Henry James said of Eliot, "She is magnificently ugly--deliciously hideous...in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her."
George Eliot: Biography
From Mary Anne Evans
to George Eliot
• The World of Ideas • Alone • George Henry Lewes • "Married" Life • George Eliot Is Born • Alone Again |
Mary Anne Evans: The Early Years
Mary Anne Evans (1) was born at South Farm, Arbury, on November 22, 1819. The youngest child of Robert Evans and Christiana Pearson Evans, she had four siblings: Robert, Fanny, Chrissy, and Isaac. Mary Anne shared an especially close relationship with her brother Isaac -- they were inseparable playmates. However, in 1824, Isaac was sent to school at Foleshill, and Mary Anne was sent to Miss Latham's boarding school. At Miss Lathim's, missing the companionship and comfort of her brother, Mary Anne first turned to books as a source of amusement. Those who knew her found Mary Anne a serious, sensitive, and introspective child. She had straight light-brown hair and a plain face. Mathilde Blind described her as "a queer, three-cornered, awkward girl, who sat in corners and shyly watched her elders" (qtd. in Haight, GEB 10).
In 1828, after finishing at Miss Latham's, Mary Anne was sent to Mrs. Wallington's Boarding School at Nuneaton. It was at Mrs. Wallington's that she met the woman who was to be the most influential figure of her early life, Miss Maria Lewis. Maria Lewis, a kind woman with strong evangelical beliefs, was a governess at the school. She took an immediate interest in the shy Mary Anne, and marking the exceptional quality of the child's mind, took it upon herself to foster it. By the time Mary Anne was thirteen, she had learned all that Mrs. Wallington's school had to offer. When she left, however, she maintained a close relationship with Miss Lewis -- a relationship they kept up for nearly fourteen years. Upon leaving Miss Wallington's, Mary Anne attended Miss Franklin's school at Coventry. It was here that Mary Anne worked to rid herself of her Midland accent and cultivated the "low, well-modulated, musical voice, which impressed everyone who knew George Eliot in later years" (Haight, GEB 11). At Miss Franklin's school, Mary Anne became an accomplished pianist, studied French, was admired for her skill at writing, and read widely. She also wrote poetry and fiction.
Drastic changes soon occurred in Mary Anne's life. Her mother had been ill for quite some time. In February of 1839, Mrs. Evans died, and Mary Anne, then 19, left school to take care of her father. Though not the oldest daughter, Mary Anne had always been close to her father, and she tried to fill in for her mother while continuing her education at home (now Griff House). Robert Evans, proud of his daughter, bought Mary Anne any book she wished to have and arranged for her to receive lessons in Italian and German. In 1841, she and her father moved to a new home at Foleshill.
The World of Ideas:
Foleshill was a larger town than Griff, and Mary Anne suspected that her father had chosen it in order to enlarge her social circle, and perhaps help her find a husband (Haight, GEB 42). However, Mary Anne felt distanced from those around her. Always serious and shy, she "could not help thinking how much easier life would be to her, and how much better she would stand in the estimation of her neighbors, if only she could take things as they did, be satisfied with outside pleasures, and conform to popular beliefs without any reflection or examination" (qtd. in Haight, GEB 34). Mary Anne had been entertaining doubts about her religious convictions for some time, but she did not have the courage to relinquish those convictions just yet.
At Foleshill, Mary Anne continued her studies and spent her evenings reading Sir Walter Scott to her father, whose health was failing. On November 2, 1841, Mary Anne was invited to the home of Charles and Cara Bray. Mary Anne found in the Brays the same doubts about Christianity that she had been secretly harboring for quite some time and felt she was among kindred souls. In his autobiography, Bray later wrote, "we became friends at once" (qtd. in Haight, GEB 38); in fact, Charles and Cara Bray were to be Mary Anne's most intimate friends for the next thirteen years.
