George Eliot

Silas Marner adapted by Greg Cullen

Theatr Clwyd, 1996 

In an age of remarkable thinkers and writers, George Eliot made the novel intellectually respectable without sacrificing any of its duties to entertain. Her works attracted great respect and admiration for their moral rigour, acute psychological insight and perceptive humour, and yet, a woman in a man’s world, her own domestic arrangements were far from the accepted norm. 

A Provincial Upbringing

She was born Mary Ann Evans (later shortened to Marian) in 1819, the daughter of a successful land agent in Warwickshire. The youngest child of Robert Evans’s second marriage, she had from an early age a deep craving for affection and, although by no means neglected by her father, she worshipped her elder brother Isaac. This dependence, together with a nature abnormally sensitive to criticism, inevitably led to frustration and dissatisfaction. Maggie Tulliver, the imaginative passionate and emotionally demanding heroine of The Mill on the Floss, has been recognised by many to be a partial self-portrait.

Educated at Nuneaton and Coventry, the young Marian was swept into the Evangelical Revival in the Church of England by her schoolmistress, a Miss Lewis. For a time this suited her naturally earnest and moral character. Then when Mary Ann was 15, her mother died, and she became mistress of her father’s household, although still continuing her studies with tutors. Six years later, father and daughter moved together to a smaller house in Coventry where for the first time she came into contact with people of people similar intellect, but radically different outlook.

Charles Bray, a Coventry manufacturer eight years her senior, was instrumental in causing her to reconsider her religious views. He introduced her to various social and philosophical freethinkers inder whose influence she began to question the more conventional codes of Victorian behaviour. She became an agnostic and dissenter and in 1846 published her first book, a translation from the German of D F Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Eight years later her translation of L von Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity would be the only one of her works to appear under the name Marian Evans. 

Marian and Men

In 1850, following her father’s death, she met John Chapman, editor and publisher of the Westminster Review, the organ of the philosophical radicals. In its early years it had supported the likes of Coleridge, Byron and Carlyle. Marian became its assistant editor for two years. But her search for love was continuing to cause embarrassment. For a time she stayed in Chapman’s household as a paying guest until her unconcealed ardour for him obliged her to move out again. Also around this time she met Herbert Spencer, the founder of evolutionary philosophy, who also, while recognising her mental powers, did not reciprocate her feelings.

Perhaps one explanation for these difficulties was that she as not at all the typical little Victorian woman. She was intellectually confident, serious-minded, and possessed heavy equine features (Henry James once famously described her as “Magnificently ugly – deliciously hideous”). But in 1854 she met the author and scientific journalist George Henry Lewes with whom she formed a mutual attachment that would last the next twenty-five years until his death. Lewes and his wife Agnes were both famous for their infidelity. He was not necessarily the biological father of all the sons she expected him to provide for, but although husband and wife were separated, he was unable to obtain a divorce – at this time only an act of Parliament could dissolve a marriage. Nevertheless, he and Marian departed for the continent together, scandalising friends and family alike, and she became a generous stepmother to his sons. 

A Maiden No More

Her loyalty to Lewes was complete, though he, a noted sensualist, was probably less faithful. The irony of her position could not have been lost on her – of great moral fibre herself, she found deep personal satisfaction from living with a married man. And despite the fame and respect her later work was to bring, she was forever barred from taking her rightful place in literary society. Gentlemen visited her salon, but left their wives at home.

However, Lewes in his way was more a good thing than a bad, and it was he who encouraged her to turn her hand to fiction. In return she adopted his first name as a nom de plume, adding Eliot as “a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word”. Soon after their return to England, Amos Barton appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, the first of her novels to be published under her new name. Together with Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story, and Janet’s Repentance, these Scenes of Clerical Life attracted immediate praise for their domestic realism, pathos and humour.

