Читать книгу George Eliot: The Last Victorian - Kathryn Hughes - Страница 6

AT THE AGE of eight Mary Anne took a step towards a new world, urban and refined. In 1828 she followed Chrissey to school in Nuneaton. Miss Lathom’s had been only three miles from Griff and was attended by farmers’ daughters with thick Warwickshire tongues, broad butter-making hands and little hope of going much beyond the three Rs. The Elms, run by Mrs Wallington, was a different proposition altogether. The lady herself was a genteel, hard-up widow from Cork. She had followed one of the few options available to her by opening a school and advertising for boarders whom she taught alongside her own daughters. There were hundreds of these ‘ladies’ seminaries’ struggling to survive in the first half of the nineteenth century and most of them were dreadful. What marked out The Elms was its excellent teaching: by the time Mary Anne arrived, the school was reckoned to be one of the best in Nuneaton. Responsibility for the thirty pupils was shared between Mrs Wallington, her daughter Nancy, now twenty-five, and another Irishwoman, Maria Lewis, who was about twenty-eight.

The change of environment did nothing to help Mary Anne shed her shyness. Adults and children still steered clear, assuming they had nothing to offer the little girl whom they privately described as ‘uncanny’.¹ Only the assistant governess Miss Lewis, with her ugly squint and her Irishness, recognised in Mary Anne something of her own isolation. Looking beyond the smooth, hard shell of perfection, she saw a deeply unhappy child ‘given to great bursts of weeping’. Within months of her arrival at Nuneaton Mary Anne had formed an attachment to Miss Lewis, which was to be the pivot of both women’s lives for the next ten years. Miss Lewis became ‘like an elder sister’ to the Evans girls, often staying at Griff during the holidays.²

Mr and Mrs Evans were delighted with Mrs Wallington’s in general and Maria Lewis in particular. In their different ways they both set great store by their youngest girl getting an education. Shrewdly practical, Robert Evans had already schooled his eldest daughter, Fanny, to a standard that had enabled her to work as a governess to the Newdigates before her marriage to a prosperous farmer, Henry Houghton. Anticipating that the quiet, odd-looking Mary Anne might remain a spinster all her life, Evans was determined that she would not be reduced to relying on her brothers for support. A life as a governess was not, as Miss Lewis’s example was increasingly to show, either secure or cheerful. Still, it was the one bit of independence open to middle-class women and Robert Evans was determined that it should be Mary Anne’s if she needed it.

Christiana’s hopes for her daughter were altogether fancier.³ Like many a prosperous farmer’s wife, she expected a stint at boarding-school to soften her child’s rough corners and round out her flat vowels. A smattering of indifferent French and basic piano were the icing on the cake of an education designed to prepare the girl for marriage to a prosperous farmer or local professional man. In the case of young Chrissey the investment was soon to pay off handsomely. A few years after leaving Mrs Wallington’s she married a local doctor, the gentlemanly Edward Clarke. Still, husbands were a long way off for little Mary Anne. All Mrs Evans hoped for at this stage was that her odd little girl would become near enough a lady. Maria Lewis may not have been pretty, but her careful manners and measured diction were held up to Mary Anne – who still looked and sounded like a farm girl – as the model to which she should aspire.

It did no harm, either, that Miss Lewis was ‘serious’ in her religion, belonging to the Evangelical wing of the Church of England. From the end of the previous century the Evangelicals had worked to revitalise an Established Church that had become lethargic and indifferent to the needs of a changing social landscape. A population which was increasingly urban and mobile found nothing of relevance in the tepid rituals of weekly parish worship. During the 1760s and 1770s, the charismatic clergyman John Wesley had taken the Gospel out to the people, preaching with passion about a Saviour who might be personally and intimately known. For Wesley ritual, liturgy and the sacrament were less important than a first-hand knowledge of God’s word as revealed through the Bible and private prayer. When it came to deciding questions of right and wrong, the authority of the priest ceded to individual conscience. This made Methodism, as Wesley’s brand of Anglicanism became known, a particularly democratic faith. Mill workers, apothecaries and, until 1803, women, were all encouraged to preach the word of the Lord as and when the spirit moved them.

This challenge of Methodism, together with the continuing vitality of other dissenting sects such as the Baptists and the Independents, had forced the Established Church to put its house in order. The result was Evangelicalism – a brand of Anglicanism which held out the possibility of knowing Christ as a personal redeemer. In order to attain this state of grace an individual was to prepare her soul by renouncing all manner of leisure and pleasure. A constant diet of prayer, Bible study and self-scrutiny was required to stamp out temptation. Yet at the same time as renouncing the world, the Evangelical Anglican was to be busily present within it. Visiting the poor, leading prayer meetings and worrying about the state of other people’s souls were part of the programme by which the ‘serious’ Christian would reach heaven. Uninviting though this dour programme might seem, Evangelicalism swept right through the middle classes and even lapped the gentry during the first decades of the century. Its combination of self-consciousness, sentimentality and pious bustle went a long way to defining the temper of domestic and public life in early nineteenth-century England. In ‘Janet’s Repentance’, one of her first pieces of fiction, George Eliot showed how Evangelical Anglicanism had worked a little revolution in the petty hearts and minds of female Milby, a barely disguised Nuneaton: ‘Whatever might be the weaknesses of the ladies who pruned the luxuriance of their lace and ribbons, cut out garments for the poor, distributed tracts, quoted Scripture, and defined the true Gospel, they had learned this – that there was a divine work to be done in life, a rule of goodness higher than the opinion of their neighbours.’⁴

Even Robert Evans, not known for his susceptibility to passing trends, was affected by Evangelical fervour. During the late 1820s he went to hear the Revd John Jones give a series of passionate evening sermons in Nuneaton. Jones’s fundamentalist style was credited with inspiring a religious revival in Nuneaton and with provoking a reaction from more orthodox church members – events which Eliot portrayed in ‘Janet’s Repentance’. But Evans was too much of a conservative to do more than dip into this new moral and political force. As the Newdigates’ representative, he was expected to uphold the tradition of Broad Church Anglicanism. The parish church of Chilvers Coton stood at the heart of village life and it was here the Evanses came to be christened – as Mary Anne was a week after her birth – married and buried. Labourers, farmers and neighbouring artisans gathered every Sunday to affirm not so much that Christ was Risen but that the community endured.