In 1842, Mary Anne stopped going to church. Her longtime friend Maria Lewis was disappointed and their correspondence dwindled -- though no permanent break was made until Christmas of 1846. Mary Anne's father was even more disturbed by his daughter's heresy and refused to speak to her. Eventually, a truce was effected--Mary Anne agreed to go to church with her father and he conceded that she had the right to think what she pleased (as long as she showed signs of outward conformity), but relations between the two remained strained.
Mary Anne continued her friendship with the Brays. They were open-minded intellectuals, and they brought the shy Mary Anne out of her shell. After five years in their company, she could not be called shy at all. Charles Bray had connections to some of the most important thinkers of the time, and Eliot's acquaintance with him served to bring her closer to "the world of ideas." Mary Anne met many interesting and important people at the Bray's home, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was quite taken with her and commented, "that young lady has a calm and serious soul" (Haight, GEB 65).
At Rosehill (the Bray's home), Mary Anne also met some of the people who were to become her closest friends: Sara Hennell, Charles Hennell, and Elizabeth (or Rufa) Brabant (later Mrs. Charles Hennell). In 1844, Mary Anne began work on an English translation of David Friedrich Strauss' Das Leben Jesu, one of the most influential works of religious thought read in England at the time. This translation took her two years to complete, and while her name did not appear on the publication, it did later bring her some little fame in London when people discovered that it was her work. Meanwhile, Mary Anne's father's health continued to fail, and Mary Anne was his caring nurse. He died in June of 1849. Mr. Evans seemed to soften towards Mary Anne a bit in his final years, but left her little in his will (Haight, GEB 66-7). Mary Anne was twenty-nine.
Alone:
Though emotionally and physically exhausted from nursing her father, Mary Anne agreed to take a Continental tour with the Brays just five days after the funeral. In July, rather than returning home with them, Mary Anne announced her intention to stay in Geneva alone. She returned to England in 1850, and resolved to move to London. She first spent seven months at Rosehill with the Brays, where she came into contact with John Chapman, a London publisher and bookseller. Having read her translation of Strauss, he asked her to write an article for the Westminster Review. Mary Anne finished this article in November. It was an impressive piece. She delivered the article herself to Chapman in London and took up lodgings in Chapman's London home at 142 Strand, where Chapman lived with his wife, Susanna, and his mistress, Elisabeth Tilley.
Chapman was a tall, handsome, magnetic man and a notorious philanderer. Soon after Mary Anne moved into the Strand, he took a great interest in her and they began to spend an inordinate amount of time together, often at strange hours. Both his wife and his mistress were jealous. When Susanna caught her husband holding Mary Anne's hand, things blew up. Susanna and Elisabeth joined forces against Mary Anne and demanded of Chapman that she move out immediately. Mary Anne agreed to return to Coventry.
In 1851, Chapman purchased the Westminster Review. He needed an editor, and he wanted someone who would be willing to let him take all the credit and work behind the scenes anonymously. Mary Anne was his first choice. However, he needed her in London, and knew it would prove difficult to persuade Susanna and Elisabeth to agree. Eventually, he did get the ladies to agree, and Mary Anne moved back into 142 Strand. Things were different this time -- Mary Anne saw the true nature of Chapman, and made a vow to keep her relationship with him strictly professional. This was a vow she kept. Mary Anne edited the Westminster Review for two years and ten issues. Under her direction, it again became the important intellectual journal it had once been under former editor John Stuart Mill. Mary Anne's social circle continued to grow. London had become a center of enlightened radicalism and there were many parties at the Strand where she met some of the most important thinkers of the time. Though she was physically unattractive, most people who met Mary Anne were quite taken with her. They were charmed by her expressive face and eyes, her gentleness, her beautiful, low voice, and her great intellect.
