Читать книгу George Eliot: The Last Victorian - Kathryn Hughes - Страница 8

FROM NOW ON Mary Ann spent every free moment with the Brays. Although Rosehill was less than a mile from Bird Grove, the contrast could hardly have been greater. While the Evans household was conservative, conventional and nominally devout, the Brays’ was radical, avant-garde and truth-seeking. Here was the perfect atmosphere for Mary Ann to explore her new beliefs and the emotional release that came with them.

At the time Mary Ann first went to Rosehill Charles Bray was at the height of his reforming zeal. Prosperous, young and boundlessly energetic, he pursued a bundle of good and forward-thinking causes in the city and beyond. A passionate advocate of non-sectarian education, he built a school for children from dissenting families who had been excluded from Anglican institutions. He campaigned for sanitary reform and set up a public dispensary. He ran an anti-Corn Law campaign. Other projects were more visionary than feasible. He built a teetotal Working Men’s Club to lure labourers away from pubs, set up an allotment scheme so that they could produce their own food and established a co-operative store to undercut local shop prices. Unfortunately, the working classes of Coventry did not share Bray’s ideas about how they should live. Both the club and the gardening scheme failed through lack of support, while the store was forced to close by local shopkeepers determined to retain their monopoly.

Bray’s generosity and intellectual open-mindedness – many called it sloppiness – meant that he attracted friends easily. Rosehill had quickly become established as the place where any visiting reformer, philosopher or thinker could be assured of a warm welcome. Indeed, said Bray in the puffed-up autobiography he wrote at the end of his life, anyone who ‘was supposed to be a “little cracked”, was sent up to Rosehill’.¹ During these years Mary Ann met virtually everyone who was anyone in free-thinking, progressive society. The socialist Robert Owen, the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mental health reformer Dr John Conolly were just a few of the people who took their turn sitting on the bear rug which the Brays spread out in the garden every summer. Here, under a favourite acacia tree, they spent long afternoons in vigorous debate, intellectual gossip and various degrees of flirtation.

For just as the Brays challenged conventional thinking in every area of life, so their attitudes to marriage and sexual love were markedly unorthodox. Nor was this openness confined to daring chat. As people who thought deep and hard about how to live, they had come to the conclusion that the monogamy demanded by the marriage vows did not suit human nature, or at least did not suit theirs. Although enduringly attached to one another, both had taken long-term lovers.

Just how this arrangement had come about, and how openly it was acknowledged by others, is obscured by the reticence which the couple were obliged to observe in order to remain active in Coventry public life. Indeed, the main account of their irregular marriage was written down in code and not untangled until the 1970s. The stenographer was the phrenologist George Combe, who examined Bray’s head for lumps and bumps in 1851 and concluded that his ‘animal’ qualities were impressively predominant. Probing further, Combe extracted the following confession from his friend: ‘At twelve years of age he was seduced by his father’s Cook and indulged extensively in illicit intercourse with women. He abstained from 18 to 22 but suffered in health. He married and his wife has no children. He consoled himself with another woman by whom he had a daughter. He adopted his child with his wife’s consent and she now lives with him. He still keeps the mother of the child and has another by her.’²

This makes sense of some odd references in Mary Ann’s letters to Cara Bray during May 1845. Writing from Coventry to her friend on holiday in Hastings, Mary Ann says reassuringly, ‘Of Baby you shall hear to-morrow, but do not be alarmed.’³ A couple of days later she writes, ‘The Baby is quite well and not at all triste on account of the absence of Papa and Mamma.’⁴ Whoever this baby was, it did not last long at Rosehill. A month later an entry in Cara’s diary suggests that the baby was removed from the household. Clearly this first attempt at adoption had not worked out. Baby’s real mother may have wanted her back or perhaps Cara, while dedicated to young children through her teaching and writing, did not take to this particular infant. An attempt the following year with another baby, sister of the first, was successful and this time the Brays adopted Elinor, known as Nelly. Over the years Mary Ann became attached to the girl and when news of her early death came in 1865 it touched her deeply.

The fact that the first baby had been returned to its mother suggests that the Brays’ family life did not run as rationally or smoothly as Charles liked to believe. Although the details are sketchy, it appears that for a time he tried to get the children’s mother, Hannah Steane, to live at Rosehill as nursemaid. One version has Cara accepting this, but changing her mind when Hannah produced an illegitimate son, named Charles after his father. Henceforth Hannah, now reincarnated as Mrs Charles Gray, wife of a conveniently absent travelling salesman, was established in a nearby house – into which Bray could slip discreetly – with her growing family, five excluding Nelly.⁵

Cara’s answering love affair was more circumspect. According to a gossipy report from her sister-in-law in 1851, ‘Mrs Bray is and has been for years decidedly in love with Mr Noel, and … Mr Bray promotes her wish that Mr Noel should visit Rosehill as much as possible.’ Edward Noel was an illegitimate cousin of Byron’s wife, a poet, translator and owner of an estate on a Greek island. He was also married with a family. Whether he and Cara became physically intimate is not clear: one version maintains this was an unreciprocated passion. All the same, once Noel’s wife died from consumption in 1845, the way was clear for him to become a familiar fixture on the edge of Rosehill life.⁶

The Brays’ was the first of three sexually unconventional households which had a great impact on the young Mary Ann, whose romantic experience at this point was confined to a crush on her language teacher. Later she would find herself in a curious ménage à quatre with John Chapman, the publisher with whom she boarded in London during the early 1850s. And her subsequent dilemma over whether to live with George Henry Lewes was the result of his inability to divorce on the grounds that he had condoned his wife’s affair with another man.

It would be good to think that these open marriages were founded on a principled rejection of the ownership of one person by another, and in particular of women by men, of the kind which John Stuart Mill would set out in The Subjection of Women in 1869. But in fact there was more than a whiff of male sexual opportunism and hypocrisy about the various set-ups. Charles Bray, after all, maintained in public that ‘Matrimony is the law of our being, and it is in that state that Amativeness comes into its proper use and action, and is the least likely to be indulged in excess’,⁷ yet he did not confine himself to adultery with Hannah. There were rumours that ‘the Don Juan of Coventry’ had previously enjoyed an affair with Mary Hennell, one of Cara’s elder sisters. And there was even a suggestion that he and Mary Ann became lovers at some point. Certainly Maria Lewis objected to the way the two clung together and Sara Hennell admitted after Mary Ann’s death that she had always disapproved of the girl depending too much on male affection – perhaps specifically on the affection of her brother-in-law.⁸ Bessie Rayner Parkes, who was later to become one of Mary Ann’s best friends in London, certainly always believed that Mary Ann and Charles Bray had been lovers.⁹

Cara Bray, too, was inconsistent on the question of marital fidelity. Although she allowed her husband to have affairs and was herself at least emotionally intimate with Edward Noel, she reacted with Mrs Grundy-ish horror when Mary Ann went to live with George Henry Lewes in 1854. For five years she refused to communicate properly with her friend, let alone to see her. That a woman as progressive and principled as Cara should display such embarrassed confusion over sex outside marriage is a reminder of how deeply entrenched were codes of respectable behaviour – especially female behaviour – in even the most liberal Victorian circles.