At a time when many country people still could not read, it was the familiar cadences of the Prayer Book rather than the precise doctrine it conveyed which brought comfort, a point Eliot was to put into the mouth of the illiterate Dolly Winthrop as she urged the isolated weaver Silas Marner to attend Raveloe’s Christmas service: ‘If you was to … go to church, and see the holly and the yew, and hear the anthim, and then take the sacramen’, you’d be a deal the better, and you’d know which end you stood on, and you could put your trust i’ Them as knows better nor we do, seein’ you’d ha’ done what it lies on us all to do.’⁵

While this was exactly the kind of hazy, casual observance which the Evangelical teenage Mary Anne abhorred, as a mature woman she came to value the way it strengthened social relations. Mr Ebdell, who had christened her, turns up in fiction as Mr Gilfil of ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’. Schooled in his own suffering, Gilfil is a much-loved figure in the community, with an instinctive understanding of his parishioners’ needs. He pulls sugar plums out of his pockets for the village children and sends an old lady a flitch of bacon so that she will not have to kill her beloved pet pig. Yet when it comes to preaching, that key activity for a new generation of zealous church-goers, Mr Gilfil is sadly lacking: ‘He had a large heap of short sermons, rather yellow and worn at the edges, from which he took two every Sunday, securing perfect impartiality in the selection by taking them as they came, without reference to topics.’⁶

Gilfil begins a long line of theologically lax, but emotionally generous, Anglican clergy in Eliot’s fiction which includes Mr Irwine of Adam Bede and Mr Farebrother in Middlemarch. Irwine may hunt and Farebrother play cards, much to the horror of their dissenting and Evangelical neighbours, but both extend a charity and understanding to their fellow men which was to become the corner-stone of Eliot’s adult moral philosophy.

Ironically, it was just this kind of loving acceptance which drew Mary Anne away from her family’s middle-of-the-road Anglicanism towards the Evangelicalism of Miss Lewis. At nine years old she was hardly able to comprehend the doctrinal differences between the two ways of worship, but she was easily able to register that Maria Lewis gave her the kind of sustained attention which her own mother could not. If loving God was what it took to keep Miss Lewis loving her, Mary Anne was happy to oblige. With the insecure child’s eager need to please, she adopted her teacher’s serious piety with relish. After her death, when family and friends were busy offering commentaries on Eliot’s early influences, the idea grew that it was Maria Lewis’s indoctrination that had provoked Mary Anne into the flamboyant gesture of abandoning God at the age of twenty-two. In fact Miss Lewis’s observance, though rigorous, was always sweet and sentimental. She was hardly a hell-fire preacher, more a gentle woman who talked earnestly of God’s tender mercies. But she was not so gentle, however, that she was not prepared to push the blame in the direction where she believed it lay. Reminiscing after Eliot’s death, she maintained that it was Mary Anne’s next teachers, the Baptist Franklin sisters, who were to blame for the girl’s ‘fall into infidelity’.⁷

The Franklins, whose establishment was in the smartest part of Coventry, ran the best girls’ school in the Midlands. The ambitious curriculum and pious ambience attracted girls from as far away as New York. Too rarefied for Chrissey Evans, who returned home to Griff after her stint at Mrs Wallington’s, it was none the less the perfect place for twelve-year-old Mary Anne.

The Franklin sisters, Mary, thirty, and Rebecca, twenty-eight, were the daughters of a local Baptist minister who preached at a chapel in Cow Lane. Despite these stern-sounding origins, they were generally agreed to be the last word in female charm and culture. In what was becoming a classic pattern for the early nineteenth-century schoolmistress, Miss Rebecca had spent time in Paris perfecting her French before coming home to pass on her elegant accent to her pupils. Indeed, her combination of refinement and learning had given the younger Miss Franklin a personal reputation as one of the cleverest women in the county.

In such an exquisite atmosphere Mary Anne could hardly fail to flourish. Her French improved by leaps and bounds, and she won a copy of Pascal’s Pensées for her efforts, a triumph which still gave her pleasure at the very end of her life. Her English compositions were immaculate, read with admiration by Miss Franklin ‘who rarely found anything to correct’.⁸ As the best pianist in the school, she was sometimes asked to play for visitors, even if she often fled from the parlour in ‘an agony of tears’ at her failure to excel.⁹

Mary Anne’s educational progress went hand in hand with her social transformation. She had already lost her accent by listening carefully to Miss Lewis’s pedantic, old-fashioned diction. Now she took Miss Rebecca as her model, developing the low, musical voice which in later life continued to hint at the effort it had taken to acquire. These were the years when the question of who or what was ‘genteel’ pressed hard upon the provincial middle classes. Women of the previous generation – like her brisk Pearson aunts – rooted their self-worth in keeping a spotless home and helping their husbands run a thriving business. They felt no shame in being spotted up to their elbows in whey or poring over an account book. But from the 1820s middle-class women were increasingly required to behave in ways which showed that they were ‘ladies’. Ladies did not involve themselves in profit making and they employed domestic servants to do the rougher housework. Instead of curing bacon they spent their time in a series of highly ornamental activities – painting, music and fine needlework – which advertised the fact that their husbands and fathers could afford to keep them in leisure. Evangelicalism went some way towards curbing the worst excesses of this faux-gentility, but even a serious Christian like Mary Anne Evans was expected to drop the ways of speaking and behaving which she had learned in her parents’ farmhouse.

