In Love with George Eliot

by Kathy O'Shaughnessy

  Johnny turned. ‘I wanted to suggest,’ he said, with his old innocent good humour, ‘that we walk. The sun has come out.’

  Her thoughts dropped away. She said it was a lovely idea, and rose to join him.

  Epilogue

  This day stands alone. I am not afraid of forgetting, but as heretofore I record her teaching while the sound is still fresh in my soul’s ear. This morning at 10 when the wreath I had ordered — white flowers bordered with laurel leaves — came, I drove with it to Cheyne Walk, giving it silently to the silent cook. Then, instinct guiding — it seemed to guide one right all day — I went to Highgate — stopping on the way to get some violets — I was not sure for what purpose … Then I laid my violets at the head of Mr Lewes’ solitary grave and left the already gathering crowd to ask which way the entrance would be. Then I drifted towards the chapel — standing first for a while under the colonnade where a child asked me ‘Was it the late George Eliot’s wife was going to be buried?’ — I think I said Yes … Then someone claimed a passage through the thickening crowd and I followed in his wake and found myself without effort in a sort of vestibule past the door which kept back the crowd … then the solemn procession passed me. The coffin bearers paused in the very doorway, I pressed a kiss upon the pall and trembled violently as I stood motionless else, in the still silence with nothing to mar the realization of that intense moment’s awe. Then — it was hard to tell the invited mourners from the other waiting friends — men many of whose faces I knew — and so I passed among them into the chapel — entering a forward pew … I saw her husband’s face, pale and still; he forced himself aloof from the unbearable world in sight … but what moved me most was the passage — in the Church Service lesson — it moved me like the voice of God — of Her.

  Awe thrilled me. As at the presence of God. In the memory of her life bare grain — oh God, my God. My love what fruit should such seed bring forth in us — I will force myself to remember your crushing prophesy — that I was to do better work than you had — that cannot be, my Best! and all mine is always yours, but oh! Dearest! Dearest! it shall not be less unworthy of you than it must … The grave was deep and narrow — the flowers filled all the level space. I turned away with the first — Charles Lewes pressed my hand as we gave the last look. Then I turned up the hill and walked through the rain by a road unknown before to Hampstead and a station. Then through the twilight I cried and moaned aloud.

  Edith Simcox’s diary, 29 December 1880

  Only three weeks after moving in to Cheyne Walk, Johnny Cross was alone in the tall fine home overlooking the Thames. He was a widower. Before that, exhausted by moving, just before entering the house, they stayed in Bailey’s Hotel in Kensington for two days, reading Tennyson, Goethe, Comte. He had the strange feeling of one who had spent much time getting tremendously prepared for an event — that never happened.

  She wanted to be buried in Westminster Abbey, he said. This was the least he could do. Spencer, Sidgwick collected signatures; but they were warned off. An atheist who had lived unwed with a man for a quarter of a century, to be buried in the Abbey! Johnny gave way.

  But he was certain it was what she had wanted. He was sure he could remember where she first mentioned it, the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.

  Yet it was not all over. Though something had broken with her death, he had to admit to himself that some great project still hung mistily, rainbow-coloured, in the air.

  The wine he was sipping began to taste sour as he took stock. Almost certainly, the burden of writing her Life must fall on him. Who else could he trust with this sacred office? He knew exactly who was going to come knocking at the door, with maniacal plans. He would, he must, thwart Edith Simcox. Often Marian had talked about hard, prying, greedy eyes. Who would understand her yearning and complicated, loving and driven soul? With trepidation, he opened the teak chest with the worn metal corners containing her diaries and letters. He shut himself up to read. He opened at random the first one. Geneva. Baldly confessional, wistful, self-critical. He read on. — Good heavens! He hesitated, then made himself rip the page, as one might rip off a plaster — quickly.

  Brett brought him coffee, and apple pie — ‘No — No’ — he waved Brett away. He had the extracted page in his hand, he crumpled it, threw it like an absurdly light tennis ball into the fire. Gone. She would be pleased. He continued reading. No — there was nothing for it — he tore out, then tore out again.

