the leaves had begun to fall, it was a wet, October day — she made her way with a new sensation of lightness to the rosily lit Kuchenladen, bought a rare treat for that night’s dessert — strüdel — before returning to 62A Kaufgasse, the room she had rented with George. The thought of Cara and Sara had been nagging at her since she had left England. Yet how liberating the time had been! Everywhere they were accepted without question. Researching and writing his biography of Goethe, Lewes knew writers and musicians, and their circle had rapidly expanded. Soon they had become great friends with Liszt, and his astonishingly ugly mistress, the Princess von-Sayn Wittgenstein — the ease with which these Europeans accepted the less conventional relationship! It was like drinking good wine.

  But all this time Cara and Sara had existed at the side of her mind, as a sort of weight. To think of them had been like putting on old clothes, that were too familiar. And her dreams! She had a dream of a newborn cuckoo in the nest. The strangest dream. She was the cuckoo, and yet she devoured it, which made no sense at all; and then she flew; none of it made sense.

  Shortly after writing to Charles, a letter had arrived from Sara. With a slight sense of being captive, she stared at the familiar handwriting on the envelope. At the same time, with awful clarity, she recalled the years, the many years, of her woeful, intimate, outpourings to Sara, addressing her playfully as Cara Sposa, and Beloved Achates, to tell her yet again, laced with apologies for doing so, about her unhappiness, her illnesses, her fears, her loneliness. Abruptly she put the letter down. Instead she went out to walk — to the green at the end of Weimar, a place without borders or fences, a park that blurred into the surrounding nature, in a beguilingly unEnglish way.

  She opened the letter in the evening.

  Not to obtrude yourself, Sara expostulated, when if you ever thought our friendship good for anything, you must know how we have been longing to hear from you! Sara went on to say: So much for my own feelings of your treatment of us, a trifling subject indeed compared with that of your change of life — but on that I hardly dare to enter.

  Marian frowned, put the letter on the table. That night over supper she said, vivaciously, ‘My dear George, she completely misunderstands me! She is failing to see the central situation. I did not want to compromise either Sara or Cara.’

  George agreed.

  ‘Yes indeed. I did not want to compel either to associate with me! George, are you listening? If I had taken them into my confidence, they would have been less free to choose.’

  ‘You tell her that, then!’ said George, but he seemed more interested in scraping off the last bit of meat from the mangy, half-starved pheasant they had bought cut-price for their landlady to cook.

  She would reply to Sara the next day.

  Three days passed before she took up her pen.

  My dear Sara

  The mode in which you and Cara have interpreted both my words and my silence makes me dread lest in writing more I should only give rise to fresh misconceptions. I am so deeply conscious of having had neither the feeling nor the want of feeling which you impute to me that I am quite unable to read into my words, quoted by you, the sense which you put upon them.

  She read through what she had written and approved. She was aware, too, of a sense of indignation stirring slowly in herself. With more spirit she continued:

  When you say that I do not care about Cara’s or your opinion and friendship it seems much the same to me as if you said that I didn’t care to eat when I was hungry or to drink when I was thirsty. One of two things: either I am a creature without affection, on whom the memories of years have no hold, or you, Cara and Mr Bray are the most cherished friends I have in the world.

  Good. Good.

  It is simply self-contradictory to say that a person can be indifferent about her dearest friends; yet this is what you substantially say, when you accuse me of ‘boasting with what serenity I can give you up’, of ‘speaking proudly’ etc.

  She drew in her breath. Goodness, the roar outside — she got up to look out of the dirty window. So dirty she could hardly see. She could just make out the Michaelmas fair going on below: small, primitive-looking crooked stalls, in this dear town of Weimar, that seemed two hundred years behind England. She sat down and continued.

  There is now no longer any secrecy to be preserved about Mr. Lewes’ affairs or mine, and whatever I have written to Mr
Bray, I have written to you. I wish to speak simply and to act simply but I think it can hardly be unintelligible to you that I shrink from writing elaborately about private feelings and circumstances.

  There. It was her right to be private. She had a trembling sensation inside herself, like the tremor of rage.

  Cara, you and my own sister are the three women who are tied to my heart by a cord which can never be broken and which really pulls me continually. My love for you rests on a past which no future can reverse, and offensive as the words seem to have been to you, I must repeat, that I can feel no bitterness towards you, however you may act towards me.