The Franklins’ brand of Baptism was mild, but still they believed in the conversion experience, that moment when an individual realises his sinfulness and asks to be born again in Christ. It is not clear if Mary Anne underwent a sharply defined crisis in her mid-teens, but it is certainly the case that she became more ponderously religious than ever before. She was always first to lead her schoolmates in spontaneous prayer, a habit that aroused in them feelings of queasy awe. One of the daughters of these unfortunate girls recalled years later that Mary Anne’s schoolfellows ‘loved her as much as they could venture to love one whom they felt to be so immeasurably superior to themselves’.¹⁰

Delighted with her growing reputation for perfection, Mary Anne’s response was to compose a poem entitled ‘On Being Called a Saint’ in which she tortured herself deliriously with the possibility that she was not quite as perfect as everyone believed. Her opening stanza sighs,

A Saint! Oh would that I could claim

The privileg’d, the honor’d name

And confidently take my stand

Though lowest in the saintly band!¹¹

Saints, of course, are not supposed to worry about what they look like. At a time when even her most pious classmates were becoming interested in their looks and the things that went with them – flirtation, courtship, marriage – Mary Anne was increasingly aware that she was unlikely to attract many admirers. Her big nose, long upper lip and lank hair were really not so very ugly, especially at a time when many a teenage girl had to worry about black teeth and smallpox scars, but her mother’s early lessons about her unacceptability had been well learned. Believing herself a fright, she became one.

Evangelical and dissenting Protestantism had always warned against the pleasures of the flesh, identifying vanity as a particularly besetting sin. Mary Anne seized on this licence with enthusiasm, deliberately playing up her plainness by looking unkempt and adopting a severe style of dress, including an unflattering Quaker-type cap.¹² If being pretty was the one thing at which she did not excel, she would turn the situation on its head and become expert at looking plain. In a plodding essay on ‘Affectation and Conceit’ written at this time, she upbraids pretty, vapid women who ‘study no graces of mind or intellect. Their whole thoughts are how they shall best maintain their empire over their surrounding inferiors, and the right fit of a dress or bonnet will occupy their minds for hours together.’¹³ At fifteen Mary Anne was a long way from the realisation that she was just as guilty of manipulating her appearance in order to maintain superiority over her peers.

Throughout her adult life, other people made periodic attempts to get Mary Anne interested in her appearance. But her sense of hopelessness in this area was so embedded that nothing made much difference. While she was staying in a boarding-house in Geneva in 1849 a fellow guest – a marquise no less – insisted on giving her a more up-to-date hairstyle. Mary Anne felt ridiculous: ‘All the world says I look infinitely better so I comply, though to myself I seem uglier than ever – if possible.’¹⁴

Years later, in 1863, when she and Lewes held a housewarming party at their new home off Regent’s Park, their interior designer Owen Jones gave Mary Anne a talking-to about ‘her general neglect of personal adornment’ and insisted on shoehorning her into a splendid moiré dress bought especially for the occasion.¹⁵

Mary Anne reported these two incidents to her correspondents with amused disbelief. She was so convinced of her own ugliness, other people’s kind attentions were always suspected as possible teases. As a result she never acquired the confidence which would have allowed her to make the best of herself. In middle age, when she was seen regularly at the theatre and in concert halls, she became well known for the awful mishmash of her outfits, part high fashion, part provincial dowdiness. At the end of her life, and married to the much younger John Cross, her attempts to put together a flattering new image earned her sniggers from the effortlessly elegant.

Yet behind the poker-faced demeanour which sometimes confused visitors into thinking she was a third Miss Franklin, Mary Anne’s emotions worked as violently as ever. One schoolmate recalled her shock at finding a passionate demand for love scribbled in the back of the paragon’s German dictionary.¹⁶ The tearful exits which usually followed her piano recitals in the Franklins’ drawing-room suggest the intensity with which she lived. Performance of all kinds was to remain a tricky business throughout her life. She longed for the praise, acclaim and love that went with setting her fiction before the public, but could not bear the criticism and gossip that naturally accompanied them. Her need to be right and perfect went beyond vanity and became a matter of survival, to the point where Lewes realised he had better suppress all but the most flattering reviews if she were not to plunge into a paralysing despair. The teenage Mary Anne was, if anything, even more thin-skinned. Performing for the Misses Franklin and their visitors offered the possibility of reaching an instant of perfection and, better still, having it witnessed by others. When that moment of transcendence failed to appear – because, in her own eyes, she had failed to reach the required standard – it was as if she had blown her last chance at love.

Mary Anne’s surviving exercise book, too, reveals a deep interest in the whole drama of rejection. In her neat hand she copied out a trashy poem called ‘The Forsaken’ in which a young woman is jilted by a casual, arrogant man. Melodramatic though this might have been, it explores Mary Anne’s experience of her brother’s early coldness. The man in the poem behaves much as Isaac had done – leaving his sweetheart – sister bereft, while he sets out to explore a wider world, returning in this case not with a pony but with another woman. By way of a fantasy revenge, one of the last poems Mary Anne copied out in her notebook is ‘To a Sister’ in which a far-away brother begs his sister to remember him.¹⁷ These verses and the trauma behind her choice of them laid the basis for Mary Anne’s pessimistic expectations about adult sexuality: women are doomed to love men who will not love them back. The future she imagined for herself was the one which came to pass. Until the age of thirty-four she was to endure one romantic rejection after another.

In 1835 Christiana Evans fell ill with breast cancer, and at Christmas Mary Anne was called home from school to nurse her. All the French prizes and piano performances in the world could not rescue the cleverest girl in the school from the expectations which the nineteenth-century family placed on its unmarried daughters. Any hopes Mary Anne might have harboured about moving on from the Franklins to an even more prestigious school, perhaps on the Continent, were dashed by the summons home to Griff.

