by Phyllis Rose
Through her work for the Westminster, Miss Evans met Herbert Spencer, who was about her own age and held a position similar to hers on The Economist. His first book, Social Statics, had recently been published. It also happened that he lived just across the street from the Chapmans. With so much in common – scientific and philosophical interests, extraordinary intelligence, a taste for music – he and Miss Evans spent a lot of time together. He got reviewer’s tickets to the opera, theatre and concerts, and Miss Evans was his favourite companion.
They enjoyed each other’s company so much that it became a problem. Spencer, a man not conspicuous for social daring, was afraid that people might assume they were engaged because they appeared together in public so often. Even worse, Miss Evans herself might think that he was in love with her. He knew he was not in love with her and was never likely to be. He found her, with some reason, physically unappealing, and the lack of physical attraction was fatal. As strongly as his judgment prompted him to love her, his instincts would not respond.4 He took the extraordinary step of warning her that he did not love her and had no intention of doing so. Then, embarrassed by his own lack of tact, he wrote another letter apologising for having hurt her.
Miss Evans’s response was characteristically self-deprecating. ‘I feel disappointed rather than “hurt” that you should not have sufficiently divined my character to perceive how remote it is from my habitual state of mind to imagine that anyone is falling in love with me.’5 But despite the warning that her love would not be returned, she fell in love with him, or, more precisely, her passionate desire that there should be love in her life came to focus on Spencer. He was available. He was her equal. He was appropriate. He would do.
Aware of the unconventionality of her behaviour, she made a declaration of her feelings, asking for his love. He said he could not give it. She asked, then, for merely his companionship and the promise that he would not attach himself to someone else, abandoning her. If that happened, she said, she must die, but short of that she could gather courage from his friendship to carry on with her work and to make her life useful. ‘I do not ask you to sacrifice anything – I would be very good and cheerful and never annoy you. But I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions.’
Those who have known me best have always said that if I ever loved anyone thoroughly my whole life must turn upon that feeling, and I find they said truly. You curse the destiny which has made the feeling concentrate itself on you – but if you will only have patience with me you shall not curse it long. You will find that I can be satisfied with very little, if I am delivered from the dread of losing it.6
I do not want to weaken the impact of this letter, surely one of the saddest I have ever read, but lest Marian Evans sound entirely like a love-starved spinster, pathetically abasing herself for a crumb of affection, I must point out the letter’s ending, which sounds another note. ‘I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this – but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious that in light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar-minded women might think of me.’ If the need for affection was characteristic of her, so too was pride in her radical rethinking of how to live, pride in the difference between her morality and that of most men and women. The strength of her desire to love and be loved was matched by the energy and daring she was willing to devote to satisfying that desire.
Still, she had been rejected, and it was a hard thing to take. Her self-esteem could hardly have been lower. When she told a friend in Coventry that she was being taken to the opera (for Spencer continued to perform that essential service), she said, ‘See what a fine thing it is to pick up people who are short-sighted enough to like one.’ It seemed that going to the opera would be the only sensual pleasure she would ever know. ‘What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be bye-and-bye.’7
You would not say of all thirty-three-year-old women that they are middle-aged, but you would certainly have said it of Marian Evans in the summer of 1852. She felt the best was behind her; she looked into the future and saw no sources of renewal. She feared that old friends would die and that she wouldn’t have the power to make new ones. She feared she had missed out on life. ‘You know how sad one feels when a great procession has swept by one, and the last notes of its music have died away, leaving one alone with the fields and sky. I feel so about life sometimes.’ A passage from Margaret Fuller’s journal was achingly appropriate. ‘I shall always reign through the intellect, but the life! the life! Oh my God! shall that never be sweet?’8
At her advanced age, she could hardly hope for marriage. Even when she had been young, her father and brother had considered her a poor prospect. She was too ugly. Her only asset on the marriage market was her piety, and when she lost that her brother was furious, partly with the fury of the outraged religious conservative and partly with that of the property-owner whose tenant sublets to a welfare family. By the time of his death, her father must have given up hoping a husband would take over the care of Marian – hence the legacy, to enable her to be independent. Marian must have given up herself.
Yet she had a strongly affectionate nature, supported by a philosophical conviction that people should devote themselves to the happiness of others. In a phrase that she would use to describe some of her heroines, she was ardent, longing to attach herself to other people, other goals. How long can such a person survive as merely a welcome guest at other people’s dinner parties? She longed for closer attachments, for an emotional connection which would be central to her life, from which new interests and activities would result as naturally as children result from lovemaking. Although she had accomplished a great deal (her translation of Strauss’s Life of Jesus was an important contribution to progressive thought), although she had a position of some stature in literary London, although she enjoyed the respect and affection of everyone who met her, although – in sum – her lot was enviable compared to that of most unmarried women in Victorian England, she was lonely. Her powerful imagination could conceive of a life much richer than the one she led. As active as she was, she felt she could be doing more – and events would prove her right. She would look back on these years as a time of inertia and suffering. Her great energy, burning to be put to other uses – nurturing, intimacy, creativity – turned back upon herself for lack of an object. Idle, she brooded; brooding, she despaired.
