Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  When they went to Germany, Miss Evans took along with her the fragmentary chapter she had written years before and one night in Berlin she read it aloud to Lewes. I want to underline that Lewes did not encourage her to bring the manuscript. She says it ‘happened to be among the papers’ she brought with her. Nor did Lewes encourage her to read it aloud. ‘Something led me to read it to George.’19 Demurely, girlishly, she was blurring the traces of her own activity, and I emphasise the extent to which she took the initiative in this matter because history has so readily perpetuated the fiction that she was the passive party in the birth of George Eliot. But just as she was unafraid to ask for love from Herbert Spencer, she was aggressive enough to raise the possibility of writing novels to Lewes. All she needed in order to continue was the encouragement she had every human reason to expect he would offer in response.

  Lewes’s reaction to her reading of the fragmentary chapter could hardly be called overwhelming. On the basis of what he heard, he thought she might be able to write fiction, but he had his doubts. It was wholly descriptive, and everything else she had written was expository. In general, her mind seemed so powerfully analytic that one did not expect her to be creative. He wondered whether she would have the dramatic power necessary for fiction writing – the ability to imagine other people’s thoughts and to invent dialogue for them. This was exactly her own doubt. Still she was sufficiently encouraged to continue to think about writing fiction, and as time went by, perhaps sensing her desire for such encouragement, Lewes urged her even more strongly: positively, she must try to write a story. He thought she might be able to pull it off by the sheer force of her intelligence.

  One morning her desire to write finally coincided with sufficient self-confidence to form a resolution to do so. ‘As I was lying in bed, thinking what should be the subject of my first story, my thoughts merged themselves into a dreamy doze, and I imagined myself writing a story the title of which was – “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”.’20 When she told Lewes about it, he said, ‘O what a capital title!’ And so she set to work. To Lewes’s amazement, the very first chapter of ‘Amos Barton’ convinced him that her dialogue was excellent. The only other question was whether she could command pathos. Did it follow that a person who was strong in intelligence was correspondingly feeble in feeling, or that an analytical mind could not also imagine fiercely? One night in the autumn of 1856 Lewes went to town on purpose to give her quiet to write, and she set out to prove she could evoke emotion, in treating the death of Milly, Amos Barton’s wife. She was determined that the old dualistic chestnut about intelligence and emotion be laid to rest. She knew herself to be a deeply feeling woman as well as an intelligent one. When Lewes returned and read aloud what she had written, both of them were moved to tears. He went over to her, kissed her and said, ‘I think your pathos is even better than your fun.’21

  Lewes sent ‘Amos Barton’ to John Blackwood in Edinburgh, who, with his characteristic reticence, said the piece ‘would do’. He ran it in Blackwood’s Magazine and later published the completed series, Scenes of Clerical Life. Although Blackwood was aware that ‘George Eliot’ was a pseudonym, he believed his new author was a man, in all probability, a clergyman.22

  To say that George Eliot was the child of the extraordinarily happy union of Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes is more than wordplay.23 Literary parthenogenesis being as impossible for Miss Evans as the biological sort is generally impossible, George Eliot would almost certainly not have entered the world without Lewes’s participation. But what exactly was his role, the dynamics of his contribution? The usual explanation – that Marian was ‘not fitted to stand alone’ and needed someone to lean on – is subtly misleading, making England’s strongest woman novelist seem deficient and dependent.