  But when she showed the letter to George, he merely laughed. ‘Fine!’ he said, picking up the Leader. The Brays and Sara Hennell, he seemed to be saying, were her affair.

  After that, Sara had accepted the new terms between them. They both wrote to her. ‘It’s good we are friends again,’ said Marian to herself, now, in the empty drawing-room. But how strange that Sara was reading Adam Bede without realising it was her.

  Back in the old days of Rosehill, she used to talk a great deal about the question of faith, and also about writing, with Sara. Even now Sara was still sending her odd portions of the book she was writing, called Thoughts in Aid of Faith, asking for her advice.

  Marian had read bits of it, and passed some of it to Lewes.

  ‘Awfully mediocre,’ sighed Lewes, puffing on his cigar, after he’d read ten pages.

  ‘It really is!’ agreed Marian. ‘I think it’s worse than her previous one. But I’ll have to write to her as truthfully as I can. It won’t be helpful otherwise.’

  ‘You do as you think fit,’ said Lewes, twinkling.

  Marian coloured. Wheels within wheels: here she was, sending her old friend criticisms of her work, with commendable truthfulness; and all the while she was lying to the same friend about what she was doing. Lewes, with his usual tolerant good nature, saw it all.

  13

  The week after Sara’s letter about Liggins arrived, the Congreves came to supper. Before they dined, Lewes opened a promisingly dusty bottle of Pouilly-Fumé 1847; within ten minutes, alcohol was running through their bloodstreams; and even Maria Congreve’s pale skin was becoming duskily flushed, her smile brimming. Talk soon turned to the new Scottish National Gallery, which had opened towards the end of last month.

  Sitting in his chair, Richard Congreve, legs crossed, thumbs in his waistcoat, said: ‘It’s a fine building — very handsome indeed. Designed by —’

  ‘Playfair, wasn’t it?’ put in Lewes, quickly.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Congreve, inclining his head in the way he did. ‘In fact, I had the privilege of attending the opening, in Edinburgh. It’s chiefly a re-housing of the old Scottish Academy works, of course.’

  ‘Did you go to Edinburgh too,?’ asked Marian, turning to Maria Congreve.

  Maria explained that she’d been too busy preparing for their trip at the end of the month. In fact, she had news. They were taking her younger sister Emily to the Continent for five months.

  ‘Five months! You’re away for five months!’ echoed Marian.

  Marian was silent. It came to her, as the plates were being cleared away, that she didn’t really like Wandsworth.

  ‘I will miss you,’ she said to Maria, at dessert. She spoke so that no one else could hear.

  ‘I feel the same,’ replied Maria, in a tender, low voice. ‘I remember what we talked about on our last walk, and always will do. I am glad that I have your permission.’

  They were both silent for a moment, each thoughtful.

  ‘So,’ said Marian humorously, but still in a quiet voice, putting her hand on the younger woman’s arm, ‘you will tell me that you love me? So that I can be happy?’

  After supper, Lewes put a decanter of port on the table, with a flourish. ‘Ten years old,’ he announced, with satisfaction. ‘I’d be interested to know how you rate it.’

  Mr Congreve sipped it, with a look of great attention.

  ‘Excellent,’ he pronounced. ‘Excellent. Which reminds me, talking of excellent, have you by any chance read Adam Bede?’

  He went on to say that they might well be tired of the subject, as it had been talked up to death, but he had rarely read a finer book. In fact, from something they’d said, he had the impression they hadn’t read it.

  ‘It is,’ announced Richard Congreve, folding his arms, ‘true to nature in an unprecedented fashion.’

  ‘Really,’ said Lewes.

  ‘Most definitely. But what I find astonishing,’ went on Richard Congreve, ‘is the way this fellow Liggins is doubted! Why?’

  The clock ticked in the silence. Lewes seemed to be concentrating on the decanter as he poured himself another glass. ‘People have different ideas,’ he said casually. ‘There’s some dispute about his claim, as I take it.’

  ‘I don’t think there is, actually,’ said Congreve, quickly, with warmth. Marian could hear that this was not the first time Congreve had discussed this — he had the air of someone returning to a favourite topical debate. ‘I don’t know if you saw the letter in The Times today? It just about clarifies it.’