Mary Anne’s entire education had been shaped by the demands of her mother’s health. At five she had been sent away because Christiana was too frail to manage her and at sixteen she was being called back because she was dying. Characteristically, any grievance Mary Anne felt was kept well buried. The one surviving letter of this time, written to Maria Lewis, uses the conventional pieties of the sickroom, ‘We dare not hope that there will be a permanent improvement.’¹⁸ There wasn’t. In the early hours of 3 February 1836 Christiana Evans died.

In a letter to his employer a few weeks later Robert Evans appeared to accept the situation stoically: ‘I have gone through a great deal of pain and Greif, but it is the work of God therefore I submit to it chearfully as far as Human Nature will permit.’¹⁹ In fact, he was far from resigned. When it became apparent in late December that Christiana was about to die, Evans had fallen violently and suddenly ill with a kidney complaint. The man who had always seemed as solid as an oak crumpled at the prospect of losing a wife for the second time. For a while it looked as if he too might die. But tender nursing and ferocious bleeding with leeches had their effect, and by mid-January he was shakily mobile. For a difficult few weeks it had seemed as if the Evans family – always a more fragile structure than it appeared – might collapse completely.

For the first time, almost, since Mary Anne’s birth the three children of Robert Evans’s second marriage were living under one roof. Chrissey was the housekeeper, Isaac the apprentice and Mary Anne her father’s surrogate wife. It was she who accompanied the old man on shopping trips to Coventry, mended his clothes and read from Walter Scott, the author whom they both loved. There is no evidence that the placid Chrissey resented her younger sister’s place in their father’s affections. Always her mother’s favourite daughter, the elder girl was released by Mrs Evans’s death into forming an attachment outside the family. A little over a year later she was married and her housekeeping duties devolved on Mary Anne.

With Isaac, the situation was not so easy. This could have been a time of reconciliation, with brother and sister moving beyond their childhood estrangement to build a new, adult relationship. But a single surviving anecdote which Cross tells from their intervening boarding-school years suggests that the tensions between them were as alive as ever. ‘On coming home for their holidays the sister and brother began … the habit of acting charades together before the Griff household and the aunts, who were greatly impressed with the cleverness of the performance; and the girl was now recognised in the family circle as no ordinary child.’²⁰ No teenage boy enjoys being outshone by his younger sister, especially in front of those family members who had previously placed him first. Between the lines of an anecdote anxiously repeated by John Cross to emphasise the harmony between Isaac and Mary Anne, there lurked a rivalry which was to reemerge now that the two were once more under the same roof.

On the surface theirs was an argument about religion. Isaac was a High Anglican, at the very opposite end of the spectrum from Mary Anne. At its most intellectually sophisticated, the Anglo-Catholic movement was rigorous and ascetic, favouring a return to the liturgy and monastic practices of the pre-Reform church. But Isaac had imbibed, probably from the tutor in Birmingham where he had finished his education, a more comfortable version, which celebrated the pleasures of the material world. While Mary Anne’s transformation from village girl to young lady had been modelled on Evangelical ideals of genteel behaviour, Isaac’s parallel metamorphosis into a gentleman – and that, indeed, is how he described himself in 1844 when he acted as executor to Aunt Evarard’s will – had been along decidedly High Church lines. His was a faith which allowed a man to hunt, drink and dine, before absolving himself from sin through the sacrament. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast with Mary Anne’s conscience-scourging, Bible-reading puritanism.

Brother and sister were on a collision course and the crash came in August 1838. They spent a few days together in London, during which Mary Anne was picky about everything. The choir at St Paul’s was frivolous and silly. Going to the theatre was sinful and she preferred to spend the evening reading. The only time she cheered up was on a visit to Greenwich Hospital. Finally, brother and sister went to a bookshop where he bought a couple of hunting sketches, while she pounced triumphantly on a copy of Josephus’s History of the Jews.²¹

Here was a return to the power struggle of a decade earlier. Isaac’s rejection of his little sister in favour of a pony had been the catalyst for her plunge into books and religion. Now she was using the intellectual muscle developed as a result to try and regain control of him. No longer sufficiently undefended to ask openly for love, she insisted that he bend down and do her will instead. The fact that he did not, that he constantly eluded her with his sociability and worldliness, only made her angrier. Her response was to become even more censorious, sniping at what she admitted later were his perfectly ‘lawful amusements’²² and adopting a superior, critical tone whenever talking about him. ‘Isaac is determinately busy, and altogether improving,’ she wrote smugly to Maria Lewis on 13 March 1840, as if discussing an annoying child.²³

There had been a brief rapprochement fifteen months before the trip to London when, on 30 May 1837, Chrissey married Edward Clarke at Chilvers Coton. On that occasion brother and sister broke down and had ‘a good cry’ at the realisation that life at Griff was moving into a new and unknown phase.²⁴ It was now that Mary Ann – newly elevated to ‘Miss Evans’ and minus the final ‘e’ of her Christian name – became the official housekeeper. Quite possibly her father offered to hire someone to do the job, leaving her free to study full-time at home. That she did not accept this tempting proposal suggests that she had a great deal at stake in becoming the mistress of Griff. John Cross, always anxious to absolve his late wife of anything that might hint at oddness or masculinity, emphasised the pleasure she took in ‘the soothing, strengthening, sacred influences of the home life, the home loves, the home duties’.²⁵

A mix of motives is more likely. Running a working farmhouse was one of the few opportunities for a middle-class woman to exercise her energy and organisational skills, and Mary Ann certainly enjoyed being ‘an important personage at home’.²⁶ When the aunts came to dinner they could not fail to have noticed the gleaming tiles, polished furniture and well-stocked cupboards. The awkward, bookish little girl whom none of them had really cared for turned out to be a Pearson after all.