George Henry Lewes:
Mary Anne was growing tired of editing the Review and of living in the Chapman home. She became depressed and her health was failing. She suffered from awful headaches. Mary Anne was now nearly thirty-three and feeling lonely. She met George Henry Lewes in October of 1851. Lewes was an unattractive man, but loved by most who came near him because of his outgoing personality and wit. Lewes had married Agnes Jervis in 1841. About eight years into the marriage, Agnes began an affair with Lewes's close friend Thornton Hunt. Both Lewes and Agnes were believers in "free love" and felt that feelings were stronger than legal bonds. So when Agnes gave birth to Hunt's son, Lewes claimed the illegitimate child as his own. In the coming years, she would bear Hunt four more children. George claimed all of them, but he ceased to view Agnes as his wife (Haight, GEB 131-3).
When Mary Anne met Lewes, his marriage had long been over in every sense but the legal one. Lewes came to visit Mary Anne at the Strand often, often enough that by April of 1853, their intimacy had grown far beyond what either of them could have expected. In September of 1853, Mary Anne moved out of 142 Strand and found her own lodgings. This move gave her the opportunity to spend more time with Lewes, and by November they had grown extremely close. In July of 1854, her translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity was published, with her name appearing on the title page. This was the first and last time "Marian Evans" appeared on a work of hers.
In June of 1854, Mary Anne went to Rosehill for the last time. She knew that her friends Sara Hennell and Cara Bray would not approve of what she had made up her mind to do. Mary Anne had decided to live openly with George Lewes as his lover and spiritual wife. The decision was not an easy one. Mary Anne knew that this bold move would bring public censure and that if George ever left her, she would be alone and outcast. She wrote the following to John Chapman on the subject, "I do not wish to take the ground of ignoring what is unconventional in my position. I have counted the cost of the step I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation of all my friends. I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself" (qtd. in Haight, GEB 162).
"Married" Life:
In July of 1854, George and Mary Anne departed for the Continent. They spent eight months in Germany, first at Weimar and then in Berlin, so that George could work on his biography of Goethe. Mary Anne wrote to friends that she was quite happy (Haight, GEB 159). Upon their return, Mary Anne took lodgings in Dover, and George went to London to settle his affairs. Mary Anne did not see George for five weeks. She had stipulated that George must separate permanently from his wife, Agnes. She knew, of course, that a divorce was impossible, but she wanted to be assured that there was no possibility of reconciliation before she would move to London with George. Agnes confirmed that a reunion was not possible. With this assurance, Mary Anne moved to London in April. She and George took rooms as Mr. and Mrs. Lewes, and their "marriage" was officially begun.
Chapman soon asked Mary Anne to take over the "Belle Lettres" section of the Westminster Review at a fixed salary of fifty pounds a year. Mary Anne happily agreed to this extra income. She wrote countless book reviews which gave her ample cause to think about what exactly made good fiction. The couple received few visitors at first, but both Rufa and Bessie Parks broke the taboo and risked their reputations by paying calls at the Leweses.
George Eliot Is Born:
In June of 1856, Mary Anne and George moved to Tenby on the coast of South Whales. When Barbara Leigh Smith visited them in July, she remarked that the couple was very happy (Haight, GEB 205-6). At Tenby, Mary Anne began to think more and more about her childhood dream of writing fiction. She felt that she could competently write the descriptive passages of a novel, but feared that she lacked the talent to render dramatic and dialogue passages effectively (Haight, GEB 206). When she shared these thoughts with George, he encouraged her to try her hand at fiction writing. In August, the Leweses moved back to London, and on September 23rd of 1856, Mary Anne began to write "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton," which would later become a part of Scenes of Clerical Life. Despite his avowed confidence in her, George still had some doubts about Mary Anne's ability to write fiction. Those doubts were removed when he read her Amos Barton story. Her fears were unfounded -- she could write good dialogue and she could create drama to stir the emotions (Haight, GEB 212) . Lewes sent her story to his publisher, John Blackwood, claiming it was the work of a (male) friend who wanted to remain anonymous. The story was published on New Year's Day, 1857, less than two months after Mary Anne's thirty-seventh birthday. Mary Anne then adopted George Eliot as her nom de plume. She later told John Cross that she chose the name because "George was Mr. Lewes's Christian name, and Eliot was a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word" (Cross I, 310).