Although the Brays’ attitude could seem contradictory, in other lights it was subtle and realistic. Just as Mary Ann had learned during the holy war that spectacular rebellion is often the result of wilful egotism, so the Brays realised that there was little to be gained by publicly embracing the open relationships advocated by their friend the socialist Utopian Robert Owen. They preferred to remain within society and work for its improvement, rather than withdraw to an isolated and principled position on its margins. Whether the world thought them scandalous or hypocritical did not concern them. It was this example of adherence to a complex inner necessity, regardless of how one’s behaviour might be interpreted, which Mary Ann now absorbed. It would stand her in good stead in the years to come when she lived with Lewes and, on his death, went through an Anglican marriage service with John Cross. Her apparent inconsistency bewildered family and friends. Isaac Evans was scandalised by the union with Lewes, but appeased by the marriage to Cross. Her old friend Maria Congreve, on the other hand, was serene about Lewes, but disappointed by what she perceived to be the hypocrisy of the 1880 wedding service. In these apparent switches of principle Mary Ann demonstrated her determination to live flexibly according to the fluctuations of her own inner life rather than in observance of other people’s needs and rules.

Whether Mary Ann actually had a physical relationship with Charles Bray remains frustratingly unclear. The fact that all her letters to him prior to 1848 have disappeared suggests that they were at least emotionally intimate and that someone wanted the evidence destroyed. But even if they were lovers, it was more than a sexual affair that was responsible for the blossoming of Mary Ann’s personality during these Rosehill years. The loving acceptance of Cara Bray and the intellectual companionship of Sara Hennell gave her a sense of being wanted – the first she had experienced since those early days with Isaac. Her young neighbour, Mary Sibree, recalled that ‘Mr and Mrs Bray and Miss Hennell, with their friends, were her world, and on my saying to her once, as we closed the garden door [at Rosehill] together, that we seemed to be entering a Paradise, she said, “I do indeed feel that I shut the world out when I shut that door.”’ ¹⁰

This new happiness permeated every part of Mary Ann’s being. Now she played the piano and sang in front of other people without bursting into tears. Instead of refusing to read novels, she argued for them on the grounds that ‘they perform an office for the mind which nothing else can’.¹¹ She relaxed sufficiently about her appearance to allow Cara to paint her portrait – a sweet, flattering water-colour which fooled no one and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.¹² She accompanied the Brays on holidays to other parts of the country and became a favourite with the friends and family they visited on the way.

With Mary Ann soaking up every new subject which the Brays pushed her way, it was inevitable that she should become interested in phrenology. The practice of bump-reading might seem like so much mumbo-jumbo now, but during the mid-nineteenth century it held considerable appeal for those who were trying to make connections between man’s physical constitution and his psychological processes. During a trip to London in July 1844 Charles Bray persuaded Mary Ann to have a cast made of her head – luckily it was no longer necessary to have one’s hair shaved off – and set about analysing its shape. Writing at the end of his life, and after hers, Bray naturally relied on post hoc knowledge to give his findings extra bite. In the following extract from his autobiography he creeps from phrenological ‘fact’ to interpretations of Mary Ann’s subsequent behaviour.

In the Feelings, the Animal and Moral regions are about equal; the moral being quite sufficient to keep the animal in order and in due subservience, but would not be spontaneously active. The social feelings were very active, particularly the adhesiveness. She was of a most affectionate disposition, always requiring some one 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.¹³

As Mary Ann’s willingness to contemplate phrenology suggests, her intellectual relationship with others softened during this period. During the high drama of the holy war, the competitive Evangelical had given way to the combative free-thinker. Now, during the 1840s, Mary Ann began the long journey towards empathy and tolerance which was to mark the mature narrative voice of George Eliot. A passage from Bray’s autobiography describes her at the very beginning of this bumpy process.

I consider her the most delightful companion I have ever known; she knew everything. She had little self-assertion; her aim was always to show her friends off to the best advantage – not herself. She would polish up their witticisms, and give them the full credit of them. But there were two sides; hers was the temperament of genius which has always its sunny and shady side. She was frequently very depressed – and often very provoking, as much so as she could be agreeable – and we had violent quarrels; but the next day, or whenever we met, they were quite forgotten, and no allusions made to them.¹⁴

Increasingly Mary Ann was able to move beyond these violent reactions and come to rest in a position of disciplined tolerance towards others. This was particularly true in matters of faith. In the immediate aftermath of the holy war Mrs Sibree had been doubtful about letting Mary Sibree take German lessons from Mary Ann in case the older girl should unsettle her daughter’s religious beliefs. Mr Sibree, however, did not ‘see any danger’ and the lessons began on Saturday afternoons. During these Mary Ann was always careful to steer clear of theological discussion, to the disappointment of Mary who tried to provoke the infamous Miss Evans into saying something controversial. Every time Mary tried to steer the conversation round to a dangerous topic, Mary Ann countered with a gentle reminder of ‘the positive immorality of frittering … [time] away in ill-natured or in poor profitless talk’. On one occasion the sixteen-year-old girl announced provocatively ‘how sure I was that there could be no true morality without evangelical belief. “Oh, it is so, is it?” she [Mary Ann] said, with the kindest smile, and nothing further passed.’¹⁵

Mary Ann’s deflective comments concealed the kernel of her argument with organised religion. In a letter of 3 August 1842 she told the Revd Francis Watts, one of the men who had tried to argue her out of infidelity, that feeling obliged to serve humanity out of a sense of duty and fear of punishment worked against ‘that choice of the good for its own sake, that answers my ideal’.¹⁶ Now that she was no longer burdened with having to save her soul through conspicuous good works, Mary Ann was able to concentrate on what really needed to be done. Finding that she was unsuited to some kinds of philanthropy – an attempt to help Cara at the infants’ school had not been a success – she thought carefully about how she could be most useful. Often this turned out to be as inglorious as making a direct financial contribution. When one of the Sibrees’ servants became burdened with the responsibility for newly orphaned nephews and nieces, she offered to pay for the care and education of ‘a chubby-faced little girl four or five years of age’.¹⁷ Again, she contributed two guineas to the Industrial Home for young women for which Mrs Sibree was collecting funds. ‘I tell of this’, says Mary Sibree, writing after Mary Ann’s death, ‘as one among many indications of Miss Evans’s ever-growing zeal to serve humanity in a broader way, motivated as she felt by a higher aim than what she termed “desire to save one’s soul by making up coarse flannel for the poor”.’¹⁸

Other people sensed this expansion in Mary Ann’s inner life and responded accordingly. No longer a chilly saint to be revered and avoided, she was approached by friends and servants who now came to her with their problems, ‘to an extent’, remembered Mary Sibree, ‘that quite oppressed her’.¹⁹ It was a phenomenon which was to last the rest of her life. Seven years later, when she was staying alone in a Geneva pension, she found herself a magnet for every lonely or anxious guest who needed someone to talk to. Twenty years on she was regularly besieged in letter and in person by men and women from around the world who were convinced that she, and she alone, could understand their story.