Keeping house for her father was also a way for Mary Ann to bind him closer to her. With her mother and elder sister out of the way, she was finally able to occupy the position of wife to Robert Evans. Over sixty and in indifferent health, Evans was devolving more and more responsibility for the estate business on to Isaac. In time-honoured tradition, he expected his youngest daughter to be the comforter of his declining years, filling his evenings with companionship, reading and music, before nursing him to his grave. It was a dull, heavy burden, but one which allowed Mary Ann to monopolise the member of her family who, she maintained on the eve of his death a decade later, was ‘the one deep strong love I have ever known’.²⁷

But it would be wrong to imagine something gloomy and gothic for Mary Ann Evans. Chilvers Coton was not Haworth; Robert Evans was not Patrick Brontë; and the girl herself was certainly not running mad over the moors. Griff was a working farmhouse, Robert Evans was still active and Isaac had a sociable, busy life. Mary Ann found herself playing hostess to a steady stream of visitors. The Pearson aunts and her married sisters all lived near enough to make frequent appearances at Griff. Then there were the Derbyshire Evanses, Samuel and his wife Elizabeth, who visited in early 1839. Mary Ann’s former schoolteachers, Miss Lewis and the Misses Franklin, came to stay several times. Old family friends put up at Griff, sometimes for days at a stretch.

Nor was she entirely confined to home. In November 1839 she stayed with her old school friend Jessie Barclay in London, making her first train journey to get there. The following year her father took her to visit his brothers’ families in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, making a detour on the way home to sightsee in Lincoln. Still, long-distance travel was neither easy nor cheap and the mail remained the chief way in which middle-class girls living at home continued their school friendships. Indeed, Hannah More, whose pious books Mary Ann much admired, referred to these post-school, pre-marriage years as the ‘epistolary period of life’. Many of Mary Ann’s letters from these years have not survived, but luckily forty-five remain, the majority written to Maria Lewis and Martha Jackson, an old classmate.

Evangelicalism, with its roots in the Puritan doctrines of the seventeenth century, had always placed the well-tended home at the heart of Christian life. Becoming mistress of Griff gave Mary Ann a larger sphere for her religious activities than she had hitherto known. Making jam and churning butter were not simply routine domestic tasks, but crucial ways of worshipping God. Determined to give up all worldly pleasures since ‘I find, as Dr. Johnson said respecting his wine, total abstinence much easier than moderation’,²⁸ she was in the powerful position of being able to make sure that everyone else at Griff did too – or else endure her smouldering disapproval. Every Michaelmas she sulked at having to organise a harvest festival supper. The pagan overtones of the feasting and drunkenness made the event ‘nauseating’ to her. Equally unpleasant was having to give up a day to the ‘disagreeable bustle’ of preparing for Isaac’s twenty-third birthday, on 19 May 1839, which was to be marked by a crow-shooting party.²⁹ The one saving grace was that since the birthday itself fell on the Sabbath, the celebrations were held over until the next day. By the time she came to write Adam Bede twenty years later, Eliot’s mature vision had transformed both the harvest supper and the coming-of-age party into occasions which celebrated the cohesion of village ties and the enduring nature of community life. At this point, though, they seemed witless and wanton.

That same crucial shift in perception is apparent in another incident which occurred around now. In early 1839 Mary Ann’s Methodist aunt and uncle were visiting from Derbyshire. Elizabeth Evans was a devout Methodist and a one-time preacher. Her vocation and a few details about her career notoriously formed the basis of Eliot’s portrayal of Dinah in Adam Bede. A genuinely good woman, Elizabeth Evans radiated the kind of generous fellow feeling which was anathema to her sour-minded niece. During the course of the visit Mrs Evans spoke joyfully about a minister she knew who had recently died. Undeterred by the fact that he was a drinker – a quality not likely to endear him to the abstinent Evangelical and dissenting conscience – she spoke enthusiastically about the man’s good qualities and concluded that he was now surely in heaven. ‘This was at the time an offence to my stern, ascetic hard views,’ explained the middle-aged Mary Ann, ‘how beautiful it is to me now!’³⁰

Despite disapproving of her aunt’s reluctance to condemn, Mary Ann seized upon Elizabeth Evans as the one person within the extended family network with whom she could share the daily experience of her faith. Sadly, most of this experience was a kind of torture. In a letter written just after the 1839 visit, Mary Ann pours out her despair at her failure to reach God. Even at this point, two and a half years before she gave up going to church, she was battling with the realisation that her gloomy and self-denying faith had little to do with the divine and a great deal to do with her own internal dramas.

Instead of putting my light under a bushel, I am in danger of ostentatiously displaying a false one. You have much too high an opinion my dear Aunt, of my spiritual condition and of my personal and circumstantial advantages … I feel that my besetting sin is the one of all others most destroying, as it is the fruitful parent of them all, Ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures. This seems the centre whence all my actions proceed.³¹

Certainly it was ambition rather than fellow feeling which powered Mary Ann’s drive to become one of the most important figures in the parish. During these years she started a clothing club, organised bazaars, ran a Sunday School and visited the local workhouse, Coton College. ‘We shall never have another Mary Ann Evans’ was the ambiguous lament of those on the receiving end of her charity when she left for Coventry in 1841.³² Spiritual and social yearnings dovetailed nicely when this pious busyness brought Mary Ann to the attention of Mrs Newdegate (who used the older spelling of the family name), the new mistress of Arbury Hall. Old Francis Parker-Newdigate had died in 1835 and the inheritance had passed to his cousin’s wife, Maria Newdegate, and her son Charles. While Francis Parker-Newdigate had been indifferent to the welfare of his tenants, his successor was irritatingly involved. Devoutly Evangelical, Mrs Newdegate insisted that all the farmers should attend church at least once on Sunday. This new regime at Arbury Hall exactly suited Mary Ann, who soon became a pet of her father’s new employer.