  In the new year, Willie came to stay. ‘Thought I’d better keep you company in the palatial.’ Palatial was Willie’s short-hand term for the tall house overlooking the Thames. ‘Ah, Johnny. You sad old thing. After all that —’

  They went for silent walks, under the leafless trees, in the cold, by the Thames.

  ***

  Upstairs in Finsbury Park, I am writing the last pages of the book. The sun is slanting in and getting in my eyes. I close the laptop.

  ‘Kate?’

  It’s Hans, slightly out of breath. His shirt is outside his trousers and he asks if I want to see where he’s put the desk. We go downstairs. The black desk — it’s just been delivered — is next to the fireplace where Billy now likes to curl up. I say it looks great.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on, come on …’

  He’s smiling with that percipient gleam.

  ‘No — I just — you know what? It’s fine. I mean, maybe it’s a bit close to the fireplace —’

  We move it to the other wall, then briefly embrace, as we haven’t been living together long; and it’s still a half surprise to find ourselves near each other, for the evening, and the night, and the next day.

  Ann is having her baby, and the father is Jo Devlin.

  Letting go of Hans, I see a postcard on the floor, where the desk was. Highgate Cemetery, Eliot’s grave. ‘Ah!’ he says. ‘That’s where it all started.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘For sure!’

  ‘Maybe.’ I can’t resist being dubious. Hans laughs, shakes his head. We are, I think, perfectly imperfect together.

  Upstairs I shut the door, and return to my desk to write the final paragraphs.

  ***

  Marian is gone, Marian has died, but the impulses and emotions she generated continue. So although Johnny will never go near an altar again — he lives unmarried till 1924 — in the immediate aftermath the old rivalry continues. Edith goes to Coventry three days after Marian’s funeral to gather material for the Life she wants to write. Johnny visits her, puts her straight. She steps aside.

  Herbert Spencer hears that Johnny is writing the Life, and makes sure to tell him that it was a fabrication about a romance between himself and Marian. The world must know, in spite of his great regard for her, that he never found her physically attractive.

  Henry James visits Johnny. Over lunch, Johnny modestly jokes that he was a cart-horse yoked to a racer. Henry James demurs, but smiles into his beard. My private impression, he writes to his sister, is that if she had not died, she would have killed him. He couldn’t keep up the intellectual pace — all Dante and Goethe, Cervantes and the Greek tragedians.

  Edith Simcox’s hungry love continues. She becomes friends with Barbara and Maria Congreve, and discovers, in an odd way to her delight, that Maria Congreve loved her darling ‘lover-wise’, also.

  Edith publishes her strange, fictional hybrid book, Episodes.

  Are you jealous, sweetheart, of my amours with the spirits of the waves and flowers? And besides, what was there to tell? It is a long story, and yet it comes to very little. I was ill and went to the seaside, and the waves broke, sweet wild flowers grew, and the changing sky was overhead. I saw visions and dreamed dreams, but rash mortals fare ill who would woo the very gods. The island imps teased me, they hid when my heart was aching; but I think, darling, they meant it kindly, for after every trick they play
ed me came back the memory of a sweet, fair face, with grave brown eyes that could not tease or trifle; and but for their mischievous bright magic I had despaired at once of life and love, and — Marian — you.

  Author’s Note and Selected Bibliography

  This book is heavily indebted to other books. Perhaps most of all, to George Eliot: A Biography by Gordon Haight, with its special wealth of detail and insight; Rosemary Ashton’s fine George Eliot: A Life and G. H. Lewes: An Unconventional Victorian; Kathryn Hughes’ briskly excellent George Eliot: The Last Victorian; and Edith Simcox’s Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, ed. Constance Fulmer and Margaret Barfield.