Thanks to growing family pressure, Mary Sibree had little contact with Mary Ann over the next few decades. But in 1873, as Mrs John Cash, wife of a prosperous manufacturer and the new mistress of Rosehill, she visited the woman who was now known as Marian Lewes in London. ‘It touched me deeply to find how much she had retained of her kind interest in all that concerned me and mine, and I remarked on this to Mr Lewes, who came to the door with my daughter and myself at parting. “Wonderful sympathy,” I said. “Is it not?” said he; and when I added, inquiringly, “The power lies there?” “Unquestionably it does,” was his answer.’²⁰

Mary Ann spent her first day home after the holy war at Rosehill reading letters which Charles Hennell had written to his sister Cara while working on An Inquiry. It was not just intellectual curiosity that made the experience so delightful. The fact that Hennell had responded to his sister’s religious doubts by devoting two years of his hard-pressed time to produce this magnificent piece of work resonated deep within Mary Ann. Her own brother Isaac had met his sister’s crisis of conscience with coldness, calculation and a complete lack of understanding. Charles Hennell, by contrast, seemed to have all the qualities desirable in an ideal brother – lover.

So it was painful to learn that he was already in love with someone else. Elizabeth Rebecca Brabant was the talented daughter of an intellectually minded doctor whose patients had included Thomas Moore and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, she got her nickname – ‘Rufa’ – from some verses the latter had written about her striking red hair. Dr Robert Brabant had taught himself German in order to study the work of eminent theologians such as David Friedrich Strauss, who had done so much to reveal the man-made origins of the Bible. In 1839 Dr Brabant was an inevitable early reader of Charles Hennell’s An Inquiry, which reached many of the same conclusions as Strauss. Delighted by the book, Brabant invited its author to his home in Devizes. Hennell, in turn, was enchanted by Rufa Brabant, to whom he quickly proposed. The good doctor, however, opposed the match when he examined the young man and found him to be consumptive. It is hard, now, to conceive the terror that tuberculosis generated a hundred and fifty years ago: the nearest analogy might be to finding that one has a slow-growing malignant tumour. The young couple agreed not to see each other but, by way of continuing their relationship, Rufa undertook to translate Strauss’s most important book, Das Leben Jesu (1835–6), for her suitor. Remarkably, Hennell, who did not know German, had written An Inquiry without detailed knowledge of its contents.

When Rufa arrived in Coventry to visit the Brays in October 1842 it was inevitable that Mary Ann would not like her. All the more so when Charles Hennell turned up the next day, presumably against Dr Brabant’s wishes. Rufa not only had the kind of hair which inspired poets, she read German theology in the original and enjoyed the love of a kind, clever man. However, during the next three weeks Mary Ann was able to draw on the emotional discipline which was eventually to become an integrated part of her personality. Writing to Sara Hennell on 3 November, she admits that her first impression of Rufa ‘was unfavourable and unjust, for in spite of what some caustic people may say, I fall not in love with everyone’. On further acquaintance, she is happy to report: ‘I admire your friend exceedingly; there is a tender seriousness about her that is very much to my taste, and thorough amiability and retiredness, all which qualities make her almost worthy of Mr Hennell.’²¹

There followed a tricky nine months during which events conspired to push Mary Ann and the officially unengaged Charles Hennell together. In March 1843 he turned up at Rosehill for a fortnight. In May he accompanied her and the Brays on a visit to Malvern. In July things came to a painful head when the same party, this time supplemented by Rufa, took a longer trip to Wales. During a ten-day stay in Tenby, Rufa badgered Mary Ann into attending a ball at the pavilion. Excruciatingly, no one asked her to dance. Doubtless Rufa was trying to be kind, but the news that she had resumed her engagement to Charles Hennell, this time with her father’s approval, only pointed up the differences between the two young women. Both were clever and serious. But one was pretty and well connected and the other was not. And it was Rufa, with her magnificent hair and a pedigree rooted in the intellectual middle classes, who had bagged Charles Hennell.

There was a consolation prize of sorts. Mary Ann was to be a bridesmaid at the wedding, which took place on 1 November in London. The service was conducted by the country’s leading Unitarian minister, William Johnson Fox, at the Finsbury Chapel. Escorted by Charles Bray, Mary Ann spent a week in London, staying with Sara Hennell, who lived with her mother in Hackney. When she had previously visited the city in 1838 with Isaac, it had been during the height of her Evangelical phase. The gloomy teenager who had glowered at the suggestion of a trip to the theatre had been replaced by a young woman eager to pack as many cultural experiences as possible into the time available. But despite the fun and bustle, Mary Ann was still feeling left out and left behind by the Brabant – Hennell marriage. This was her third time as a bridesmaid and it was hard to imagine that it would ever be her turn to enjoy the loving attention which other women seemed to claim by right. So in these dispiriting circumstances it was delightful to receive an invitation from Rufa’s father, asking her to accompany him home to Devizes for a holiday. She had first met the sixty-two-year-old Dr Brabant when he had joined the Brays’ party in Wales and, persuaded by the fact that Rufa had come into some money, had given permission for the young couple to marry. If she could not have Charles Hennell as a brother – lover, then perhaps she might claim Robert Brabant as a more congenial substitute for the still disapproving and distant Robert Evans.

Luckily, Dr Brabant was ripe for the role in which he had been cast. He begged Mary Ann to consider Devizes her home for as long as she was deprived of a permanent arrangement in Warwickshire. Even now, eighteen months after the holy war, Isaac and Robert Evans were still making noises about moving Mary Ann back to the country. To have a charming, educated older man telling her that she must consider his library as her particular domain must have been intoxicating. She responded eagerly to his attentions, rapturously boasting in a letter to Cara that her host had christened her ‘Deutera, which means second and sounds a little like daughter’.²² Her next letter, on 20 November, continues in the same breathless vein. ‘I am in a little heaven here, Dr. Brabant being its archangel … time would fail me to tell of all his charming qualities. We read, walk and talk together, and I am never weary of his company.’²³ She wrote to her father asking him if she could extend her stay to 13 December.

Not everyone in the Devizes household shared Mary Ann’s view of paradise, especially Dr Brabant’s wife and her sister. The latter, Miss Susan Hughes, had alerted Mrs Brabant, who was blind, to the fact that Miss Evans was permanently entwined with the doctor. Mrs Brabant immediately wrote to Rufa to ask her to tear herself away from her new husband and come down to Devizes to see if she could calm her over-ardent friend. Rufa in turn told her sister-in-law Cara what was going on and begged her to caution Mary Ann by letter about her behaviour. Miss Hughes, meanwhile, took the most direct path by advising Mary Ann on the train times home, three weeks before her proposed departure.