  The myth of George Eliot’s dependency – a myth she may have chosen to perpetuate for her own purposes – originates with a phrenological reading of her character made in her Coventry days. Like many intellectuals of her time she looked to phrenology as a way of understanding herself, as contemporary intellectuals look to psychoanalysis. Charles Bray, her Coventry mentor, took her to London to have a cast made of her head for a phrenological reading. The reading confirmed that in her brain development Intellect vastly predominated. ‘Feelings’ expressed themselves in another part of the topography of the skull, and from the bumps in that area, the skilled phrenologist could tell that Miss Evans’s ‘Animal’ and ‘Moral’ instincts were about equal. The moral feelings were sufficient to keep the animal in order and in proper subservience but they were not ‘spontaneously active’. In addition, her social feelings were very active, particularly ‘adhesiveness’, a phrenological term for non-sexual love. ‘She was of a most affectionate disposition,’ Bray reported, paraphrasing the phrenologist, ‘always requiring someone to lean upon, preferring what has hitherto been considered the stronger sex, to the other and more impressible. She was not fitted to stand alone.’24

  Phrenologically speaking, Marian Evans had feared for a long time that her moral and animal regions were unfortunately balanced. That is to say, she felt herself to be a sensual person. When her father was alive, she had associated him with the restraining, moral part of herself, and when he died she suffered from a horrid image of herself ‘becoming earthly sensual and devilish for want of that purifying restraining influence’.25 The phrenological reading confirmed her fears about the sluggishness of her moral region: it was ‘not spontaneously active’. But the part of her phrenological reading that posterity has chosen to emphasise is her dependence, the notion that she required someone to lean on, preferably a man, that she was not fitted to stand alone.26

  In support of this characterisation, we are told how Marian Evans threw herself at the feet of the aged Dr Brabant, the Biblical scholar, offering to devote herself to his work. We are told how she repeatedly mistook intellectual friendships offered by men for offers of sexual love. We are told how, ignoring conventions, she paid men like Dr Brabant the utmost attention, causing consternation in their families. We hear about the wife and mistress of John Chapman – how jealous they were of Miss Evans’s intimacy with Chapman and how threatened they felt when she moved into their household. We are told about her attempt to throw herself on Herbert Spencer and the relief with which she sank onto the proffered arm of the already married George Henry Lewes. And in all this we are supposed to see a ‘need’ – not a desire, mind you, but a neurotic ‘need’ – for affection. In the face of all these terrified wives and families, of men who realise with dismay that this gentle woman who has captivated them wants even more than they thought – we are supposed to see a woman who cannot stand alone. What I see is a woman of passionate nature who struggles, amidst limited opportunity, to find someone to love and to love her; a woman who goes to quite unconventional lengths and is willing to be unusually aggressive – almost predatory – in her efforts to secure for herself what she wants. To want love and sex in one’s life is hardly, after all, a sign of neurosis. And is it a sign of dependence for a woman to want love and sex from a man? It is a small matter of emphasis only, but it does seem to me to make some difference whether we think of one of the most powerful female writers ever as neurotically dependent on men or as brave enough to secure for herself what she wanted.

  ‘Under the influence of the intense happiness I have enjoyed in my married life from thorough moral and intellectual sympathy, I have at last found out my true vocation after which my nature has always been feeling and striving without finding it.’27 I take seriously this account of how George Eliot seized her identity as a writer. I see the story of George Eliot’s ‘birth’ as a moving testimony to the connection there may be between creativity and sexuality. Lewes’s editorial help and his encouragement at the start of her writing career were certainly important in George Eliot’s birth, but they were responses to gestures Miss Evans made. They were not the motivating force. That came from inside her, welling up along with the joy, the se
lf-esteem and the sense of fulfilment which followed her belated acquisition of love. It was a second spring in her life, and its warmth released powers inside her which had been held back, powers which might earlier have drowned her meagre, virginal equanimity.

  living in sin

  Although the union of Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes has been legitimised by time and by its progeny – the literary career of George Eliot – at the time it caused great scandal. We have heard the Carlyles’ indignant reaction to the elopement a good ten years after it occurred, and we know the extent of Thomas Carlyle’s sympathy – that it could not be said that Lewes had gone from bad to worse. It is, of course, one of life’s persistent disappointments that a great moral crisis in my life is nothing but matter for gossip in yours. Still, it is somewhat of a shock to me that Carlyle’s response to the moral complexities of the Lewes-Evans affair was so briskly superficial. The man who fervently believed that new times needed to generate new institutions did not, evidently, apply this belief to the institution of marriage. Nor did he see the relationship between a man and a woman as fit matter for anything but comedy.