  Other books that have informed this one include: Rosemary Bodenheimer’s The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans; and her equally penetrating essay ‘Autobiography in Fragments: The Elusive life of Edith Simcox’. Also: Rebecca Mead’s illuminating The Road to Middlemarch; Nancy Henry’s The Life of George Eliot; Ina Taylor’s George Eliot: Woman of Contradictions; George Eliot by Jennifer Uglow; George Eliot: The Emergent Self by Ruby V. Redinger; Gordon Haight’s George Eliot and John Chapman, with John Chapman’s Diaries; Rosemary Ashton’s 142 Strand; George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections edited by K. K. Collins; A George Eliot Chronology by Timothy Hands; George Eliot: Novelist, Lover, Wife by Brenda Maddox. Henry James’ Autobiography; Herbert Spencer and The Invention of Modern Life by Mark Francis; Johnnie Cross: The Intriguing Story Behind George Eliot’s Mysterious Last Year by Terence de Vere White; Trollope by Victoria Glendinning; Edith Simcox and George Eliot by Keith McKenzie; A Circle of Sisters by Judith Flanders; Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones by Georgiana Burne-Jones; Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist and Rebel by Pam Hirsch; Emily Davies and the Liberation of Women by Daphne Bennett; Gillian Beer’s dazzling Knowing A Life: Edith Simcox — Sat est Vixisse? George Eliot’s English Travels by Kathleen McCormack; George Eliot’s Feminism by June Szirotny; Memoirs and Letters of Sir James Paget; Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie; George Eliot and Herbert Spencer by Nancy Paxton; Recollections and Impressions by Eleanor Mary Sellar.

  I have drawn throughout on Gordon Haight’s edition of George Eliot Letters, as well as The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Harris and Johnston; and also George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals, put together by Johnny Cross. I have also had recourse to George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks, ed. Pratt and Neufeldt; and Jerome Beaty’s Middlemarch: From Notebook to Novel. For the original Dante text I have used the Princeton University Press edition.

  Events in the novel are closely based on events as they happened in real life, and it has been my intention to try to imagine my way, as faithfully as possible, in to Eliot’s experience as it might have been. On occasion I have tampered with real-life events. The most significant instance of this is when Johnny Cross and Henry James meet in my book at the Priory.

  In real life, Henry James did visit George Eliot in May 1869, only to find Thornie — days after Thornie’s return from Africa — on the floor in agony; and he did rush off to try to find Dr Paget for morphine, but Johnny Cross was not present.

  Henry James wrote up this experience in his Autobiography, and I have drawn on his account for dialogue.

  Throughout, I have drawn on Eliot’s letters for text and dialogue, and Edith Simcox’s diary, her Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, for the same.

  I am grateful to Rosemary Ashton for talking to me about George Eliot over tea; to Ina Taylor for her hospitality in Shropshire, and conversation about Eliot’s relationship with Johnny Cross, about which she made such intriguing claims in her biography; and also to Felicia Richardson, descendant of Johnny Cross, who did her best to pass on glimmers of family folklore concerning her elusive ancestor. I am grateful to Felicia for her hospitality, and for her kindness, too, in driving me to see Lincoln cathedral. Thanks also to Rebecca Lancaster for patiently sifting through Terence de Vere White’s files in the Howard Gottlieb Library in Boston for me.

  Thanks to Kate Summerscale for her encouragement, critical counsel and interesting talk; to Denise Bigio, for her perceptive reading; to my mother, Edna O’Shaughnessy, for her consistent belief and encouragement; to my husband, William Fitzgerald, for the same, and for reading a variety of texts; to my son, Patrick, for his close careful reading of this manuscript. Thanks to Henry Sutton. Thanks above all to my wonderful agent Rebecca Carter, whose judgement is so sure, and who has guided me so patiently through drafts; and to my editor Philip Gwyn Jones, for his vision and brilliant suggestions. Thank you to Molly Slight for such sensitive and careful editing. Thank you finally to my family, William, Patrick, Tom, and Beatrice, who have, I feel, lived long enough with George Eliot hovering around the house.