Mary Ann was too enraptured to take the hint. She insisted on extending her stay and when Cara wrote warning her to beware of Dr Brabant, she snapped back, ‘He really is a finer character than you think.’²⁴ The time had come for Mrs Brabant, whom Mary Ann had previously described as ‘perfectly polite’, to put her foot down. She demanded that Mary Ann depart immediately, a fortnight early, and swore that if she were ever to return then she, Mrs Brabant, would leave at once. It would be nice to report that the ‘archangel’ intervened and stood up for his ‘Deutera’. In fact, according to John Chapman paraphrasing Rufa in 1851, Dr Brabant ‘acted ungenerously and worse, towards Miss E. for though he was the chief cause of all that passed, he acted towards her as though … the fault lay with her alone’.²⁵

The roots of the Devizes crisis went deeper than the emotional topsoil turned over by the wedding. Mary Ann was probably not the first, and certainly would not be the last, young woman towards whom Brabant was over-familiar. In 1885 her cattiest literary rival, Eliza Lynn, told Herbert Spencer that she too had received advances from Dr Brabant during a visit to Devizes in 1847. Never missing an opportunity to snipe, Lynn expressed amazement that Miss Evans could bear to encourage Dr Brabant, who she declared was ‘more antipathetic than any man I have ever known … his love-making purely disgusting’.²⁶

Nor was this the first time that Mary Ann had let an intellectual rapport with an older man overstep the mark. The Revd Francis Watts, a friend of the Sibrees, had been one of the subtle thinkers enlisted to persuade Mary Ann back into the fold during the holy war. Although unsuccessful, he admitted to Mrs Sibree that Miss Evans had ‘awakened deep interest in his own mind, as much by the earnestness which characterised her inquiries as by her exceptional attainments’.²⁷ Mary Ann was equally taken with the Revd Watts. In a pattern which was to be repeated several times over the next decade, she used her intellect to keep a clever, unavailable man interested in her. While still in exile at Griff she had written to Watts suggesting that he oversee her translation of Vinet’s Mémoire en faveur de la Liberté des Cultes. With its proposition that man’s capacity for goodness is not dependent on his belief in an afterlife, Vinet’s book lay at the heart of her new beliefs. Enclosing a sample of her translation, she courted Watts in language which set abject humility alongside flirtatious presumption: ‘I venture to send you an échantillon that you may judge whether I should be in danger of wofully travestying Vinet’s style, and if you approve of my project I shall be delighted if you will become foster-father to the work, and arrange for its publication.’²⁸

A second letter, nearly three months later, makes it clear that it is Watts’s interest in her, rather than hers in Vinet, which makes the project meaningful to her. ‘I shall proceed con amore now that you encourage me to hope for the publication of the memoir. I confess my spirits were flagging at the idea of translating four hundred pages to no purpose.’ And then in a curiously oblique manner she continues: ‘A friend has given some admonitions that led me to fear I have misrepresented myself by my manner … It gives me much pain to think that you should have received such an impression, and I entreat you to believe that the remembrance of you, your words and looks calls up, I will not say humble, but self-depreciating reflections and lively gratitude.’²⁹

Watts must have been sufficiently reassured by Mary Ann’s acknowledgement of her over-familiarity to continue his involvement in the project throughout the autumn of 1842. However, a letter received in December sounded warning bells again. Writing to acknowledge the receipt of some books he had lent her, Mary Ann gushed, ‘I beg you to understand that I consider myself your translator and the publication as yours, and that my compensation will be any good that may be effected by the work, and the pleasure of being linked to your remembrance.’³⁰

Now Watts had no choice but to acknowledge that Mary Ann’s interest in Vinet arose out of her deep feelings for him. Panicked by the implications, he withdrew from the project and the correspondence, claiming busyness and possibly family illness as an excuse. The next thing we hear is that Mary Ann is returning his books and has given up on Vinet with the strange explanation that she has started translating ‘a part of Spinoza’s works for a friend’.³¹ In fact, the friend was Cara and, far from begging Mary Ann to start work on it, Cara had wanted to do it herself, telling her sister Sara: ‘I grieved to let Mary Ann carry it off, for I am sure I could understand his [Spinoza’s] Latin better than her English; but it would disappoint her.’³²

In truth, Mary Ann had embarked on Spinoza as a face-saving device, a way of rejecting Watts as surely as he had rejected her. It was a tactic she was to use in the even more embarrassing case of Dr Brabant, at whose suggestion the Spinoza translation was being done. Her last letter written from Devizes on 30 November 1843, a couple of days before her departure, gives the impression to Cara, who knew otherwise, that she is leaving on her own terms. She talks of her ‘grief at parting with my precious friends’, but makes no specific reference to the man who had previously been the epicentre of her correspondence.³³

From the moment she returned to Coventry Mary Ann adopted an attitude of studied condescension about Dr Brabant, referring to him in public as if he were a ridiculous pest. Yet she could never quite bear to bring the relationship to a decisive close. Following the Devizes débâcle the archangel and his Deutera did not communicate for three years. However, when in 1846 Mary Ann finished the translation of Strauss, which she had taken over from Rufa, she could not resist sending Brabant a bound copy. Perhaps she wanted to show him that his second daughter could manage a piece of work which exceeded anything his first might have managed. The appearance of Miss Evans’s parcel ruffled a few feathers in Devizes, and Sara Hennell was immediately asked to find out exactly what was going on. Mary Ann responded to her enquiry with defensive loftiness: ‘Pray convince her [Rufa] and every one concerned … that I am too inflatedly conceited to think it worth my while to run after Dr. Brabant or his correspondence.’ It is true, she admits, that she has initiated contact with him, but ‘as a favour conferred by me rather than received’. And in case this should seem too obviously at odds with known history, she qualifies this with, ‘If I ever offered incense to him it was because there was no other deity at hand and because I wanted some kind of worship pour passer le temps.’³⁴

Over the next few years Mary Ann kept up this slighting tone towards the doctor. In February 1847 when she wanted to return his copy of Spinoza to him – the one she had started translating instead of Vinet – she imagined hurling it towards Devizes so that it would leave ‘its mark somewhere above Dr. B’s ear’.³⁵

Brabant, by contrast, was unencumbered by embarrassed feelings and continued to display jaunty self-possession in his dealings with Mary Ann. In August of that year Sara reported that Mary Ann had received ‘a most affectionate invitation from Dr. B. a few days ago to go to Germany with him!’³⁶ Although there would have been others in the party, Mary Ann refused. Starting up a correspondence with the archangel was one thing, reliving the embarrassment of the Devizes episode quite another.

Still, the good doctor refused to disappear completely. Whenever he was in town he stayed at 142 The Strand, the Chapmans’ boarding-house where Mary Ann lodged during the early 1850s. On one such occasion when their paths crossed Mary Ann informed Cara that the ‘house is only just exorcised of Dr. Brabant’, as if he were a nasty smell.³⁷ Yet the very next day she wrote appreciatively of the doctor’s visit to Charles Bray, mentioning that he had taken her ‘very politely’ on an excursion to Crystal Palace, as well as the theatre.³⁸

Brabant’s most celebrated reappearance in Mary Ann’s life was in the shape of Edward Casaubon, the pedantic, ineffectual scholar of Middlemarch. For all Brabant’s bustling endeavour, he never actually managed to sustain any piece of intellectual work. According to Eliza Lynn, Brabant ‘used up his literary energies in thought and desire to do rather than in actual doing, and [his] fastidiousness made his work something like Penelope’s web. Ever writing and rewriting, correcting and destroying, he never got farther than the introductory chapter of a book which he intended to be epoch-making, and the final destroyer of superstition and theological dogma.’³⁹

Mary Ann saw for herself just how ineffectual Brabant really was when, at the beginning of 1844, she took over Rufa’s translation of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu. The new Mrs Hennell had found the work too onerous to combine with married life and suggested to her sister-in-law Sara that Mary Ann might like to step in. This was a delicate situation. Having watched Rufa carry off Charles Hennell, was Mary Ann being offered her cast-off translation as some kind of compensation? If this suspicion did go through her mind, Cara and Sara surely pressed her to set it to one side. They were both aware of how desperately she needed a substantial piece of work to stretch and exhaust a mind prone to pull itself to pieces. Mary Ann’s previous attempts at sustained intellectual work – the ecclesiastical chart, the translation of Vinet – had faltered through her own failure to get started. At the end of her life she told John Cross of her ‘absolute despair’ at this point of achieving anything.⁴⁰ The big attraction of the Strauss was that the translation was already commissioned – by the Radical MP Joseph Parkes – so there would be an external authority driving her to complete the project.