  Marian took care not to glance at Lewes. They had both pored over the letter this morning, Marian speaking more and more loudly, cheeks reddening with anger. In the space of minutes, Liggins no longer seemed a helpful smokescreen, but an infuriating imposter. They had drafted an immediate peremptory reply to be sent to the editor.

  Mr Congreve was glancing inquisitively at them — perhaps their expressions struck him. He went on, briskly, ‘The letter’s from a fellow by the name of Anders, who says Joseph Liggins, of Nuneaton, wrote the book; and he says that if anyone doubts Liggins is the author, they just have to ask someone in the neighbourhood! Apparently the connections are very obvious. The characters in the book are just like those in real life. Everyone local recognises them.’

  A gross simplification of the creative process, thought Marian, irritably. In actual fact, the beginning was minute observation, but imagination did the rest.

  ‘Right-oh,’ said Lewes. He was drumming his fingers restively on the small table, looking round the room with a vacant expression.

  ‘And someone suggested a woman wrote it! I don’t think so, I don’t think so,’ said Richard Congreve, in a complacent tone. ‘You only have to read the first chapter to see that the author is a man, with a clear moral horizon, as at home in a carpenter’s workshop as I was in an Oxford college. My guess is that this Mystery Author is a clergyman who’s good at carpentry.’

  Marian said: ‘Perhaps Mr Congreve wants some more port.’

  Lewes said: ‘Yes. How about it?’

  Richard Congreve assented, and Lewes filled his glass.

  ***

  Marian had gone to the kitchen, ostensibly to speak to the new servant, Martha, who’d arrived the week before. Martha said, in her thick west country voice, that everything was fine. Through the steamed-up window, Marian could just make out the dark backs of the houses at the end of the garden. Blocking out so much sky.

  Marian missed the countryside, the lanes, dishevelled, sweet, dirty, winding, the open free prospects. Away from this talk, gossip, posturing, lies.

  The tenacity of this man Liggins.

  Good that Mr Congreve liked the book.

  As she walked back to the front room, she wondered about declaring herself. If she could overcome fear —

  ***

  Richard Congreve, one leg crossed over the other, hands deep in his pockets, was saying, ‘Superb vintage, by the way, Lewes,’ nodding in the direction of his glass.

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘Superb. But as I say — the most extraordinary reviews. The Westminster Review gave it twenty-seven pages. Twenty-seven pages! And there was a magnificent piece in The Times yesterday. Ah,’ — and with a nimble movement he�
�d risen, having evidently spotted the newspaper on the sideboard, the same one that Lewes had brought home the day before. ‘Well, here we are!’ exclaimed Congreve. ‘You’ve got it! Hmm — wait — three whole columns — “first-rate novel, and its author takes rank at once among the masters of the art”. I urge this book on both of you,’ he finished, in a tone approaching severity.

  His face was severe, too. That was the thing with Richard Congreve, thought Marian. He looked at ease, but was stiff, tricky, formal underneath.

  She sent George an affectionate glance.

  ‘… wonderful … wonderful …’ Richard was continuing, about his new discovery.

  ‘Unprecedented, I think you said?’ said Lewes, with a casual air.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘In — what way?’

  ‘Oh!’ said Congreve, promptly. ‘The artistry of the whole thing. The work of a master. A complete master.’

  He spoke quickly, almost dismissively.

  ‘It shows such human understanding,’ said Maria, in her quiet voice. ‘I liked the author’s approach to life.’

  Richard laughed indulgently, and shook his head. ‘A hazy generalisation, my dear. The thing is a superb make-believe.’

  After supper, the two couples divided up: Lewes talking to Maria about Lucerne, while Richard and Marian sat side by side on the chaise longue. Abruptly, Richard swung round to face her. Face distorted by pity, a dark cleft showing between his brows. In a low, rapid voice: ‘My dear Mrs Lewes, I have talked about this with Mrs Congreve, but I wanted to say this personally to you before we travelled. When I used to read you in the Westminster Review, I was impressed — exceedingly. I did not feel that your mind travelled in narrow grooves. And,’ — now he lowered his voice further — ‘I am distressed that since your — marriage — I have seen no pieces by you. A voice has gone —’

  She made a face that might pass for gratitude; saw him flick Lewes a suspicious look.