In May of 1857, Mary Anne finally decided to tell her family of her marriage to George. At first, she kept the details to herself, but when pressed, she revealed that the marriage was not a legal one. Urged by Isaac, Mary Anne's sisters wrote letters renouncing Mary Anne. She was now an outcast in the eyes of her family.
After the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life, there was much talk about the supposed identity of George Eliot, but Mary Anne kept her secret (she didn't even tell Blackwood until February of 1858). In October of 1857 she began work on Adam Bede. The Leweses spent the middle of that year in Munich, Vienna, and Dresden. Mary Anne continued to work on Adam Bede while they were abroad, and finished it in September of 1858, shortly after their return to England. When Adam Bede made it into print, the critics praised the book highly. It was a sensational success. Even Queen Victoria loved it (Haight, GEB 335). And the public still had no idea who George Eliot was!
Mary Anne's private life afforded her much joy. She and George were very happy together. He was constantly looking to protect her from her friends and critics alike. In 1859, they purchased their first home: Holly Lodge at Southfields. By this time the secret of George Eliot's identity wasn't very secret. Herbert Spencer and John Chapman had informed many of the members of the literary circle in London that George Eliot was none other than the unprepossessing Mary Anne Lewes.
When the truth about George Eliot's identity was firmly established, Blackwood balked at publishing Mary Anne's new novel, The Mill on the Floss. He feared that the controversy surrounding Mary Anne's life with Lewes would keep it from selling. Eventually Blackwood did publish the novel with George Eliot appearing on the title page, and when the book came out, it was a success despite all the worry about the controversial nature of Mary Anne's relationship with Lewes.
Finding their country home too far from town, the Leweses moved back to London in late 1860. Mary Anne became depressed in her new surroundings. Not even George could revive her spirits. Mary Anne attributed much of her depression to the social ridicule she felt. Since she had become famous, her private life with George Lewes had become public business. While the public adored her novels, they often criticized her personally for her defiance of the marriage convention. She resented the fact that she was seen as a violator of the marriage vow while George's unfaithful wife, Agnes, appeared a long-suffering victim (Haight, GEB 338). In such a social climate, the Leweses received few visitors (they could count the number of their female visitors on one hand). Rufa Hennell, the first woman to call on the Leweses, also became the first to invite them to dinner. However, the greater part of their social circle remained male, even as it widened with Eliot's increasing fame (Haight, GEB 371).
In April of 1861, after the publication of Silas Marner, Mary Anne left for Italy to begin research for her next novel, Romola, to be set in fifteenth century Florence. Mary Anne researched furiously -- she often fell into depression because of self-doubt and the overwhelming nature of the task before her. In May of 1862, she accepted an offer from George Smith to publish the novel serially in the Cornhill Magazine. Serial publication proved problematic for Mary Anne, who was very sensitive about her work and easily disturbed by the reviews that came out on earlier parts of her work while she was working on the later ones. Lewes eventually began to suppress almost all negative commentary from his wife. He knew that such negativism would stall her writing, as she was still given to bouts of depression, so he offered her only the good. This policy of Lewes has often been blamed for the "abstruseness" of Eliot's later novels, but without it, she very likely would not have written at all--she certainly was no longer in need of money, having earned nearly £16,000 (Haight, GEB 369).
As Eliot's fame increased and her renown grew, her social circle continued to widen. The more popular Eliot's novels grew, the more accepting London society became of her relationship with Lewes. Mary Anne's family continued their silence, but it is apparent that they, too, read her novels and found them worthy of the sister they remembered. Her siblings probably would have been surprised to know how conservative Mary Anne had become by this time, in spite of her unconventional love of Lewes.
