1Setting Sail
She had decided, she had prepared, she had waited, and finally the day arrived. Light came into her room around five in the morning, and she rose early. It was Thursday, 20 July 1854: today she would not be married to George Lewes, and they would set off on their honeymoon.
She got ready for the journey alone. There were no sisters or bridesmaids to calm her nerves, no wedding dress to be helped into, no father to give her away — her father was dead — but no brother, either; Isaac Evans, like her sister Chrissey, was a hundred miles from London, and knew nothing about Mr Lewes. She had told no one about this day except her friends Charles Bray and John Chapman, who had lent her money for the journey. A secret elopement on borrowed funds was the sort of thing expected of a foolish seventeen-year-old. Marian Evans was not seventeen: she was thirty-four, and leaping into a new life. She was expectant, excited, nervous — what if he didn’t come?
She left her Hyde Park lodgings with her belongings in a carpet bag and took a cab east through the city to St Katherine’s Wharf, where the River Thames is very wide. They had arranged to meet on a steamer bound for Antwerp.
That night, in a lyrical mood, she marked the beginning of her marriage story in her diary. Their journey from London to the Continent was a ‘perfect’ passage into a ‘lovelier’ dawn — and also a passage from ‘I’ to ‘we’:
July 20th 1854.
I said a last farewell to Cambridge Street this morning and found myself on board the Ravensbourne, about ½ an hour earlier than a sensible person would have been aboard, and in consequence I had 20 minutes of terrible fear lest something should have delayed G. But before long I saw his welcome face looking for me over the porter’s shoulder, and all was well. The day was glorious and our passage perfect … The sunset was lovely but still lovelier the dawn as we were passing up the Scheldt between 2 and 3 in the morning. The crescent moon, the stars, the first faint flush of the dawn reflected in the glassy river, the dark mass of clouds on the horizon, which sent forth flashes of lightning, and the graceful forms of the boats and sailing vessels painted in jet black on the reddish gold of the sky and water, made up an unforgettable picture. Then the sun rose and lighted up the sleepy shores of Belgium with their fringe of long grass, their rows of poplars, their church spires and farm buildings.
Life was merging with art: the crossing became a sequence of forms and colours, painted boats and skies shifting from day to night to day again. She was shifting too, not just an observer this time, but the figure at the centre of this ‘unforgettable picture’.
Marian was also travelling through a literary landscape. Early in 1853 she had read Charlotte Brontë’s new novel Villette, whose spirited heroine Lucy Snowe sails from London to Labassecour — a fictionalized Belgium — to begin a new life. She arrives in Villette in the middle of the night, finding a dreamlike town full of surprises, populated with faces from the past, like some region of the unconscious. In this uncanny, passionate place Lucy meets an eccentric little man who bears no resemblance to a romantic hero. They fall in love, but the world does not want them to marry. He is generous and kind; with extraordinary care he creates for her a life that is more truly her own. ‘I am preparing to go to Labassecour,’ Marian wrote elusively to Sara Hennell, her closest friend, a few days before she left England with Lewes.
Since she was a girl she had inhabited a world of books, which offered both refuge and adventure. She had taken lessons in German and Italian, taught herself Latin from a grammar book, and devoured thick volumes on history, philosophy, religion, art and science. The few books by female authors were novels, and novels were almost always about marriage. In 1852 she read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, in which the challenge faced by the charming Dashwood sisters is to marry the right men. ‘The Miss Dashwoods were young, pretty and unaffected … Elinor had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer … her complexion was uncommonly brilliant; her features were all good; her smile was sweet and attractive.’ Marianne Dashwood is sixteen, and believes that ‘A woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.’ Like Austen’s other stories, Sense and Sensibility depicts the brief, heady period in a young woman’s life when she is conscious of her own power to shape her future — a power limited to accepting or rejecting a prospective husband, but nevertheless exhilarating.
Charlotte Brontë’s novels also moved towards marriage, but they explored a different kind of challenge, closer to Marian’s experience and rendered vivid by the intimate intensity of an autobiographical voice. Jane Eyre and Villette ’s Lucy Snowe — plain, impoverished heroines more or less alone in a world made for prettier women — exist on the margins of eligibility, and do not feel entitled to hope for marriage. At eighteen Jane Eyre is clear-eyed and pure-hearted, accomplished and creative, yet she knows this is not enough. ‘I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer,’ she confides to the reader — ‘I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and a small cherry mouth: I desired to be tall, stately and finely developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked. And why had I these aspirations and regrets? It would be difficult to say: I could not then distinctly say it to myself; yet I had a reason, and a logical, natural reason too.’
