Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  The situation was paradoxical. A quarter of a century earlier she had bypassed marriage to live with Lewes, and people were upset. Some were offended by her re-marrying, yet she hadn’t ever really been married. Some, radical friends who approved the unconventionality of her relationship with Lewes, now felt vexed at her lapse into conventionality. St George’s in Hanover Square, indeed! One consistent reaction was that of her brother Isaac, who in his unimaginative rectitude had refused to have anything to do with her while she was living in an unsanctioned union. Now that she was a respectably married woman, he broke his silence of twenty-five years to offer his congratulations and assure her of his love. ‘The only point to be regretted in our marriage,’ she wrote back, not allowing it to escape his attention that there was something to be regretted, ‘is that I am so much older than he, but his affection has made him choose this lot of caring for me rather than any other of the various lots open to him.’63

  The appeal of a handsome, vigorous man of forty, wholly devoted to her, to a woman of sixty who has achieved everything professionally she could hope to achieve, who, moreover, has always doubted her own attractiveness, is so obvious to me that it would seem to need no comment. But even contemporary commentators find Cross hard to accept. ‘Cross was probably a mistake,’ writes one. ‘In all his public appearances he is firmly on the dull side.’64 But if anything his businessman’s ignorance of the higher culture was piquant and attractive to her. ‘Thou dost not know anything of verbs in Hiphil or 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.’65 If the devoted companion of George Henry Lewes could not hide the pleasure of having to do, for a change, with a man who did not know the place of Kepler in science, are we to understand that as a betrayal of her attachment to Lewes? It would be more generous – and more revealing – to take it as testimony to the multiplicity of human instincts, which can be satisfied by one person only at the cost of partial shutdown.

  Her response to Cross was more fulsomely sentimental than her response to Lewes had been. ‘Best loved and loving one – the sun it shines so cold, so cold, when there are no eyes to look love on me. I cannot bear to sadden one moment when we are together, but wenn Du bist nicht da I have often a bad time.’ At about the time she wrote that, during their courtship, she wrote to her friend Mrs Burne-Jones about a woman who had made an inappropriate match, ‘Remarkable men so often choose a succession of stupid women (if not evil ones) that there should be some tolerance for a woman who does the corresponding thing.’66

  Never without noble reasons for doing what her strong-willed nature impelled her to do, George Eliot presented her decision to remarry as a spiritual discipline, an attempt to avoid selfishness. ‘Marriage has seemed to restore my old self. I was getting hard, and if I had decided differently I think I should have become very selfish.’ Her self-sacrifice was matched by that of Cross, who declared, ‘The great object of my life now will be to justify her trust and to fulfil worthily the high calling which I have undertaken.’ I do not mean to discount their rhetoric, for it seems to me that the formulas with which we choose to present our actions are by no means a negligible part of them. Yet the response to this unlikely marriage that pleases me best is that of excellent Barbara Bodichon (née Smith), who said that she would have done exactly the same as John Cross if she had been a man and Marian had let her. ‘You see I know all love is so different that I do not see it unnatural to love in new ways.’67

  They spent a good part of their honeymoon in Venice, which seemed to them a town of toys erected by petulant children with vast resources. They loved its beauty, quiet and dustlessness. The season of heat and mosquitoes had not yet arrived. They read Ruskin on Venetian architecture, making grateful use of his knowledge but trying to shut out his wrathful innuendoes against the whole contemporary world. In the mornings they examined works of art or buildings of interest, not hurrying and then were taken about in a gondola to see the most changeable of cities in all lights and from as many points of view as possible. It was idyllic. And then, after two weeks, something terrible happened. John Cross became ill. It may have been one of those Venetian fevers, generated by the filth in the canals, which travellers at that time were prey to. Under the influence of fever, Cross jumped from the balcony of their room at the Hotel de I’Europe into the Grand Canal, to be rescued by gondoliers, examined by the chief medical officer of Venice, given chloral.