At the end of 1839 Mary Ann decided to start work on a chart laying out the history of the Church from the birth of Christ to the Reformation. If all went well it would be published and some of the profits would go towards building a new church at Attleborough. To help her with the vast research, she reported proudly to Maria Lewis that Mrs Newdegate ‘permits me to visit her library when I please in search of any books that may assist me’.³³

Only a few years previously Mary Ann had been made to wait in the housekeeper’s room, while her father talked business with old Mr Newdigate. Now here she was, taking possession of the library, that symbol of culture, achievement and learning. Her father’s professional success and her own genteel education had eased her transformation from near-servant to near-lady. Instead of the awkward little girl with the thick Warwickshire accent of only a few years ago, there was an intense young woman with a well-modulated voice and an abundance of learning, as well as the required string of genteel accomplishments. Of course, no amount of round vowels and fancy arpeggios were ever going to give Mary Ann a smooth passage into the gentry. Mrs Newdegate might allow her agent’s daughter to borrow her books and run her clothing club, but she was not going to invite her to dinner or allow her to marry her son. These distinctions of rank, so subtle and yet so rigid, grated on Mary Ann, as a passage from Felix Holt, perceptively quoted by John Cross, suggests: ‘No one who has not a strong natural prompting and susceptibility towards such things [the signs and luxuries of ladyhood], and has, at the same time, suffered from the presence of opposite conditions, can understand how powerfully those minor accidents of rank which please the fastidious sense can preoccupy the imagination.’³⁴

Like many upwardly mobile men and women of the Victorian period, Mary Ann’s transformation into a member of the genteel middle class remained open to scrutiny all her life. Eliza Lynn, a minor novelist of about the same age who met Mary Ann when she was in her early thirties and bore her a strange lifelong grudge, maintained that ‘there was something underbred and provincial [about Miss Evans] … She held her hands and arms kangaroo fashion; was badly dressed; had an unwashed, unbrushed, unkempt look altogether.’³⁵ Even when George Eliot was at the height of her reputation and had acquired sufficient money to buy herself some new clothes and a hairbrush there were still those ready to snipe at her lack of breeding. In an increasingly secular age, her irregular relationship with G. H. Lewes was linked less often to the fact that she did not attend church than that she was, more pertinently, ‘not quite a lady’.

Mary Ann’s confidence about putting together an ecclesiastical chart reflects the scope of her reading during these Griff years. Although she had refused her father’s offer of a housekeeper, she allowed him to fund her continuing education in other ways. Twice a week Signor Joseph Brezzi arrived from Leamington to teach her Italian and German – the language which was to play such an important part in her personal and professional life. Robert Evans also happily settled her bills at Short’s, the Nuneaton bookseller who did his best to keep up with her often obscure demands. It was now that she embarked on a habit of private reading which was to form the foundation for one of the greatest self-educations of the century. During these gloomy Evangelical years of 1837–40 the books she chose were inevitably religious. None the less, her practice of careful study, shrewd analysis and clear summary writing (in the form of letters to Maria Lewis and Martha Jackson) laid the basis for the critical skills which she was to apply across the huge range of subject matter which she tackled during her working life.

Her letters to Maria Lewis, who was now installed unhappily as a governess in a clergyman’s family near Wellingborough, set out a formidable list of titles during the years 1838 to 1839. The core text remained the Bible, which she read every day. To this was added a series of commentaries and theological works, which helped define her position on the doctrinal controversies that were close to tearing apart the Established Church. The Tracts for the Times, with their yearnings for an Anglican Church reconciled with Rome, predictably repelled her. She looked more favourably on Joseph Milner’s History of the Church of Christ (1794–7) with its mild Evangelicalism and cautious tolerance towards dissenters. Another book she liked was John Hoppus’s Schism as Opposed to Unity of the Church (1839), which attacked the assumption of Roman Catholics and Anglicans that the structure of their Church rested on the direct authority of God. Years later it was this ability to empathise with intellectual and psychological positions far from her own that would mark George Eliot’s mature art. At the age of twenty, however, open-mindedness simply muddled her. ‘I am powerfully attracted in a certain direction but when I am about to settle there, counter assertions shake me from my position.’³⁶

Mary Ann’s Evangelical conscience did not allow her to read for pleasure. Works of fiction, which took the reader away from the stern business of soul-saving and into a compensatory world of fantasy, were, she believed, particularly harmful. In an essay disguised as a letter to Maria Lewis on 16 March 1839 she set out her objection to novels: ‘For my part I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing even a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life. Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?’ With the convenient exception of her beloved Scott, plus a few individual works such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, Mary Ann sternly outlawed all novels in favour of religious and historical texts. Even fiction on religious themes, of which there was a huge outpouring at this time, ‘should be destroyed for the public good as soon as born’.³⁷

Instead Mary Ann filled up her tiny amounts of free time by plunging into biographies of the good and the great, identifying with their struggles while going out of her way to deny any hubris. The experiences of William Wilberforce, the Evangelical reformer who campaigned against slavery, struck an immediate chord: ‘There is a similarity, if I may compare myself with such a man, between his temptations or rather besetments and my own that makes his experience very interesting to me. O that I might be made as useful in my lowly and obscure station as he was in the exalted one assigned to him.’³⁸ Other model lives devoured included John Williams, an obscure dissenting South Seas missionary, and the sentimental Hannah More whose Evangelical pieties were immensely popular in middle-class households. Favoured poets included those twins of religious verse, Cowper and Young.

Although piety was the cloak Mary Ann threw over her intellectual energy, at times the full scope of her ambition peeps through the learned references and pious quotations with which she peppers her letters to Maria Lewis. Her early drive did not dissipate just because she was now at home making cheese. If anything, frustrations about the limitations on her time intensified it. Her letters to Maria Lewis are didactic and pedagogic, anxious to display their superior knowledge. She lectures her former teacher on German pronunciation, recommends books, and generally acts like the older woman’s spiritual and intellectual adviser.

But Mary Ann remained painfully aware that this desire to show off was the result of Ambition, her besetting sin. As a good Evangelical Christian, she should stamp on any impulse to push herself forward – these early letters are full of apologies for egotism, for talking too much about herself, for ‘the frequent use of the personal pronoun’.³⁹ At twenty she was not able to integrate these two sides of her personality – the desire for attention and the wish to surrender the self – and the result is a series of emotionally and tonally uneven letters. A demand for attention from Maria is followed by a humble withdrawal, in which Mary Ann imagines Miss Lewis thinking critically of her and rushes to apologise.