On taking up Strauss, Mary Ann asked Dr Brabant, via Sara Hennell, for some work he was rumoured to have done already on the concluding section. When the translation finally arrived it turned out, true to form, to be scrappy and incomplete. In any case, Mary Ann soon realised that trying to follow someone else’s translation was ‘like hearing another piano going just a note before you in the same tune you are playing’.⁴¹ Putting aside the doctor’s jottings, she started again from scratch.

Translating Strauss was to dominate her life for the next two years. Unable to concentrate for more than four hours a day, she evolved the method she was to follow when writing fiction of working from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. This meant that she managed to cover about six pages of Strauss a day. Sara, who had turned down the translation before it had been offered to Rufa, agreed to act as Mary Ann’s editor. Letters went back and forth between London and Coventry discussing various points of translation as they arose. When a section of the work was completed, Mary Ann mailed it to Sara to read through and check against the original. This reliance on the post caused constant worries about late and non-arriving packages. ‘I sent a parcel of MS to you on Friday. Have you received it? I thought I should have heard that it had arrived safely when you sent the proof,’ was a typically anxious communication between Mary Ann and Sara during a particularly difficult stretch.⁴²

The translation was a remarkably difficult piece of work, which would have taxed the most scholarly, university-educated brain. There were fifteen hundred pages of what Mary Ann described despairingly as ‘leathery’ German, with many quotations in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. At times it was only Sara’s brisk enthusiasm that kept her going: ‘Thank you for the encouragement you sent me – I only need it when my head is weak and I am unable to do much.’⁴³ Even more tricky than finding literal meaning was the teasing out of nuance. Was it ‘Sacrament’ or ‘The Sacrament’? Was ‘Dogmatism’ quite what Strauss meant by ‘das Dogma’?⁴⁴ And then there were pedantic, Rebecca Franklin-ish bickerings about English. Was ‘as though’ as good as ‘as if’? Was it ‘finally’ or ‘lastly’?⁴⁵

Although the title of the work was The Life of Jesus, it is the subtitle – Critically Examined – which provides the key to Strauss’s methodology. He takes each episode in the life of Jesus, as told in the four Gospels, and shows how it ‘may be considered not as the expression of a fact, but as the product of an idea of his earliest followers’.⁴⁶ Steeped in the Jewish tradition of the returning Messiah, Jesus’s disciples shaped their understanding of their master’s life to fit inherited expectations. Strauss’s aim was to unpick that process and show how the ‘historical’ Jesus had been created out of a series of Evangelical ‘mythi’.

There was nothing in Strauss that was new or strange to Mary Ann. She had long since come to the conclusion that Jesus was a gifted human teacher and not the Son of God. However, she did worry about the theologian’s relentlessly totalitarianising approach, which insisted on subsuming inconvenient exceptions into the arc of his narrative. ‘I am never pained when I think Strauss right,’ she wrote in the autumn of 1845, ‘but in many cases I think him wrong, as every man must be in working out into detail an idea which has general truth, but is only one element in a perfect theory, not a perfect theory in itself.’⁴⁷ The crucifixion was a case in point. Strauss had to concede that the Jews’ expectations of the Messiah did not include one who was to suffer and die, let alone rise again. So where did this part of the Gospel narrative come from? Strauss was obliged to conclude weakly that ‘Jesus Himself may have reached the conclusion of the necessity of his death … or the whole idea might have been added after his death.’⁴⁸

It was this stripping away of all that was ‘miraculous and highly improbable’ from the Gospels which oppressed Mary Ann the deeper she went into Das Leben Jesu. All her life she had read the Bible not simply as the revelation of God, but as the metaphorical language of her own experience. The quotations in her letters to Maria Lewis were not just for pious show, but a way of describing complex inner states. To be robbed of that language – for that is what she experienced Strauss as doing – was to be deprived of a vital part of herself. Her disillusionment with Das Leben Jesu became particularly acute at the beginning of 1846, when she tackled the detailed analysis of the crucifixion and resurrection. Describing herself as ‘Strauss-sick’, she fled to Rosehill, avoiding the first-floor study at Bird Grove, where she was supposed to be getting on with her work. She was, reported Cara in a letter to Sara, deathly pale and suffering from dreadful headaches.⁴⁹ To pull herself through this Slough of Despond she placed a cast of the Risen Christ together with an engraving in a prominent place by her desk. This was her way of reasserting the mystery and hopeful joy of the New Testament narratives which continued to sustain her long after she had given up orthodox Christianity.

Once the work was finished, except for routine worries over proofs, Mary Ann’s spirits began to rise. At the end of May 1846 she headed off to see Sara in London with the promise that ‘we will be merry and sad, wise and nonsensical, devout and wicked together!’⁵⁰ It was not simply liberation from the daily grind of translation that gave her such a delightful feeling of relief. The fact that the book was coming out at all was reason for celebration. Only a year earlier it had looked as though Strauss might go the same way as the ecclesiastical chart and Vinet – into oblivion. In May 1845 Joseph Parkes’s assurance that he would finance the publication started to look shaky and Mary Ann began ‘utterly to despair that Strauss will ever be published unless I … print it myself. I have no confidence in Mr Parkes and shall not be surprized if he fail in his engagement altogether.’⁵¹

In the end, the book did come out, published by John Chapman of Newgate Street. Mary Ann received only twenty pounds for her two years’ work and her name does not appear on the title page – or indeed anywhere else. None the less, its impact on her life was huge. Das Leben Jesu was a supremely important book and the name of its translator could not fail to circulate among well-informed people. Mary Ann’s meeting with the publisher John Chapman, while staying with Sara in summer 1846, was the catalyst for her move to London three years later and the start of her journalistic career. And, of course, the translation brought her to the notice of Strauss himself, who provided a preface in which he described her work as ‘accurata et perspicua’.⁵² In 1854 they finally met, thanks to the fussy ministrations of none other than Dr Brabant. Whether by chance or not, the good doctor popped up on the train on which Mary Ann and G. H. Lewes were travelling to Germany to start their life together, having fled gossiping London. Brabant insisted on introducing her to Strauss, whom he claimed as a kind of friend. The meeting, which took place over breakfast in a hotel in Cologne, turned out dismally. Strauss spoke little English and Mary Ann not much German. For this reason, or perhaps the buzzing presence of the insufferable Dr Brabant, Strauss appeared ‘strange and cast-down’ and the encounter drew to an embarrassed close.⁵³