  It is difficult, now, not to think of Venice as a place where age pursues youth in sinister ways, yet George Eliot does not seem to have thought that her husband jumped out of the window to escape her. She feared insanity, revealed to Dr Ricchetti that there was madness in the Cross family. Gordon Haight, her biographer, believes that what happened to Cross in Venice was acute mental depression, although Cross himself, in his documentary life of George Eliot, describes his illness as physical, attributing it to bad air and lack of exercise.68

  In response to a frantic telegraph from George Eliot, Cross’s brother, Willie, joined them in Venice and the weakened man was moved by easy stages to Innsbruck, Munich, Wildbad and, by July, back to England. She responded to his illness with strength. It seemed more natural to her to have anxiety than to be free from it and only hoped she would not run down ‘like a jelly fish’ when the anxiety was over.69

  That summer and autumn, while Cross continued to improve, they stayed in the country, at the house George Eliot and Lewes had purchased in Surrey, near Godalming. Now they made the formal calls which they had not had time to do before the wedding, visiting Cross’s married sisters in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. A female guest at one of these dinners observed the incongruous pair in their new felicity. ‘George Eliot, old as she is and ugly, really looked sweet and winning in spite of both,’ wrote Mrs Jebb. The famous author was cleverly dressed in a dark satin dress to show off her slenderness but to hide the angularity of age. Nevertheless, Mrs Jebb felt sorry for her. There was not a person in the room – including her husband – whose mother she could not have been. That she adored her husband was clear, and Mr Cross seemed devoted to her in return. But Mrs Jebb suspected her of being inwardly tormented by jealousy, for such a marriage was against nature. Cross might forget the twenty years’ difference in their ages, but his wife never could.70

  At last, by December, their beautiful townhouse on Cheyne Walk, overlooking the river, was ready. Moving the books from The Priory had been a huge job which Cross had supervised, and their move to London had also been held up by intermittent illnesses of Marian’s. But nothing serious. Two weeks after they moved in, she developed another minor illness. A sore throat. The doctor was called in but was not concerned. Sleep, he said, was the best medicine. She took some cold beef tea jelly and an egg beaten with brandy, then dozed. Her husband listened to her breathing. He hoped it was curative sleep, but what he heard was death coming on. When another doctor arrived, four hours later, she complained of a pain in her side, then lost consciousness forever, and the next day Cross wrote, ‘I am left alone in this new House we meant to be so happy in.’71

  There was some talk of burying George Eliot in Westminster Abbey, as she wished, but even the agnostic T. H. Huxley did not think it was appropriate, pointing out that the Abbey was a Christian church, not a Pantheon. ‘George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian practice in regard to marriage,’ he wrote. ‘One cannot have one’s cake and eat it too. Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters.’72 She was therefore buried near Lewes in Highgate Cemetery, where her grave and Karl Marx’s remain almost uniquely accessible in the treacherous bramble thicket which has covered most of the Victorian graves, protecting all but the giants from prying modern worshippers.

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nbsp; A hundred years after her death, a memorial stone was installed in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. It bears the name she was born with, Mary Ann Evans, and the name she lives by in memory, George Eliot, but refers to neither of her husbands – except perhaps, obliquely, in the quotation from ‘Janet’s Repentance’ inscribed around the four sides, ‘The first condition of human goodness is something to love: the second something to reverence.’

  NOTES

  1. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892), 222–23. See also Thomas Carlyle to John Carlyle, November 2, 1854.

  2. The Westminster Review was founded in 1824 by James Mill with money supplied by Jeremy Bentham. It was to be the organ of philosophic radicalism. John Stuart Mill presided over it from 1838 to 1840, and, after various transfers of ownership, it passed to Chapman in 1850. He dreamed of providing a liberal review for readers on both sides of the Atlantic, but scarcely had the capital to support his ambitions and was always in financial trouble. See Gordon Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 28–30. Mill’s connection with the Westminster explains why his biographer misunderstood Jane Carlyle’s remark about the strong woman of the Westminster Review, assuming it referred to Harriet Taylor. See Michael St John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 325.