Why does Jane Eyre, like so many women, want to be married? During the 1840s, when Brontë wrote the novel, radical voices were protesting that marriage deprived women of their legal right to own property, earn money, and keep custody of their children if they separated from their husbands. In 1854, the year Marian set sail to ‘Labassecour’, her friend Barbara Leigh Smith published A Brief Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women, which explained that ‘A woman’s body belongs to her husband; she is in his custody.’ Smith’s fierce ‘Remarks’ on English marriage laws drew attention to the stark difference between single and married women: ‘A woman of twenty-one becomes an independent human creature,’ she wrote, ‘But if she unites herself to a man, she finds herself legislated for, and her condition of life suddenly and entirely changed. Whatever age she may be, she is again considered as an infant.’ Having been ‘courted and wedded as an angel’, a wife is ‘denied the dignity of a rational and moral being ever after.’ When the philosopher John Stuart Mill prepared to marry Harriet Taylor in 1851, he had felt it his duty ‘to put on record a formal protest against the existing laws of marriage’. This feminist husband made ‘a solemn promise’ never to use the controlling powers that would be conferred on him by law once Harriet became his wife.
Less progressive authors were also alert to the unequal dynamics between married couples. Sarah Stickney Ellis’s popular guidebook for wives — dedicated to Queen Victoria — offered tips for dealing with husbands whose upbringing had nurtured ‘their precocious selfishness’ and accustomed them to ‘the triumph of occupying a superior place’. Ellis counselled women to humour their husbands’ egos. ‘It is perhaps when ill, more than at any other time, that men are impressed with a sense of their own importance,’ she observed sagely, and advised her readers ‘to keep up this idea by little acts of delicate attention.’ Any woman who had ‘not yet crossed the Rubicon’ into marriage should, Mrs Ellis urged, ‘look the subject squarely in the face.’ The longest chapter of her book is devoted to ‘Trials of Married Life’: most wives could expect to endure ‘daily and hourly trials’ of bad temper, idleness, profligacy, fussy eating and ‘causeless and habitual neglect of punctuality’.
‘“But why then,”’ asks Ellis, ventriloquizing a young reader, ‘“all the fine talk we hear about marriage? and why, in all the stories we read, is marriage made the end of a woman’s existence?” Ah! there lies the evil. Marriage, like death, is too often looked upon as the end; whereas both are but the beginning of states of existence infinitely more important than that by which they were preceded.’
Novels persistently portrayed marriage as a happy ending. Young female readers longed to be ‘courted and wedded as an angel’ — or, if already married, to reimagine this phase of life, so vibrant with possibility. Like Charlotte Brontë’s heroines, Marian Evans struggled with these longings. She had read Jane Eyre in 1848, soon after it was published; then nearly thirty years old, she was, like Jane, conscious of falling far short of the feminine ideal. Though her figure was slender and graceful, she had a large manly nose, a long chin, ‘evasive’ grey-blue eyes, a formidable intellect and a brooding, sensitive disposition — a ‘temperament of genius’ as her friend Charles Bray put it.
All her life Eliot tended to transform thwarted desire and unspent anger into depression. In her early twenties she had ‘felt a depression’ that, as she wrote to her friend Maria Lewis, ‘has disordered the vision of my mind’s eye and made me alive to what is certainly a fact though my imagination when I am in health is adept at concealing it, that I am alone in the world.’ At that time she was living with her father, and had several close friends; her loneliness revealed her longing for a husband. She could not quite say it outright. ‘I mean,’ she explained delicately, ‘that I have no one who enters into my pleasures and my griefs, no one with whom I can pour out my soul, no one with the same yearnings the same temptations the same delights as myself.’
This need for intimacy was mixed with other yearnings, even harder to confess, for creative fulfilment. Throughout her twenties she had lived with the marriage question — not whom she would marry, but whether she could marry — hanging over her. This question seemed less an exhilarating uncertainty than an ominous cloud, growing heavier as the years went by.
* * *
Now she was with Lewes, and the sun was rising over Europe’s ‘sleepy shores’. But her marriage question, far from dissolving, had taken on a new and unexpected shape. Like Mr Rochester — Charlotte Brontë’s first ugly, flawed, irresistible hero — Lewes had ‘a wife still living’ and could not divorce her, not least because divorces were prohibitively expensive. Agnes Lewes was no fiend locked in a gothic attic, but a pretty, plump, cheerful woman who had borne Lewes three sons, before having more children by his friend Thornton Hunt.
