George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes
href="#litres_trial_promo">7 Instead, she promised she would look out for a position in a private household for Maria, and even asked Signor Brezzi if he knew of a family that needed a governess. But when a possible situation did present itself in May 1841, Mary Ann took the opportunity to drop hints to Maria about the change in her own religious opinions.
Of course in Mr. W’s family perfect freedom of thought and action in religious matters would be understood as an unquestioned right, but as education, to be such, implies aggression on supposed error of every kind and incubation of truth it is probable you would not choose to put yourself in a position apparently requiring the anomalous conditions of neutrality and command. It is folly to talk of educating children without giving their opinions a bias. This is always given whether weak or strong, not always nor perhaps in a large proportion of cases, a permanent one, but one instrumental in determining their point of repose.8
The message is coded, though easily unpicked. In matters of religious faith, Mary Ann supports the principle of ‘perfect freedom of thought and action’ in preference to Maria’s assumed desire to stamp out ‘supposed error of every kind’. She finishes with an oblique warning that while Maria may have used her authority as a governess to shape Mary Ann’s early religious views, her former pupil is now beginning to think for herself.
Throughout the summer of 1841 Mary Ann’s letters to Maria continue in this contradictory fashion. Elaborate pledges of affection are followed by hurtful snubs. On 12 August she declared, ‘How should I love to join you at Margate now that you are alone!’ before bewailing the fact that ‘I have no one who enters into my pleasures or 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.’9 How wounding to the woman who had spent the last decade as Mary Ann’s chief confidante. How could the girl claim that she had no one who understood her? What were these ‘yearnings’ and ‘temptations’ which separated them? Once again, Mary Ann realised she had gone too far, adding disingenuously, ‘Pray regard all I have written as cancelled in my own mind.’10 But Maria could not. She wrote back anxiously demanding reassurances that nothing had changed. The response she got was inflatedly insincere, declaring, ‘Yes, I firmly believe our love is of a nature not to be changed by place or time.’11 Maria, by now rattled, countered with ‘a very ambiguous reply’ and suggested that it might not be a good idea for her to visit at Christmas. Mary Ann did her best to sound reassuring in her next letter, but actually came across as evasive, skidding off into a description of the glorious autumn weather.12 Then, on 16 October 1841, she gave the clearest indication yet that something was different, if not actually wrong. In an abrupt postscript on that day she writes, ‘May I call you Maria? I feel our friendship too serious a thing to endure even an artificial name. And restore to me Mary Ann.’13 Despite her reasoning that a return to their real names reinstated the dignity of the friendship, it sounded more as if Mary Ann wanted to withdraw from a correspondence which had become a bore.
But turning Veronica back into Maria did not have the desired effect. Far from easing up on her demands for reassurance, Maria redoubled her anxious enquiries to know exactly what was going on. Exasperated by her growing revulsion for the older woman, on 23 October Mary Ann let loose with a brutal letter, conspicuously lacking the respect due to a former teacher.
You are veritably an overreaching friend, my dear Maria, not content with my scribbling a couple of sheets to every quarter of the moon, you even insist on dictating the subjects of the same, and the one you now impose on me is at once so sterile, so incomprehensible and so unfascinating that I should be quite justified in refusing to descant thereon. If you complain that my letters become increasingly illegible, just take into consideration the necessary effect of having to write a few pages almost daily. This has been the case with me of late, and I am likely to be more and more busy, if I succeed in a project that is just now occupying my thoughts and feelings.14
Maria, unsurprisingly, did not reply and Mary Ann realised that this time she was in danger of losing her only intimate friend: despite her boastful teasing, her new contacts in Coventry had not yet yielded the kind of emotional intimacy she craved. In a continuation of that earlier pattern of assertion followed by withdrawal, she wrote a few days later with muffled apology – ‘tell me that you forgive my – something between brusquerie and confusion in my last letter’.15
Somewhat mollified, Maria responded by again raising the vexed subject of her Christmas visit. After a delay of a week and a half, Mary Ann wrote back with the strongest hint yet that something profound had happened to her which Maria might not like. She mentions that her ‘whole soul has been engrossed in the most interesting of all enquiries for the last few days, and to what result my thoughts may lead I know not—possibly to one that will startle you, but my only desire is to know the truth, my only fear to cling to error’. Then she continues urgently, ‘Think – is there any conceivable alteration in me that would prevent your coming to me at Christmas? I long to have a friend such as you are I think I may say alone to me, to unburthen every thought and difficulty – for I am still a solitary, though near a city.’16
Maria evidently wrote back reassuring Mary Ann that there could be no ‘conceivable alteration’ in her friend that would make her not want to spend Christmas with her. Word of Mary Ann’s religious crisis may have already reached Maria Lewis through their network of mutual acquaintances. Or perhaps she put Mary Ann’s restlessness down to the fact that the Evans family was going through one of its periodic crises.
Isaac was about to be married. Some time previously, probably when he was living with his tutor in Birmingham, he had met a woman called Sarah Rawlins. A large dowry from her leather-merchant father sweetened the fact that she was ten years older than the prospective groom. The two families had long been acquainted and Mr Rawlins had been a pallbearer at Christiana’s funeral. And with a son in the Church, the whole family was clearly working its passage away from Trade. Like his father before him, Isaac was shrewdly cautious when it came to choosing a bride. Sarah, as with Christiana in the generation before, appeared to have most of the qualities required in the wife of a young man determined to consolidate his position as a gentleman.
Isaac was a ditherer in emotional matters, especially when their ramifications reached so far. If he and Sarah married, the obvious move was for them to become the new master and mistress of Griff, especially now that Isaac was already running much of the business. But in that case, where would Robert and Mary Ann live? Doubtless Sarah would be quite happy to look after the old man, but whether she really wanted her young sister-in-law watching her every move was quite another matter. Mary Ann might not have relished every aspect of housekeeping, but she depended on it for her sense of identity and was not about to relinquish it easily. ‘I will only hint’, she writes to Maria Lewis in May 1840, ‘that there seems a probability of my being … severed from all the ties that have hitherto given my existence the semblance of a usefulness beyond that of making up the requisite quantum of animal matter in the universe.’17 Toppled from her throne, she was unlikely to become an easy and serene deputy to Sarah. Her role henceforth would be marginal and ambiguous, involving a great deal of routine needlework and, in time, childcare. More specifically, it would mean taking instructions from the woman who had usurped her in Isaac’s life.
Such a potentially unhappy arrangement might well have caused Isaac to think twice about marrying Sarah at all. In July 1840 Mary Ann reports that her brother has gone to Paris and that the marriage is uncertain ‘so I know not what will be our situation’.18 Two months later the couple are re-engaged, although this time Mary Ann is cautiously optimistic that Isaac and Sarah will