Once the exhilaration of being released from her task had settled, Mary Ann was in a position to assess the Strauss experience. Despite her dedication, a strain of ambivalence runs through her comments about the whole business of translation. It was, when all was said and done, not original or creative work, but ‘trifling’ stuff. She resented having had to worry about whether or not Parkes would come through with the money for something which was ‘not important enough to demand the sacrifice of one’s whole soul’.⁵⁴ Even at this stage Mary Ann knew that she wanted to be something more than a mediator of other people’s words, although in later life she told a correspondent that at this point she stayed with translation because she felt that it was all she could do well.⁵⁵ Although she had completed three substantial translations by the time she started to write fiction, she never drew attention to the fact and would have been quite happy for her involvement in them to have remained little known.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of Strauss her loftiness concealed considerable pride in her achievement. She was pleased with Charles Wicksteed’s review in the Prospective Review praising the ‘faithful, elegant, and scholarlike translation’.⁵⁶ And when an old school friend approached her for advice about how she might earn her living as a translator, Mary Ann was quick to defend her own patch. Although she conceded that Miss Bradley Jenkins was clever, she poured scorn on her assumption that ‘she could sit from morn till noon, from noon till dewy eve, translating German or French without feeling the least fatigue’.⁵⁷ It was one thing for Mary Ann Evans to think translation beneath her, quite another for an old classmate to assume she could do the same thing just as well.

One important legacy of the Strauss years was the deepening of Mary Ann’s friendship with Sara Hennell. They had first met by proxy, during those difficult months of the holy war in the spring of 1842. From Cara, Mary Ann had heard all about her clever elder sister who had worked as a governess to the Bonham Carter family. Sara, meanwhile, followed the trials of Cara’s interesting young neighbour through the letters she regularly received from Rosehill. The two women were finally introduced that summer, when Sara spent one of her many holidays in Coventry. Six weeks of music and talk laid the foundations of a friendship which would become the most important of both women’s lives for the next few years.

In many ways Sara Hennell was a clever, sophisticated version of that first governess in Mary Ann’s life, Maria Lewis. While Miss Lewis worked in the house of a Midlands clergyman, Miss Hennell had taught the daughters of a wealthy, cultured Unitarian Liberal MP. Instead of a relationship with her employers marked by resentment and insecurity, Sara Hennell was treated respectfully, enjoying the friendship of her eldest pupil long after she had ceased to teach her. While Maria Lewis’s notions of good behaviour were provincial and old-fashioned, Sara Hennell was used to fitting gracefully into life in the best circles. Most significantly, while Miss Lewis remained narrowly Evangelical, Sara Hennell set out from the Unitarianism of her childhood to explore and expand her faith through careful study of the new biblical criticism. She followed her brother Charles into print, publishing several books on theology throughout her long life.

When Mary Ann handed the letters she had so abruptly demanded back from Maria Lewis to Sara, she was signposting the similarities in the position the two women occupied in her life. Like Maria, Sara was located at a convenient distance, available for holiday visits and intense correspondence, but not the tedium and messiness of everyday contact. Mary Ann’s letters to Sara are less self-enclosed than those to Maria, but still there is a sense that she uses them as a way of exploring her own thoughts rather than as a means of exchanging ideas and feelings. One of the first letters she writes to Sara is the important reassessment of the lesson learned during the holy war, in which she elevates the community of feeling over the hair-splitting of intellectual debate. Throughout the correspondence it is Sara’s job to provide an informed listening ear rather than a provocative intervention in her young friend’s flow of thought. It is the idea of Sara, rather than Sara herself, which becomes the enabling force.

Mary Ann was guiltily aware of the narcissism running through her correspondence and indeed, the first few letters to Sara recall the early ones to Maria Lewis in their anxiety about appearing egotistical. ‘An unfortunate lady wrote a note, one page of which contained thirty I’s. I dare not count mine lest they should equal hers in number.’⁵⁸ However, after a tentative start in which Mary Ann struggled to find a voice to speak to the Sara whom she held in her mind’s eye, the correspondence started to flow. Within a year, Mary Ann was addressing Sara as ‘Liebe Gemahlinn’, ‘Cara Sposa’ and ‘Beloved Achates’ – all terms which claimed her as something more than a friend.

Eliot’s early biographers, from her husband John Cross right down to Gordon Haight in the 1960s, felt uncomfortable with the language of sexual affection the two women used to one another. Cross simply left out the offending passages, while Haight anxiously explained them away in terms of contemporary conventions of female friendship. In fact, the language in the letters exceeds that used by even the closest women friends during the period. ‘This letter is only to tell you how sweet the genuine words of love in your letter to Cara have been to my soul. That you should really wish for me is a thought which I keep by me as a little cud to chew now and then,’ writes Mary Ann on 15 November 1847.⁵⁹ Eighteen months later Mary Ann is teasing Sara with the idea that she may have been unfaithful. ‘I have given you a sad excuse for flirtation, but I have not been beyond seas long enough to make it lawful for you to take a new husband – therefore I come back to you with all a husband’s privileges and command you to love me … I sometimes talk to you in my soul as lovingly as Solomon’s Song.’⁶⁰

By the autumn of 1842 it was already a joke in the Bray – Hennell circle that Mary Ann fell in love with everyone she met. At twenty-three she was still searching for that intense maternal love which her own mother had been unable to provide at the crucial stage in her development. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, neither Watts nor Brabant had been in a position to give her the kind of replacement mothering she craved. Both had backed off with differing degrees of grace. Sara Hennell, however, was in an altogether different position. Single and living with her mother, she was emotionally free to enter into an intense and absorbing relationship. Seven years older to the week than Mary Ann, she was young enough to seem a contemporary in the way that Maria Lewis never had, yet sufficiently mature to take on the role of mentor and nurturer.

The erotic language which Mary Ann used is a signal of the insecurity she felt about just how much Sara really loved her. By playing with ideas of possession, fidelity, flirtation and jealousy, she was both expressing and containing her fear that Sara might abandon her, just as Isaac Evans, Francis Watts, Robert Brabant and Robert Evans had all done. Yet by the time she was using analogies to Solomon’s Song in 1849 – the most explicitly erotic section of the Old Testament – she was already less dependent on the relationship. This echoed the pattern with Maria Lewis: it was at the point when Mary Ann wanted to leave the friendship that her declarations of love became most extravagant.