To avoid feeling sorry for herself, she tried to suppress any awareness of her emotions at all. ‘If you insist on my writing about “Emotions”,’ she said to one friend, ‘why, I must get some up expressly for the purpose. But I must own I would rather not, for it is the grand wish and object of my life to get rid of them as far as possible, seeing that they have already had more than their share of my nervous energy.’9 In describing herself, she used the word plucky rather than happy. She would carry on, with resolute cheerfulness but not with joy, and it seems hardly likely that in this ‘carried-on’ life the writing of fiction would have figured. Those parts of herself she would need in writing novels – passion, sympathy, dramatic power – were too close to the parts of herself she would have had to stifle in order to remain a plucky spinster.
Herbert Spencer was feeling so guilty that he even mentioned marriage to Miss Evans, as a kind of restitution for having engaged her emotions. But she was not interested in the mere form of intimacy. Still, he continued to see her, and one day George Henry Lewes10 asked if he might join Spencer in his visit to Miss Evans. Another day, to Spencer’s vast relief, Lewes decided to stay on alone with Miss Evans after Spencer left.
John Chapman had introduced them in 1851. He and his assistant happened to run into the literary journalist in a book-store in the Burlington Arcade. Lewes and Thornton Leigh Hunt had recently begun publishing The Leader, a radical weekly for which Hunt wrote the political sections and Lewes covered theatre, music and books. Despite his position in the literary world of the capital, Le
wes did not make much of an impression on Miss Evans. Physically, he was unprepossessing – short and scruffy. And although he was the best writer you could get for a certain kind of scientific subject (exactly the right man, for example, for an essay on Lamarck), Miss Evans the editor valued him less as a writer and thinker than many other contributors to the Westminster. He had nowhere near the intellectual stature of John Stuart Mill, nor even of Froude, F. W. Newman or James Martineau. He was a witty man who cultivated – in the Gallic fashion – a flippant manner, and this, too, did not impress the earnest Miss Evans. And he was, of course, married. Mrs Lewes had recently given birth to her sixth child.
By the spring of 1853, Miss Evans’s opinion of Lewes had changed. She now found him genial and amusing. ‘Like a few other people in the world, he is much better than he seems, a man of heart and conscience wearing a mask of flippancy.’11 Lewes, like Spencer, was supplied with free tickets to theatre, opera and concerts, and he took Miss Evans along with him. At some point, Lewes must have told her the truth about his marriage, and that more than anything – more than his kindness and attentiveness, more than the free tickets – must have changed her mind about him. Here was a man who needed her.
Lewes had married Agnes Jervis in 1841. She was then a beautiful nineteen-year-old with striking blonde hair, and the two seemed very much in love. Mrs Carlyle, for one, got pleasure from seeing them together. But by 1849 she noticed a change. ‘I used to think these Leweses a perfect pair of lovebirds,… but the female lovebird appears to have hopped off to some distance and to be now taking a somewhat critical view of her little shaggy mate!’ Jane Carlyle saw acutely. Mrs Lewes had in fact hopped so far from her husband that she was having an affair with his close friend and partner, Thornton Leigh Hunt. (Hunt was married, too.) The child born to Agnes Lewes in the month that her husband was introduced to Miss Evans in the book-store was fathered not by Lewes (the father of her first three children) but by Hunt. It was her third child by Hunt.
Agnes, her husband and her lover all had views on sex and love that would have been called at the time ‘free-thinking’ or ‘advanced’ by some, ‘libertine’ by others. They were inheritors of a heady eighteenth-century rationalist tradition: what was endorsed by religion and society was not always right. If anything, inherited institutions and traditional authorities were likely to be stupidly tyrannical. One had to be on the lookout. One had to rethink everything. One had to beware of authority. One had to rebel. Mr and Mrs Lewes believed that only love could bind people together and that neither law nor religion had it in its power to cement a union where feeling no longer existed. And although traditionally, by law, a woman’s body belonged to her husband, they believed it was her own, to give to whomever she chose.
Taking the high rationalist line, Lewes refused to be outraged by his wife’s infidelity. He registered no complaint when she gave birth to another man’s child, and even allowed the baby to be given his name, in a spirit, one supposes, of communal responsibility – a spirited ‘no’ to the pedantry of precise acknowledgement. He must have thought that Agnes’s passion for Hunt would pass in time, or that a rational, sophisticated man who admired Gallic insouciance ought to be able to live with the fact of his wife’s infidelity. In 1850 he believed in what was much later given the name of ‘open marriage’. But in October 1851, when Agnes gave birth to another child he had not fathered, Lewes began to realise that what he had was not an open marriage, or a radical, free-thinkers’ marriage, but no marriage at all. By the start of 1853, when Agnes was pregnant yet again by Hunt, Lewes had ceased to think of her as his wife, although he continued to support her and her children.