Mary Anne began serious work on Middlemarch in 1869, though she'd been thinking about this "English novel" for years. Progress was slow, but it was published by Blackwood in parts from 1871-2. The novel was a success with the public. If George Eliot was famous before, she was doubly famous after the publication of Middlemarch. She was also very rich (Haight, GEB 444). Once socially ostracized, now the couple could not get away from a constant stream of visitors. Their dream was to move out into the country so that they could spend time alone with one another as in the old days. They searched for the perfect house for four years without ever finding a permanent residence. By 1876, the public seemed to have forgotten the unofficial marriage status of its beloved author, George Eliot. There were even rumors that her marriage had been made official by the death of Agnes Lewes, but they were false. Agnes was alive and well in Kensington (Haight, GEB 490).
In 1874, Mary Anne began work on what would be her final novel, Daniel Deronda. Mary Anne's old fears about the worth of what she was doing returned. She hoped desperately that she was not just "adding to the heap of books" (qtd. in Haight, GEB 476). As usual, Lewes did his best to comfort her. Illness followed depression. Mary Anne began to suffer from kidney stones in February of 1874--the pain would plague her until her death. Daniel Deronda came out in 1876. Mary Anne's health continued to falter, and her fame continued to grow. She was now regarded as "the greatest living English novelist" (Haight, GEB 491). Her fans were wild about her; she received scores of letters from all over the world.
Alone Again:
Eventually, the Leweses managed to stem the tide of visitors to their London home and only saw the few people that they wished to see. One person who was always invited on Sundays was John Cross, their business manager of sorts, whom they referred to as their "dear nephew." In November of 1876, John Cross found a lovely house for George and Mary Anne, and they finally had the country home of which they had been dreaming. They enjoyed their new home immensely, finding their frequent walks in the countryside "so much better than Society!" (qtd. in Haight, GEB 504).
In mid-1878, Lewes began to suffer from horrible cramps every night. Though he did not know it at the time, it was a sign of serious illness. The cramps continued to plague him and the attacks were coming more and more often, but he maintained his high spirits, concealing the seriousness of his illness. By November, he could no longer conceal his agony and Mary Anne wrote, "I have a deep sense of change within, and of a permanently closer companionship with death" (Haight, GEL, VII. 84). Mary Anne was right, by the end of the month, her lifelong partner and support was dead. He passed away at their home in London on November 30, 1878. Mary Anne did not leave her room for a week, and did not go to the funeral. She could bear to see no one. Cross pressed her to accept him as a visitor, fearing that too long of a solitude might prove fatal to Mary Anne. She refused, writing on February 7, 1879, "each day seems a new beginning--a new acquaintance with grief" (Haight, GEL, VII. 101). She finally saw him on February 23.
Mary Anne began the task of completing Lewes's unfinished Problems of Life and Mind and decided to establish a trust in his name, the George Henry Lewes Studentship in Physiology. She saw Cross often as he was still helping her to manage her finances. In March, she began to see other friends as well. She and Cross grew closer -- they began to read Dante together. In August of 1879, Cross hinted for the first time that he wished to be more than a friend. That November, Mary Anne turned 60 and faced the one-year anniversary of Lewes's death. She still mourned him.
Mary Anne finally accepted Cross's proposal of marriage (which had been extended three times) on April 9, 1880. Cross had just turned 40. The ceremony was in May of that year. In November, Mary Anne turned 61. On the evening of December 19, Mary Anne became suddenly ill. She was diagnosed as having laryngitis, and the doctor saw no cause for worry. A few days later her kidney problem began to bother her again, and she was in much pain. With little warning, she passed away at ten o'clock, the night of December 22, 1880. Her new husband was left alone after only seven months of marriage. Mary Anne was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, next to her spiritual husband George Lewes.
George Eliot's grave at Highgate Cemetery, London
1.George Eliot's spelling of Mary Anne changed over the years. Her baptismal records record the spelling as Mary Anne and this is how she signs her earliest letters. Around 1857, she began to use Mary Ann. In 1859, she had changed to Marian, but she reverted to Mary Ann in 1880. For the purposes of this document, I will consistently use the spelling found on her baptismal certificate, Mary Anne.