In 1853 Marian and Lewes had crossed paths in literary London; they became friends, then more than friends. Whatever the state of his marriage, she would be seen to be committing adultery if she lived openly with him. And for the Victorians, being seen to commit adultery was much worse than doing it in secret. Public transgressions not only humiliated those who were betrayed, but also — and this seemed to be the greater sin — threatened social codes of propriety.
When Jane Eyre contemplates her future with Mr Rochester after discovering, at the altar, that he is already married, she is resolute. Rochester begs her to travel abroad with him, but Jane chooses to wander into the cold night, homeless and heartbroken, rather than live unmarried with the man she loves. She is eventually rewarded with a large fortune, a blissfully happy marriage, and a baby boy with dark flashing eyes like Rochester’s.
Marian disagreed with the marriage morality of Jane Eyre, and when she faced a similar decision she made the more radical choice. It was a cruel dilemma. Lewes offered a brighter future, and the daily companionship and affection she craved. He had chosen her; at last she could prove to the world that she was worth loving. But now the question of her worthiness would shift from her feminine charm to her moral character. The consequences of a public relationship with Lewes were uncertain, but she knew she might lose her friends. It would have been easier to defy convention if she was aristocratic, bohemian, insouciant — more like George Sand, in other words — and not a lower-middle-class woman from a conservative Anglican family, who harboured ‘a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures’.
Her resolve was strengthened by a new philosophy of marriage. During the first months of 1854, already involved with Lewes, she had translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity into English. This book argues that the union of a man and woman does not need a church or a priest, since natural human love is ‘sacred in itself’. Like earlier generations of German Romantics, Feuerbach was inspired by a pantheist spirituality which refused to separate God from the world. He saw nature itself — and especially human nature — as divine, and he condemned narrow Christian moralism that treated sensual pleasure as unholy. ‘Life as a whole is throughout of a divine nature. Its religious consecration is not first conferred by the blessing of a priest,’ argued Feuerbach — and marriage should be ‘the free bond of love,’ not merely ‘an external restriction’. This daring new philosophy made freedom and spontaneous love the essence of a ‘truly moral’ marriage.
‘With the ideas of Feuerbach I everywhere agree,’ Marian wrote to Sara Hennell at the end of April, as she completed her translation — but she did not tell her friend that she was planning to put these ideas into action. The book was published a couple of weeks before she set sail with Lewes, with her name beneath Feuerbach’s on the cover, as if anticipating the censure to come by defiantly asserting her principles. Lewes was not desecrating marriage by leaving his legal wife, and she, Marian Evans, was not just running off with a married man. They were affirming a ‘truly moral’ radicalism.
And now she was entering an uncharted world. In this new dawn she was emerging as an unfamiliar, untested self — what kind of wife would she be? — and quite possibly renouncing her former life. Indeed, she had left more than one old life behind her.
* * *
She had turned sixteen in November 1835. A few months later her mother Christiana died after a long illness, probably breast cancer, and then her elder sister Chrissey left to marry a local man. Her brother Isaac, who had been her best friend and protector when they were children, was already living away from home in Birmingham. On Chrissey’s wedding day Mary Anne and Isaac wept together ‘over the break up of the old home-life’. They were mourning their mother as well as their beloved sister.
Mary Anne now became her father’s chief companion, and mistress of Griff House, her childhood home in Warwickshire. As if to herald a shift in her identity, she altered the spelling of her name to Mary Ann. She was no longer a child; she was becoming a woman — and, at least in theory, eligible for marriage.
Though she had little control over her future, she was able to give literary shape to her inner life, chiefly in the form of letters to Maria Lewis, her former schoolteacher, a devout Christian and at that time her closest friend. Following Maria’s example, she had become fervently religious. Her friend embodied one image of her own destiny: a spinster and a governess — a precarious profession, since the need for one’s services was continually being outgrown. In 1839, aged nineteen, she sent Maria an inventory of her mental landscape: ‘disjointed specimens from history, ancient and modern; scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth and Milton; newspaper topics; morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology and chemistry, reviews and metaphysics — all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast-thickening, everyday accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations.’ Another day found her ‘plunged in an abyss of books and preserves’, snatching a few minutes in the midst of jam-making to write to her friend.
Griff House
Her appetite for knowledge and ideas was voracious, yet the woman who would translate Spinoza’s Ethics, edit the Westminster Review and write Middlemarch did not feel entitled to express her intellectual aspirations. Perhaps she was embarrassed by them. Confessing a desire makes a claim on the world — and surely only a woman grander, richer, or at least less plain could have the audacity to imagine herself becoming a great artist? Mary Ann did not tell anyone that she hoped to create an important work of philosophy, or that she wanted to be a writer, widely read and recognized for her genius.