English law was not adapted to such subtleties of thought and behaviour. It understood that a man had the right to exclusive enjoyment, sexually speaking, of his wife. It was horrified at the possibility that a man might have to pass his property on to children who were not really his. That, if nothing else, was sufficient reason for the strong stand the law took against adultery – that is to say, female adultery. Even before the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, English law allowed a man – albeit with great trouble and at vast expense – to divorce his wife for adultery.12 But the law did not allow for quirky, eccentric attempts to live rationally, for private understandings of what did and did not constitute adultery. One illegitimate child was quite enough to convince the law that a man’s wife had abandoned his protection, and if a man chose to wait for a second illegitimate child before he was convinced, then in the eyes of the law he had condoned his wife’s adultery and forfeited his right to divorce her. That was George Lewes’s situation when he began seeing Marian Evans daily and escorting her to the opera. In law, he had a wife, but in fact he did not. Legally tied to a woman from whom he could expect no love, no help, no comfort, he was in as much despair about his emotional life as was, for other reasons, Miss Evans.
In October 1853, the month that Agnes’s third child by Hunt was born, Marian Evans moved out of the Chapmans’ house, where she had come to feel claustrophobic, and into lodgings of her own in Cambridge Street. Now she had more freedom. She could receive whatever visitors she chose. When she turned thirty-four in the following month, she noted that she began her new year happier than usual. The signs of a closer professional tie with Lewes appear. When Chapman accepted a negative review by T. H. Huxley of Lewes’s book on Comte, Marian intervened on her friend’s behalf, begging Chapman not to run Huxley’s piece. And when, in April, Lewes got sick and was unable to work, she wrote some of his copy for him. ‘No opera and no fun for me for the next month!’13 Lewes’s health did not improve swiftly or completely enough to suit either of them, and they began to talk about going to the Continent for his health. In July of 1854 they left England for Weimar, travelling together openly and sharing lodgings. From this moment on, until Lewes’s death twenty-four years later, they would live together as though they were married.
From the beginning, they were delighted with each other and saw their union as a rebirth. ‘The day seems too short for our happiness, and we both of us feel that we have begun life afresh – with new ambitions and new powers.’14 They moved from Weimar, which they loved, to Berlin, and with the self-satisfaction of fresh love felt pity for anyone who had to come to such an ugly place alone or with a disagreeable companion. For them, even Berlin was charming. ‘I am happier every day,’ wrote Miss Evans to John Chapman, the one person to whom she felt free to describe her illicit happiness (presumably the lecherous publisher was proof against shock), ‘and find my domesticity more and more delightful and beneficial to me. Affection, respect and intellectual sympathy deepen, and for the first time in my life I can say to the moments “Verweilen sie, sie sind so schön”.’15
‘The literary couple,’ wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, ‘is a peculiar English domestic manufacture, useful no doubt in a country with difficult winters. Before the bright fire at tea-time, we can see these high-strung men and women clinging together, their inky fingers touching.’16 One has reason to envy the intellectual compatibility of Miss Evans and Mr Lewes. They walked together, wrote together, read Homer and learned languages together. Lewes’s scientific interests were a source of new delight to Miss Evans; they even raised tadpoles together. Every night after dinner they read aloud to each other, for as much as three hours. On a typical evening she would begin with an enjoyable book (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, for example), then subside to a dreary and dry one (Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences) and then wind up with some German poetry, Heine perhaps. They read aloud the third volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and they read aloud Elizabethan plays.
Their new domestic life centred on work. Lewes was in the midst of writing his excellent Life of Goethe and Marian Evans was doing a translation of Spinoza which was destined never to be published. In addition, they wrote articles and reviews because they were constantly in need of money to support Agnes and her children as well as themselves. And what a lot of work they got done! Together the
y wrote almost half The Leader’s supplement for June 16, 1855, Miss Evans contributing a review essay, ‘Menander and Greek Comedy’, and Lewes writing articles on Sydney Smith, Isaac Newton and Owen Meredith, as well as a review of a French book on longevity.
Although posterity has reversed their positions, in 1855 when they returned from Germany and settled on the south side of the Thames in the London suburbs, Lewes was by far the more established professionally of the two, and with the self-assurance of the successful, he took more pleasure in Marian’s success than in his own. His encouragement and his example of professionalism helped her to develop quickly from an editor into a freelance writer.17 With money as motivation and with a little praise, he coaxed out her inclination to authorship.
She had long thought of writing fiction and had actually written the first chapter of a novel – a description of a Staffordshire village and the neighbouring farmhouses. Gordon Haight estimates the date of composition as 1846. But she laid the fragment aside, never going further. ‘As the years passed on I lost hope that I should ever be able to write a novel, just as I desponded about everything else in my future life.’18 Some writers, as Freud believed, thrive artistically on misery. They write only when and because life seems to offer no other source of satisfaction. They write to create for themselves, in imagination, the satisfactions that reality seems to deny. But George Eliot was a writer of the other sort, for whom productivity depends upon contentment. In this way, too, she was a realist: she could not create her happiness through fictions, had to proceed to her work from a bedrock of fulfilled life.