The reasons for the drift apart were familiar too. If Mary Ann was the one who used the language of love, it was Sara whose feelings stood the test of time. Unattached to any man except her brother, Sara’s devotion to Mary Ann did not wax and wane every time an interesting diversion appeared. Mary Ann, by contrast, used her relationship with Sara as a small child would her mother – as a secure emotional base from which to explore the world. Five years into the friendship the discrepancy in the amount the women needed one another started to show. Just like Maria Lewis, Sara expressed her insecurity about the strength of Mary Ann’s attachment in governessy comments about the inappropriateness of her behaviour with the opposite sex. ‘Poor little Miss Hennell’, reported Edith Simcox in 1885, ‘apparently always disapproved of Marian for depending so much on the arm of man.’⁶¹

Hand in hand with this emotional estrangement there went an intellectual one. In July 1848, during a season in which all Europe was in revolt against the old ways, Mary Ann wrote to Sara defending her new regard for the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand. From her tone it is clear that she felt or knew that Sara would disapprove of her reading authors whose names were synonymous with sexual freedom and political revolt. ‘I wish you thoroughly to understand that the writers who have most profoundly influenced me … are not in the least oracles to me … For instance it would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were to stun me with proofs that Rousseau’s view of life, religion, and government are miserably erroneous.’ The point was, she maintained, that it was Rousseau’s art which had made her look at the world in quite a different way, sending ‘that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has awakened me to new perceptions’.⁶²

George Sand had an even more wretched personal reputation than Rousseau in Britain. A woman who dressed as a man and lived apart from her husband stood out in comparison with Elizabeth Gaskell and even the eccentric Brontës. Mary Ann, who as a novelist would become known as ‘the English George Sand’, worked hard to reassure Sara that she was not about to take the original as her model. ‘I should never dream of going to her writings as a moral code or text-book.’ What excited her, she said, was that, like Rousseau, Sand was able ‘to delineate human passion and its results’.⁶³ Both these French writers might lead irregular lives and be indifferent literary stylists, but their ability to see characters truly and whole moved her with a sense of what the novel might achieve.

During the height of her friendship with Sara Hennell – 1843 to 1848 – there was no room in Mary Ann’s life for another significant emotional attachment. Not that that stopped her family trying to find her suitable suitors. The ‘problem’ of Mary Ann’s singleness continued to rumble on, with Isaac always ready to hint that she was being selfish by remaining a drain on her family’s resources. Even the sensible Fanny Houghton, her half-sister, was keen to introduce Mary Ann to potential partners. In March 1845 she told Mary Ann about a young picture restorer working on the big house at Baginton, who she thought might be suitable. A meeting was arranged and, true to form, within two days Mary Ann was bewitched, believing the boy to be ‘the most interesting young man she had seen and superior to all the rest of mankind’. On the third day the young man made an informal proposal through Mr Houghton saying ‘she was the most fascinating creature he had ever beheld, that if it were not too presumptuous to hope etc. etc., a person of such superior excellence and powers of mind’. Turning down a definite engagement, Mary Ann none the less gave permission for him to write. Cara describes the girl as ‘brimful of happiness; – though she said she had not fallen in love with him yet, but admired his character so much that she was sure she should’.⁶⁴

This was the first time that Mary Ann had been involved with a man who was available and who returned her feelings. The fact that both Francis Watts and Robert Brabant were older and married had allowed her to express intense longing, safe in the knowledge that no commitment would be required of her. With the young picture restorer it was different. Now that real emotional engagement was on offer, Mary Ann backed off. In the few days following her return from Baginton she was racked with dreadful headaches, which only leeches could relieve. By the time the young man appeared at Foleshill she had decided that he wouldn’t do at all ‘owing to his great agitation, from youth – or something or other’, reported Cara vaguely to Sara. The next day Mary Ann ‘made up her mind that she could never love or respect him enough to marry him and that it would involve too great a sacrifice of her mind and pursuits’.⁶⁵

However, Mary Ann did not get any relief from giving the young man her decision, especially when her letter ending the affair crossed with his to Mr Evans asking for permission to marry her. All she felt was enormous guilt at having led him on. She toyed with the idea of starting the relationship up again. ‘Not that she cares much for him,’ reported Cara, ‘but she is so grieved to have wounded his feelings.’⁶⁶

But there may have been more to it than that. On 21 April, three weeks after what was supposed to be her final decision, Mary Ann is writing to Martha Jackson about the relationship as if it may continue. ‘What should you say to my becoming a wife?… I did meditate an engagement, but I have determined, whether wisely or not I cannot tell, to defer it, at least for the present.’⁶⁷ Although Mary Ann had no real interest in this particular man, she was enjoying the experience of being the courted one, the adored. An offer of marriage, no matter how unsuitable, brought her into the fold of ordinary, lovable women.

To Sara, however, she gives a very different version of events. A letter written two weeks before the one to Martha Jackson speaks as though the relationship is well and truly a thing of the past. ‘I have now dismissed it from my mind, and only keep it recorded in my book of reference, article “Precipitancy, ill effects of”.’ She ends by confirming that her first allegiance is to Sara whose ‘true Gemahlinn’ or wife she is, which ‘means that I have no loves but those that you can share with me – intellectual and religious loves’.⁶⁸ At this relatively early stage in their friendship Mary Ann was anxious not to alienate Sara by any suggestion of ‘infidelity’. At the age of twenty-five her emotional allegiance was still to an unavailable partner, a woman. It would be nearly another decade before she would risk falling in love – this time lastingly – with an almost available man.

It was not just the Evans clan who tried to matchmake Mary Ann. Although Robert and Isaac were convinced that the Brays were cavalierly indifferent to her marriage prospects, in fact, Cara was quietly working away behind the scenes. In July 1844, returning from a holiday in the Lake District, the Brays took Mary Ann to stay with Cara’s young cousins in Manchester. The two young men, Philip and Frank, escorted the party round the city on a fact-finding mission to see whether Engels’s recently published description of the slums was accurate. It was. Cara wrote in horror to her sister-in-law Rufa, ‘The streets and houses where humans do actually live and breathe there are worse than a book can tell.’⁶⁹ But this was not her only disappointment. ‘I wish friend Philip would fall in love with her [Mary Ann],’ she wrote wistfully to her mother a few weeks later, ‘but there certainly were no symptoms of it.’⁷⁰ But at the party’s next stop, in Liverpool, romance seemed more likely. One of the guests at dinner was William Ballantyne Hodgson, Principal of the Liverpool Mechanics Institute, who was interested in the increasingly popular subjects of mesmerism and clairvoyance. He put Mary Ann in a hypnotic trance, which terrified her, since she was unable to open her eyes ‘and begged him most piteously to do it for her’.⁷¹ Hodgson’s concentration on Mary Ann during dinner suggests a definite romantic interest in her. Writing to a friend afterwards he described the evening as ‘Altogether a delightful party’ and admiringly listed the modern and classic languages which the extraordinary Miss Evans was able to read.⁷²

Men like Hodgson, Watts, Brabant and Bray who expressed a fascination with Mary Ann’s mind were used to mixing with clever women. Far from being comfortable with the simpering Angel in the House, the women in their lives were educated, well read and independent-thinking. So it is a clue to Mary Ann’s outstanding intellectual and spiritual radiance that she was so consistently the object of male attention. Indeed, the American poet Emerson, who met her during a visit to Rosehill in July 1848, could only repeat over and over to Charles Bray, ‘That young lady has a calm, serious soul.’⁷³