Instead she approached these desires sideways, or in reverse. She could reveal her ‘restless, ambitious spirit’ only in reflecting on her failure to fulfil ‘the duty of perfect contentment with such things as we have’. Nevertheless there was a grandeur to her half-spoken ambition, which protested against her ‘walled-in world’ by invoking Shakespeare, Carlyle, Wordsworth and Byron. Her sense of dwelling in ‘a small room’ that cramped her ‘instinctive propensity to expand’ often made her unhappy. Squandering her gifts in intensely literary letters to a Midlands governess clouded her heart with an anxiety she could not explain. Instead she made jokes to belittle herself, or wallowed guiltily in repressed frustration. ‘I have a world more to say, and am very fertile in thoughts that like many greater productions are born to die in unregretted obscurity,’ she wrote at the end of one letter to Maria — ‘How is it that Erasmus could write volumes on volumes and multitudinous letters besides, while I whose labours hold about the same relation to his as an anthill to a pyramid or a drop of dew to the ocean seem too busy to write a few? A most posing query! Solved, after due thought, by the very recondite fact that your poor friend is considerably inferior in mental profundity, power and fertility to the said Erasmus.’
Stuck in her father’s farmhouse, she internalized the constraints of her situation. Her letters to Maria played out an elaborate dialectical dance, offering a flash of her creative power in one sentence, before twisting and withdrawing into self-critique or self-mockery in the next. She denounced as ‘ambition’ her longing to exercise her talents. One day she sent Maria a melancholy sonnet mourning her childish pursuit of a sunlit future, where the grass seemed ‘more velvet-like and green’. Her poem ended with a jaded glimpse ‘Of life’s dull path and earth’s deceitful hope’. Not yet twenty, she was already aestheticizing disappointment, consigning her dreams to the past.
This disappointment was doubled by every glance in the mirror. Her disapproving reflection seemed to forbid even the ordinary feminine ambition to be fallen in love with, let alone her hidden hope to create something extraordinary. Finding a husband was a matter of making a home in the world, and she envisaged herself an outsider. On receiving news from Maria of a friend’s imminent marriage, she cast herself as the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, a subversive performance artist who lived on the streets of ancient Athens in a clay barrel:
When I hear of the marrying and giving in marriage that is constantly being transacted I can only sigh for those who are multiplying earthly ties which though powerful enough to detach their heart and thoughts from heaven, are so brittle as to be liable to be snapped asunder at every breeze. You will think I need nothing but a tub for my habitation to make me a perfect female Diogenes …
But she did not disdain marriage; on the contrary, she might have wanted it too much. Channelling her desires into an evangelical fervour, she found spiritual reasons to abstain from the ‘earthly bliss’ of human love. Perhaps others could ‘live in near communion with God’ while relishing ‘all the lawful enjoyments the world can offer,’ she wrote to Maria, ‘but I confess that in my short experience and narrow sphere of action I have never been able to attain this; I find, as Dr Johnson said respecting his wine, total abstinence much easier than moderation.’ Her complex, crowded sentences, blending earnestness and irony, evoke an inward struggle to keep desires deemed immoderate, unacceptable, under tight control.
In 1840 she was attracted to her tutor Joseph Brezzi, who taught her Italian and German: she found him ‘anything but uninteresting, all external grace and mental power’. This plunged her into acute self-doubt and fear for the future, ‘such a consciousness that I am a negation of all that finds love and esteem as makes me anticipate for myself — no matter what’. As she approached her twenty-first birthday, her sense of being excluded from marriage, and at odds with worldly ways, became less pious and more anguished. She remained painfully ambivalent, fearful of her own excessive passion:
Every day’s experience seems to deepen the voice of foreboding that has long been telling me, ‘The bliss of reciprocated affection is not allotted to you under any form. Your heart must be widowed in this manner from the world, or you will never seek a better portion; a consciousness of possessing the fervent love of a human being would soon become your heaven, therefore it would be your curse.’
At a party she stood in a corner, unable to join in the dancing and flirting. Her head ached and throbbed, and by the end of the evening she had succumbed to ‘that most wretched and pitied of afflictions, hysteria, so that I regularly disgraced myself’.
All this misery did not make her any more attractive to potential suitors. Through those years the possibility of marriage glowed and pulsed in her psyche, a danger zone, tantalizing and terrifying, exposing her longing for love and her dread of rejection.
Copyright © 2023 by Clare Carlisle