  3. 142 Strand housed both Chapman’s business and residential quarters. The house was so big that they often took in boarders and the place was a favourite residence in London for visiting literary Americans, including Emerson, Greeley and Bryant.

  4. George Eliot Letters, 9 vols., ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), 7:42n. Both Marghanita Laski in George Eliot and Her World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973) and Gordon Haight imply, quite unnecessarily, I think, that Herbert Spencer was homosexual because he was not attracted to Miss Evans.

  5. George Eliot Letters, 8:42. The remarkable set of letters from George Eliot to Herbert Spencer has only recently been published. They were known to exist for many years but a librarian at the British Museum told Professor Haight they could not be seen until 1985, omitting the proviso, ‘without the permission of the trustees’.

  6. George Eliot Letters, 8:56–57.

  7. Ibid., 2:22–23, 29.

  8. Ibid., 2:14–15.

  9. Ibid., 2:46.

  10. Pronounced Lewis.

  11. George Eliot Letters, 2:98.

  12. The double standard was understood to have originated in order to protect the passing on of property from a man to his rightful children. A woman can always tell her own children, but a man has to invoke the power of law to make sure his children are his. Keith Thomas disputes this explanation in ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 195–216. He suggests that the true reason for the double standard is that the woman herself is property whose value is diminished when someone other than her husband shares in possession. It should be noted that even after the Matrimonial Causes Act, a woman couldn’t divorce her husband simply for adultery. There had to be an additional cause, such as cruelty, desertion or sodomy.

  13. George Eliot Letters, 2:132, 151.

  14. George Eliot Letters, 2:190.

  15. ‘Linger! You are so lovely.’ (Faust, 1:1700.) George Eliot Letters, 2:173.

  16. Elizabeth Hardwick, ‘George Eliot’s Husband’ in A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962), 87–88.

  17. A case in point is the story of how she came to publish an article on Weimar in Fraser’s Magazine. She had written out in her journal some description of Weimar, and although she didn’t think highly enough of it to send it out, she thought well enough of it to read it aloud to Lewes. He, liking it, urged her to try to sell it to Fraser’s. ‘As this was a mode of turning it into guineas I could have no objection,’ she recalled. George Eliot Letters, 2:201.

  18. George Eliot Letters, 2:206.

  19. Ibid.

  20. ‘How I Came to Write Fiction’, reprinted from George Eliot’s journal in George Eliot Letters, 2:406–10. When John Walter Cross edited George Eliot’s papers for publication after her death, he removed the phrase ‘lying in bed’ from her account of how she came to write fiction. Presumably he found the place and posture too private for the conception of George Eliot’s career. I insist upon it for the same reason. The location of her epiphany about her own talents suggests to me that Lewes’s connection with her creativity was more secret and intimate than is generally allowed.

  21. George Eliot Letters, 2:08.

  22. The ‘George’ of her pen name was in honour of Lewes. ‘Eliot’ was perhaps intended to echo her own name, Evans. That her pseudonym should be masculine was inevitable – the Brontë sisters had long since established that books would be treated more seriously by reviewers if they were thought to be written by men.

  23. Actual children would have been at the least awkward: illegitimate, potentially outcast. And Lewes already had more people to support than he could easily handle. He and Miss Evans resolved to practise some form of birth control. We know this because of an extraordinary confidence that Marian Evans made to Barbara Leigh Smith. See Gordon Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 205.

  24. Charles Bray, Autobiography, 74–75, quoted by Haight in George Eliot: A Biography, 51. See also George Eliot Letters, 1:265–66 and note.

  25. George Eliot Letters, 1:284. For her fears about the unfortunate balance between her moral and animal regions, see 1:167.

  26. Haight’s nonetheless magnificent biography endorses this unsubtle view of George Eliot’s character and relationship to men. One chapter is titled ‘Someone to Lean Upon’, another, ‘The Need to be Loved’, and the line ‘She was not fitted to stand alone’ is repeated throughout the text.