For a time the public was intrigued. Who was this startling new talent? Dickens is said to have been among the first to suspect that ‘he’ was really a she in that only a woman would be so conversant with the specifics of domestic detail the stories contained. But the need for disguise had a practical purpose. For one thing Marian’s unconventional liaison with Lewes had brought disgrace on the Evans family name. For another, as the Brontë sisters had found, a masculine identity was helpful for ambitious writers. When the truth finally emerged, following the publication of Adam Bede in 1859, Lewes explained the deception had been necessary in order to get Marian’s books judged on their merits “and not prejudged as the work of a woman”. He added defiantly “They can’t now unsay their admiration”. Some did, however, claiming the fine morality of the latter novel was compromised by having come from a ‘polluted source’. 

Royal Sanction

Tainted or not, this work won her the admiration of that guardian of middle-class values, Queen Victoria, and her unintellectual enjoyment of Marian’s work was soon being shared by a wide readership. Eliot’s best novels are firmly rooted in the manners and mores of the provincial Midlands with whish she had grown up., She had an instinctive understanding of a wide range of characters, and knew enough about a wide variety of ordinary professions to talk about them with authority – for example, in her acknowledged masterpiece Middlemarch she can not only describe in detail what is wrong with Casaubon’s approach to his arcane researches, but also reproduce accurately details of Lydgate’s medical dilemmas. Her depiction of life is sober and down to earth, in contrast to Dickens’s sometimes highly coloured and fantastical versions of it. Significantly Marian was a great admirer of Dutch genre paintings. Her characters generally live out their little lives far from matters of great pomp and moment, but they are frequently interrupted in their doings be the authoress interjecting an apposite moral or philosophical observation. This habit of hers has been called ‘governessy’, but it catered to the taste of the time for works of high morality and didacticism. And George Eliot’s morality was unimpeachable, even if Marian Evans’s was deemed not to be.

The Mill on the Floss appeared in 1860 followed by Silas Marner the following year. This is Eliot’s shortest novel, but one of her richest, a compact, subtly plotted tale that simultaneously paints a vivid and sympathetic portrait of the village life she recalled from her formative years. Romola in 1863 was her Walter Scott-ish attempt to pull off a huge historical, set in Florence at the time of Savonarola, and if it fails it is mainly because she was forsaking her real forte, the minutiae or rural provincial life. Felix Holt (1866) gives the modern reader a useful insight into political life around the tome of the 1832 Reform Bill, and tells the story of Esther Lyons’s wilful rejection of a suitable match in order to follow her heart and pursue the eponymous idealistic radical and workers’ friend. Middlemarch in 1872 similarly follows the fortunes of a high-minded heroine who feels the need to give herself to some greater cause than the conventional. George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, came out in 1976. 

Back to the Fold

As her fame as a novelist increased, intelligent women in particular came to regard her as a champion of her sex, although Marian Evans herself never formally identified with the burgeoning women’s movement. In her own life she never sought to pursue her own career above her care for the man she loved – she and Lewes joshingly referred to each other, perhaps with more truth than they would comfortably admit, as Mr and Mrs Casaubon.

Bur despite all its potential for the opposite, their match was a good one. She suffered ill-health and bouts of depression throughout her adult life, and he took care to hide bad reviews and unhappy letters from her. By the time Lewes dies in 1878, Eliot had become recognised as England’s greatest living novelist by no lesser peers than Henry James and Turgenev. Then in May 1880 she amazed everyone by marrying her financial adviser John Walter Cross who, at 40, was twenty-one years her junior. Perhaps the wiseacres had simply underestimated her need for emotional support. But at least this delayed surrender to respectability brought about a reconciliation with those friends and family members, brother Isaac included, whose outraged sense of decency had caused them to ignore her for a quarter of a century.

In addition to her novels, Marian Evans also produced short stories and poems, and a collection of satirical character sketches based on the ancient Greek model of Theophrastus. Cross also went on to edit her journals and letters five years after her death, contriving, as one later critic complained, to leave out just about everything that made her interesting.

Mary Ann Cross died in December 1880, her position in the front rank of English writers assured.