You will think me interminably loquacious, and still worse you will be ready to compare my scribbled sheet to the walls of an Egyptian tomb for mystery, and determine not to imitate certain wise antiquaries or antiquarian wiseacres who ‘waste their precious years, how soon to fail?’ in deciphering information which has only the lichen and moss of age to make it more valuable than the facts graphically conveyed by an upholsterer’s pattern book.⁴⁰

Ironically, the end point of this dance between advance and withdrawal was a dazzling display of learning and verbal dexterity, seen here in the elaborate comparison of her handwriting with Egyptian hieroglyphics. In these bursts of words we begin to see Mary Ann flushed with pleasure as she realises what she is capable of. For if literature was forbidden as sinful, language was somehow another matter. In May 1840 she sings to Maria, ‘I am beguiled by the fascinations that the study of languages has for my capricious mind, and could e’en give myself up to making discoveries in the world of words.’⁴¹ Eighteen months later she crows, ‘I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.’⁴²

These early letters, with their see-sawing between assertion and self-denial, were the crucible in which Eliot’s mature prose style was formed. At this point Mary Ann had very little real sense of her correspondent as a real and separate person with problems of her own. There are a few sympathetic noises when Maria describes a particularly unpleasant row with her employers, but the focus quickly shifts back to Mary Ann. Maria Lewis functioned as a kind of imaginary audience, whose reactions were to be anticipated and described by Mary Ann herself, with no reference to what was really felt or thought.⁴³ This inventing of Miss Lewis’s response to her loquacity is the embryo of a stylistic practice which Eliot was to employ heavily at the beginning of her novel-writing career. In Scenes of Clerical Life, for instance, she often breaks off her narrative to deal with an imaginary reader’s response. Of Mr Gilfil, for instance, ‘You already suspect that the Vicar did not shine in the more spiritual functions of his office.’⁴⁴

The letters to Martha Jackson are different. Martha had attended the Franklin school where she was a pale imitation of Mary Ann, being both clever and ‘serious’ in her religion. Now back at home with her parents, Martha continued to be edgy about Mary Ann’s intellectual superiority. In January 1840 Mary Ann, perhaps anticipating slow progress on the ecclesiastical chart, sent a warning shot to Martha not to tread too closely on her patch. ‘I am right glad to read of your enjoyments … and of your determination to study, though, by the bye, it is hardly fair of you to trench on my field; I shall have you publishing metaphysics before my work is ready, a result of the superior development of a certain region of your brain over that of my poor snailship.’⁴⁵

Even this was not sufficient to deter the thick-skinned Martha, who wrote back demanding a list of every book that Mary Ann was currently reading. Clearly the time had come to sort out questions of pre-eminence once and for all. In her next letter Mary Ann suggested that they should organise their correspondence around a series of set topics, turning their letters into virtual essays. At this point Martha sensibly withdrew from the fray. The next time we hear from her she has taken up the girlish hobby of flower names, rechristening her friends according to their particular characteristics. Mary Ann has been assigned ‘Clematis’ which means ‘mental beauty’. Martha, meanwhile, has become ‘Ivy’ which refers to ‘constancy’ but which, as Mary Ann quickly points out in a letter of 30 July 1840, is also a creeping parasite.⁴⁶

In these letters to Martha, Mary Ann was careful to stress how little time she had for study and so, by implication, how wonderfully she was doing in the circumstances. ‘Pity the sorrows of a poor young housekeeper,’ she intoned on 6 April 1840, ‘and determine to make the very best use of your present freedom therefrom.’ Later, in case Martha had missed the point, she continued, ‘I am conscious of having straitened myself by the adoption of a too varied and laborious set of studies, having so many social duties; otherwise circumstanced I might easily compass them all.’⁴⁷

Competitiveness with Martha aside, Mary Ann’s frustration about the small amount of time available to her was pressing and real. The ecclesiastical chart never got off the ground. Before she was even near to finishing it, another appeared on the market in May 1840. Pretending not to mind, she declared it ‘far superior in conception to mine’ and made a show of recommending it to friends.⁴⁸ The combined duties of housekeeper, hostess, companion and charity worker were so time-consuming that even personal letters could rarely be written at one sitting. ‘I am obliged to take up my letter at any odd moment,’ she wrote to Maria Lewis on 7 November 1838, ‘so you must excuse its being rather a patchwork, or to try to appear learned, a tessellated or mosaic affair.’⁴⁹ And even when she did manage to write, her other life often inscribed itself on the paper: ‘I write with a very tremulous hand as you will perceive; both this and many other defects in my letter are attributable to a very mighty cause – no other than the boiling of currant jelly.’⁵⁰

This rigorous schedule of early mornings and late evenings crammed with private study was by no means unique to Mary Ann Evans. Florence Nightingale was doing the same thing in nearby Lea Hurst. So was Elizabeth Barrett in Wimpole Street. So were hundreds of other nameless middle-class girls who yearned for a life which went beyond the trivialities of the parlour and the store cupboard. What made Mary Ann Evans special was not simply her energy and determination, but also her ability to master a range of subjects far beyond the curriculum of even the best ladies’ seminary. A letter written to Maria Lewis on 4 September 1839 demonstrates both the strengths and limitations of this kind of self-education. Mary Ann’s use of the geological metaphor not only indicates that her reading was now straying beyond the strictly religious, but that she was acquainted with the new scientific discoveries which would soon shake orthodoxy to its core. More immediately, it articulates her secret terror that, without the advantages of a formal education, her reading might lack fruitful cohesion, amounting in the end to nothing more than accumulated junk.