  27. George Eliot Letters, 3:186.

  28. Ibid., 2:213.

  29. Ibid., 2:182.

  30. Ibid., 1:268.

  31. See Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman, 87–92. Barbara Leigh Smith, who was to remain one of George Eliot’s closest friends, was so far seduced by Chapman’s arguments that she spoke to her father – in a general way – about her desire to practise free love. Her father said that would be fine, but she should go to America to do it. When she spoke more specifically about Chapman’s proposal, he arranged to get her out of the country. In Algeria, she met Dr Eugene Bodichon, whom she married. Her father, Benjamin Smith, had never married the mother of his five children, although he had no other ties and lived with his family, whom he loved very much. A wealthy man of advanced views, he endowed even his daughters with considerable fortunes, enabling Barbara eventually to be one of the principal backers of Girton College, the first women’s college at Cambridge.

  32. George Eliot Letters, 2:175–76.

  33. George Eliot Letters, 8:130. The fascinating exchange of letters between Bray and Combe on the Lewes-Evans elopement has only recently been published in a supplementary volume of the George Eliot Letters.

  34. Ibid., 2:214.

  35. Ibid., 2:231. Mrs Jameson was the author of many books, including Loves of the Poets, Celebrated Female Sovereigns, and her most highly esteemed work, Sacred and Legendary Art. Her first book was about her experiences as a governess, for she had spent many years working as one before she married Robert Jameson. The marriage seems to have gone badly from the start and Jameson went to America, first to Dominica and then to Canada. At his insistence, she joined him in 1836 but returned to England in 1838, at which time their formal separation began.

  36. George Eliot Letters, 8:124.

  37. Quoted by Charles Bray in a letter to Combe. The letter from George Eliot has been lost. George Eliot Letters, 8:128.

  38. Ibid., 2:214.

  39. Ibid., 4:367.

  40. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, The Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 505.
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  41. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1962), 20, 89.

  42. George Eliot Letters, 5:9.

  43. Ibid., 322.

  44. Ibid., 3:31.

  45. Ibid., 208.

  46. Ibid., 219.

  47. Ibid., 363.

  48. Ibid., 6:72.

  49. Ibid., 5:357.

  50. Ibid., 4:233, 235.

  51. Ibid., 136.

  52. Ibid., 5:450.

  53. Ibid., 4:47. Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands was published privately in 1867 and issued publicly the following year. George Eliot was sent a copy by Lewes’s friend Arthur Helps, who edited it and since she was reading it in January of 1868, it is likely she was sent a copy of the private edition. The Queen was a great admirer of her work.

  54. George Eliot Letters, 6:64, 5:110, 5:227.

  55. Ibid., 7:121.

  56. Herbert Lewes had died in Africa, leaving a widow and two children who insisted upon coming to England and lived at George Eliot’s expense.

  57. George Eliot Letters, 7:140, 141.

  58. Ibid., 264n.

  59. Her brother-in-law, Leslie Stephen, almost collapsed with the shock of seeing them kissing in his living room.

  60. George Eliot Letters, 6:398.

  61. Ibid., 7:284.

  62. When Emily Tennyson, the poet’s sister, who had been engaged to Arthur Hallam, decided eight years after Hallam’s death to marry someone else, she was widely condemned as disloyal. Mrs Brookfield said, ‘Only conceive Emily Tennyson (I really can hardly even now believe it) Emily Tennyson is actually going to be married – and to whom after such a man as Arthur Hallam. To a boy in the Navy, supposed to be a Midshipman…. Can you conceive anyone who he had loved, putting up with another? I feel so distressed about this, really it quite hurts me, I had such a romantic admiration for her, looked at her with such pity, and now my feeling about her is bouleverséd.’ See Mrs Brookfield and Her Circle, ed. Charles and Frances Brookfield, 2 vols. (London: Pitman and Sons, 1906), 1:102–3; also Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 258. Opposition to re-marriage was an article of Positivist doctrine. Auguste Comte was chief among the Positivists who subscribed to the sentimental opposition to re-marriage. See W. M. Simon, European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963).