  For Marian Evans, on the other hand, falling in love with a man who could not marry her was a test case in personal ethics at the profoundest level. The relationship between a man and woman was to her as important as the relationship between human being and God had once been – the centrally serious business of life, an index of the degree of meaning you could infuse into the occupation of living. ‘Assuredly if there is any subject on which I feel no levity it is that of marriage and the relation of the sexes – if there is any one action or relation of my life which is and always has been profoundly serious, it is my relation with Mr Lewes.’28 To a contemporary audience whose ethical arena has become almost exclusively the matter of what we call ‘relationships’, George Eliot should seem a congenial figure.

  By the time she went to Germany with Lewes in July 1854 (the same month that Effie Gray obtained the annulment of her marriage to Ruskin), Marian Evans had given a great deal of thought to the ethics and consequences of her actions. She did not live lightly in any case, and this seemed to her the major decision of her life. Piously evangelical in her youth, she had ceased, in her twenties, to believe in the literal truth of Christianity, whose myths, rituals and worldly forms she rejected while clinging to its ethical spirit. She practised – and many people in the twentieth century have followed where she and others like her in the nineteenth century led – a Christianity without faith, emphasising caritas, good works and acts of loving-kindness, instead of belief. She believed in duty and self-sacrifice. But where did duty lie? In pleasing family and friends by conforming to conventional codes of behaviour, or in staying with the man she had willed into central importance in her life? And what was to be sacrificed, ‘that which is the deepest and gravest joy in human experience’,29 or the greatest good life offers after that, friendship and the esteem of others?

  Long before meeting Lewes, she had formulated a response to the same kind of moral dilemma when she found it posed in Jane Eyre. We may read Jane Eyre as a female Bildungsroman, in which Mr Rochester is a secondary – not to say a fantasy – figure. But when it appeared, many people assumed that the wild tale of a mad wife in the attic and attempted bigamy was no more than accurate reporting of a social problem. Mr Rochester’s marital plight seemed so plausible to a contemporary audience that many people assumed the author, ‘Currer Bell’, was a governess in the home of William Thackeray, whose wife was mad and had been locked away, yet from whom he could not obtain a divorce. (That the novel was dedicated to Thackeray encouraged this illusion.) What was a man to do whose wife, like Thackeray’s, was insane, or whose wife, like Lewes’s, had left him, albeit with his consent? All self-sacrifice is good, Miss Evans had thought upon reading Jane Eyre, but one would like it to be in a nobler cause than that ‘of a diabolical law which chains a man body and soul to a putrefying carcase’.30 She thought Jane Eyre ought to have lived with Rochester as his wife. She was puzzled by the mistaken understanding of duty which impelled a woman to abandon the man who loved and needed her simply because of a legal fiction. If the law said Rochester was married to the madwoman in the attic, if the law said Lewes was married to Agnes after she had had three children by another man, then the law (in the words of Dickens’s Mr Bumble) is a ass!

  So for her, the moral issue was clear, however painful the consequences of her choice. On the one hand was an arid legalism which would bind Lewes to Agnes and would refuse to authorise her life with Lewes; on the other hand, a radical redefinition of what constituted marriage. She would call herself Mrs Lewes. She would be his wife. Whether or not they uttered the ritual oaths of fidelity, they would stay together always. They would help each other in distress, and the responsibilities of one would be the responsibilities of the other. It was to be a regular marriage in every way but one: it was validated only by personal commitment. John Mill and Harriet Taylor had long before decided that in a matter so entirely personal no authority beyond themselves was relevant, but unlike them, Lewes and Miss Evans were prepared to act on their beliefs.