I have lately led so unsettled a life and have been so desultory in my employments, that my mind, never of the most highly organized genus, is more than usually chaotic, or rather it is like a stratum of conglomerated fragments that shews here a jaw and rib of some ponderous quadruped, there a delicate alto-relievo of some fernlike plant, tiny shells, and mysterious nondescripts, encrusted and united with some unvaried and uninteresting but useful stone. My mind presents just such an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern, scraps of poetry picked up from Shakspeare, Cowper, Wordsworth and Milton, newspaper topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry entomology and chemistry, reviews and metaphysics, all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast thickening every day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations.⁵¹

Life at Griff may have been tense between 1838 and 1840, but not enough to explain the constant depressions and headaches which dogged Mary Ann. In her letters to Maria Lewis, who was in the genuinely stressful position of working and living with people who did not value her, she complains constantly of ‘low’ spirits and whole days lost in generalised unwellness. This was the beginning of a set of symptoms that was to plague her for the next forty years, becoming particularly acute whenever she was wrestling with her writing. Whole years of her life – 1862 and 1865 stand out especially – were lost to misery and migraine as she battled with Romola, The Spanish Gypsy and Felix Holt, The Radical.

At the age of twenty Mary Ann Evans was not to embark on her novel writing for another decade and a half. But the sickness and despair suggest that she was already engaged in a bitter struggle with a part of herself which insisted on expression. During these dull, miserable years she fought to overcome an overwhelming and ill-defined sense of destiny which she placed under that pejorative umbrella ‘Ambition’. The letter to Elizabeth Evans in March 1839 shows that she already had some inkling that much of her religiosity was nothing more than the desire to stand well in the world. But when she turned to the possibility of a more active kind of achievement, of the sort represented in the biographies she loved to read, she was brought up short by the lack of possibilities open to her. When in 1841 she moved to Coventry with her father, the delighted Misses Franklin introduced her to their accomplished friends ‘not only as a marvel of mental power, but also as a person “sure to get something up very soon in the way of a clothing-club or other charitable undertaking”’.⁵² This, baldly put, was the full scope of activity open to the prosperous, accomplished middle-class girl. Unlike the Franklins themselves, Mary Ann could not even find a vocation in teaching. The universities and professions were not open to her. Surely the cleverest, saintliest girl in the school could not be expected to spend her life getting up a clothing club?

Writing was one possibility. In the previous generation respectable women like Jane Austen and Hannah More had found success. No particular qualification was needed, and there was the great advantage that you could write at home, well away from the market-place in which no lady could be seen to participate. From her earliest years Mary Ann had toyed with the idea that her destiny might be literary. An anecdote from her childhood has her so entranced by Scott’s Waverley that she commits a large chunk of it to heart.⁵³ Her surviving school notebook from around the age of fifteen contains the beginnings of a novel, ‘Edward Neville’, clumsily modelled on the work of G. P. R. James, who produced a series of poor-man’s-Scott historical fictions during the 1830s.⁵⁴ The abandoned ecclesiastical chart, no matter how pious its origins, also suggests a pull towards publication. And in January 1840 Mary Ann finally achieved her dream of seeing her work in print. ‘As o’er the fields’, a poetic leave-taking of the earth and its pleasures as the speaker prepares for heaven, was accepted by the Christian Observer.

The novel, the chart and the poem all represent different kinds of writing which Mary Ann was trying on for size. Her attempts at the last two were easier for her conscience to accommodate, being mandated by her strict faith. The idea of writing fiction was still too dangerous. It involved dissolving into the imaginative state which she had identified as so perilous to the serious Christian searching for salvation. In the celebrated letter of 16 March 1839 which posterity has always found so wry Mary Ann tells Maria Lewis that her early and undisciplined passion for novels has ‘contaminated’ her with ‘mental diseases’ which ‘I shall carry to my grave’.

The same see-sawing between desire and repression, joy and rage, was apparent in her ambivalent relationship with music during these years. Although she continued to have private piano lessons and to play for her father, opportunities for performing in front of others were few. Now Mary Ann adopted a censorious attitude towards those who allowed themselves the pleasure of demonstrating their talent. In another pompous letter to Maria Lewis, written 6–8 November 1838, she reports that she recently attended an oratorio at Coventry and hated every minute of it. ‘I am a tasteless person but it would not cost me any regrets if the only music heard in our land were that of strict worship, nor can I think a pleasure that involves the devotion of all the time and powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an expertness in so useless (at least in ninety nine cases out of a hundred) an accomplishment can be quite pure or elevating in its tendency.’⁵⁵ This reads strangely from a girl who in later life was to derive such pleasure from music and who would explore the nature of performance and artistry, especially for women, in Daniel Deronda. The ludicrous insistence that she has no ear for music and takes no pleasure in its secular uses suggests that exactly the opposite is the case. Just as in the earlier letter she fought against the recognition that she would like to write a novel and had already tried to do so, here she struggles with her desire to return to the days when she dominated the Franklins’ drawing-room with her piano playing.

At times this battle against love, beauty and imagination became too much. When, in March 1840, desire threatened to press in on Mary Ann from all sides, she broke down completely. Shortly after arriving at a party given by an old family friend she realised that ‘I was not in a situation to maintain the Protestant character of the true Christian’ and decided to distance herself. Standing sternly in the corner, she looked on from the sidelines while the other guests danced, chatted and flirted. Battling with an urge to surrender to the rhythm of the music and also, perhaps, to be the centre of attention, she took refuge first in a headache, then in an attack of screaming hysterics ‘so that I regularly disgraced myself’.⁵⁶

The fact that Mary Ann repeated the story in a letter to Maria Lewis suggests that, far from feeling embarrassed by the incident, she was secretly delighted. As she saw it, her shouting and weeping attested to her holiness. For her hostess, the ‘extremely kind’ Mrs Bull, it probably suggested something quite different. Here, clearly, was a young woman in deep distress. As Mary Ann was no longer able to hold together the two parts of herself, the saint and the ambitious dreamer, something would surely have to give.