Hodgson and Emerson came into contact with Mary Ann only briefly. Other men, equally swept up by the exhilaration of talking to a woman whose mind ranged as widely as their own, found their lives profoundly altered by contact with Mary Ann Evans. John Sibree, the elder brother of her pupil Mary, was studying to become an Independent minister at Spring Hill College, Birmingham. Like Sara Hennell, he had made Mary Ann’s acquaintance by proxy, through letters which Mary had written to him while he was at Halle University, describing the drama of the holy war. During one of his holidays from Spring Hill, Sibree finally got to meet the woman about whom he had heard so much. Characteristically, they forged their friendship by reading Greek together and, once Sibree returned to college in Birmingham, the correspondence continued. The letters which Mary Ann wrote to Sibree during the first half of 1848 are unlike any others she was to write during her whole life. As performance-oriented as ever, she none the less imagines him as a very different audience from Sara Hennell or Maria Lewis. This time she is at pains to show herself as a fun, flirtatious and even daring woman. For instance, Hannah More, whose pious work she had used to recommend to all and sundry, is now dismissed as ‘that most disagreeable of all monsters, a bluestocking – a monster that can only exist in a miserably false state of society, in which a woman with but a smattering of learning or philosophy is classed along with singing mice and card playing pigs’.⁷⁴ Doubtless Mary Ann was attempting to distance herself from the drab image of a bluestocking, all the while trying to impress Sibree with her references to Handel, Hegel and Disraeli.

The letters to Sibree are also unusual in discussing politics. Throughout her life Mary Ann seldom mentioned contemporary events. But in spring 1848, with much of Europe in turmoil, it was impossible not to be drawn in. To those who know her in her mature incarnation as a conservative thinker, Mary Ann’s brash enthusiasm for sudden change comes as a shock. She starts off by using the language of the barricades: ‘decayed monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have a hospital for them, or a sort of Zoological Garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be preserved’. Of Louis Philippe, who with his ‘moustachioed sons’ had recently escaped to Britain, ‘for heaven’s sake preserve me from sentimentalizing over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions of unfed souls and bodies’. Victoria, meanwhile, is ‘our little humbug of a queen’. When it comes to predicting whether revolution will happen in Britain, Mary Ann has already identified her country’s unique capacity for slow constitutional change which, as a mature writer, she would elevate over political solutions. Writing to Sibree, however, she sees this as second-best to the thrill of revolution: ‘There is nothing in our constitution to obstruct the slow progress of political reform. This is all we are fit for at present. The social reform which may prepare us for great changes is more and more the object of effort both in Parliament and out of it. But we English are slow crawlers.’⁷⁵

Whenever Mary Ann engaged with a man intellectually, her emotions were not far behind. The tone of the Sibree letters quickly turned personal. On 8 March 1848 she ticked him off for writing too formally and asked for some details about his innermost life. ‘Every one talks of himself or herself to me,’ she boastfully claims and demands that he write to her about his religious beliefs. ‘I want you to write me a Confession of Faith – not merely what you believe but why you believe it.’⁷⁶ Sibree had already read Mary Ann’s translation of Strauss and was starting to have his doubts about his calling. The act of marshalling an account of his faith seems to have been the final stage in resolving to abandon the ministry. This was, of course, a massive step for, as Mary Sibree explained decades later to John Cross, ‘the giving up of the ministry to a young man without other resources was no light matter’.⁷⁷

Just how influential Mary Ann was in Sibree’s decision to give up his orthodox faith is not absolutely clear. Certainly she read the letters which Mrs Sibree and Mary wrote to John during the whole crisis, and she herself enclosed a letter with the former’s correspondence. In this letter she says, ‘You have my hearty and not inexperienced sympathy … I have gone through a trial of the same genus as yours … I sincerely rejoice in the step you have taken – it is an absolutely necessary condition for any true development of your nature.’⁷⁸

While the Sibrees had been tolerant and understanding when Mary Ann had given up church-going, it was quite a different matter when their own son took a similar course. It is not clear how much they blamed Mary Ann for influencing him, but they certainly felt she played a significant part. From 1848 Mary Ann had fewer meetings with Mary and the German lessons seem to have stopped. When Mary Ann moved to Geneva for eight months in 1849, Mary Sibree asked her to write to her care of Rosehill, presumably because she did not want her parents to know that their friendship was continuing. Mary Ann refused, telling the Brays: ‘Please to give my love to her [Mary] and tell her that I cannot carry on a correspondence with anyone who will not avow it.’ Perhaps she was feeling particularly annoyed with all things Sibree because Mr Sibree senior had just turned up with his brother in Geneva, which Mary Ann thought ‘a piece of impertinent curiosity’, suspecting that they had come to spy on her.⁷⁹ In the same way that she had been scathing about Brabant, Mary Ann now declared that Mr Sibree, whom she had once wanted as a substitute father, looked ‘silly’ while his brother was ‘vulgar-looking’.⁸⁰ She could not get over her hurt that the Sibrees had not given her the total understanding she craved. They were, she said in a later letter, benignly selfish, exhibiting ‘the egotism that eats up all the bread and butter and is ready to die of confusion and distress after having done it’.⁸¹

As the John Sibree episode suggests, Mary Ann’s relationships with men during this period were tinder-box affairs. She formed sudden bonds with dramatic results. Either she was thrown out of their house, or they were thrown out of a job. There were tears and headaches, and leeches and embarrassments, which in some cases lasted down the years. She began to despair that anyone would want a peaceful, sustained relationship with her. Often known as Polly, an old Warwickshire form of ‘Mary’, she allowed Sara to make an unflattering pun on her name by changing it again to ‘Pollian’, a play on Apollyon, the monster in Revelation who also makes an appearance in Pilgrim’s Progress. It chimed with her growing sense of herself as repulsive and wrong. In October 1846 she wrote an extended fantasy for Charles Bray – surely influenced by her reading of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus – in which she pictures herself as an old, ugly translator whose only hope now is to form a rational marriage with a dusty old German theologian. ‘The other day as I was sitting in my study, Mary [Sibree] came with a rather risible cast of expression to deliver to me a card, saying that a gentleman was below requesting to see me. The name on the card ran thus – Professor Bücherwurm, Moderig University [Professor Bookworm of Musty University] … ’ The professor then addresses Mary Ann:

‘I am determined if possible to secure a translator in the person of a wife. I have made the most anxious and extensive inquiries in London after all female translators of German. I find them very abundant, but I require, besides ability to translate, a very decided ugliness of person … After the most toilsome inquiries I have been referred to you, Madam, as presenting the required combination of attributes, and though I am rather disappointed to see that you have no beard, an attribute which I have ever regarded as the most unfailing indication of a strong-minded woman, I confess that in other respects your person at least comes up to my ideal.’

Mary Ann then describes herself as responding: ‘I thought it possible we might come to terms, always provided he acceded to my irrevocable conditions. “For you must know, learned Professor,” I said, “that I require nothing more in a husband than to save me from the horrific disgrace of spinster-hood and to take me out of England.”’⁸² Professor Bookworm is clearly based on that German professor of theology to whom Mary Ann had already given up two years of her life, D. F. Strauss. And although she could not have known it at the time, it was Strauss who would, by a twisted turn of events, rescue Mary Ann from spinsterhood. In the meantime, however, it was another crisis altogether that would take her out of England.