  They believed that other rational people, not blinded by orthodox morality, could be brought to see things as they did. Of course most people were not rational – they knew that. Most people were immovably attached to a particular, restrictive narrow morality which they associated with the Church. Miss Evans would not even broach the subject to her brother, for example, for three years. She knew he was provincial and conservative. She knew she could not keep him and Lewes, both. She was prepared to give up her brother, to give up everyone, all her friends, her entire social life. That she would give them up if necessary was the bargain she made with her fate.

  But everyone wants to be understood by at least one disinterested person. While they were still in Germany, Lewes and Miss Evans tried to explain their side of the matter to a few selected friends. Above all, they wanted to contradict the rumour that Miss Evans had seduced Mr Lewes away from his wife and children. The Brays, Miss Evans’s old friends in Coventry – intellectuals, writers, progressives – were her test case. She explained that Mr Lewes had been in constant correspondence with his wife since they left England; that his wife had had all money due him in London; that he intended to separate from her but never intended to renounce his financial responsibility for her. She asked them to believe nothing they heard of her beyond the fact that she was attached to Lewes and living with him, which was scandalous enough. She pronounced herself quite willing to endure the consequences of the step she had deliberately taken.

  How eagerly she must have waited for this letter to make its way to England and for the reply to reach Germany. She could imagine their refusing to have anything to do with her again. She could imagine their graciously congratulating her on her happiness and wishing her well. Either response would have been fine. But I doubt that she took into account the human desire to avoid important issues – or imagined that the Brays, however magnanimous, might find matter for offence in her letter quite apart from the issue so singularly present in Miss Evans’s mind. In fact, the ladies were irritated because Marian, out of an exaggerated delicacy, had addressed the letter to Mr Bray, and not, as was her custom, to Mrs Bray and Miss Hennell as well. Were women, then, of no account? They were irritated, too, that she seemed so ready to give them up, seemed almost to

  Lewes turned for support to Carlyle, among other people, and here too there were comical cross-purposes. Lewes’s explanation of his separation from Agnes was received by Carlyle with sympathy; he wrote back approving the dissolution of such a marriage. He filed Lewes’s letter away in an envelope marked ‘G. H. Lewes and “Strongminded Woman”’. But he wanted to be reassured that Lewes had not eloped with the strong-minded woman, and instead Lewes wrote back that the strong-minded woman had not caused the separation. ‘As well assure me her stockings are both of one colour; that is a very insignificant point! No answer to this second letter,’ Ca
rlyle wrote to himself.

  The people who passed the test were as distressing as those who failed it, for they were as likely to be libertines as not. John Chapman, for one, that practised philanderer, had no trouble accepting the Lewes-Evans union – and using it for his own purposes. When he fell in love with the estimable Barbara Leigh Smith and tried to convince her to live with him openly, he held before her the example of Marian Evans and G. H. Lewes. ‘Rely upon it we shall be happy yet. Lewes and M.E. seemed to be perfectly so.’ This is exactly what most people predicted would be the result of such behaviour as Miss Evans’s – a bad example, an invitation to anarchy, a wedge in the stones of the temple walls. Marian herself, if she knew of it, would have been furious and chagrined. That was not what she had in mind.31 But where was the line between free-thinking and libertinism to be drawn? When was unconventional behaviour justified by one’s deepest feelings, and when was one merely self-indulgent?

  Few people in 1854 were willing to concede the morality of Mr Lewes’s and Miss Evans’s position, and few bothered to distinguish between Lewes’s high-minded behaviour and the profligacy of Thornton Leigh Hunt, who continued to sleep with and father children upon his own wife while he was sleeping with and fathering children upon Agnes Lewes. (Twice the women gave birth to his children within two weeks of each other.) The venom which the sexual behaviour of Lewes and of Hunt could arouse may be seen in a letter from Thomas Woolner, the sculptor and member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to William Bell Scott.