George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes
fall in love with her if she does not belong to the Church.41
As if to confirm the truth of this pounds-shillings-and-pence argument, Robert Evans arranged to give up the lease of Bird Grove and set about preparing to move to a small cottage on Lord Aylesford’s estate. True to form, he would not make it clear whether or not he expected Mary Ann to come with him. This frustrating silence continued even once she had returned from Meriden to Foleshill at the end of February.
In a desperate attempt to provoke her father into communication, Mary Ann wrote him a letter, the only one to him which survives. It is an extraordinary document for a girl of twenty-two to write – intellectually cogent, emotionally powerful. She starts by making clear the grounds for her rebellion. She assures him that she has not, contrary to his fears, become a Unitarian. Nor is she rejecting God, simply claiming the right to seek Him without the clutter of man-made dogma and doctrine. As far as the Bible is concerned, ‘I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life … to be most dishonourable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness.’ For this reason, continues Mary Ann, it would be impossible for her ‘to join in worship which I wholly disapprove’ simply for the sake of social appearance. She then proceeds to discuss the vexed issue of ‘my supposed interests’ and the financial aspects of the case. She understands that now she has put herself beyond the reach of respectable society, it is unfair to expect her father to maintain the expensive Coventry house. The last thing she wants is to syphon off capital which will eventually be divided among all five Evans children. Then she turns to the question of where she is to go next.
I should be just as happy living with you at your cottage at Packington or any where else if I can thereby minister in the least to your comfort – of course unless that were the case I must prefer to rely on my own energies and resources feeble as they are – I fear nothing but voluntarily leaving you. I can cheerfully do it if you desire it and shall go with deep gratitude for all the tenderness and rich kindness you have never been tired of shewing me. So far from complaining I shall joyfully submit if as a proper punishment for the pain I have most unintentionally given you, you determine to appropriate any provision you may have intended to make for my future support to your other children whom you may consider more deserving.
She ends the letter with a resounding fanfare of self-justification. If Robert had any doubts about the fundamental shift in Mary Ann’s beliefs, he had only to notice the absence of the usual Evangelical references – to God, to heaven, to the Scriptures – and the substitution of language borrowing from (though not necessarily endorsing) Charles Bray’s Necessitarianism and Cara Bray’s Unitarianism. ‘As a last vindication of herself from one who has no one to speak for her I may be permitted to say that if ever I loved you I do so now, if ever I sought to obey the laws of my Creator and to follow duty wherever it may lead me I have that determination now and the consciousness of this will support me though every being on earth were to frown upon me.’42
Robert Evans was unmoved. A few days later he told Lord Aylesford that he would soon be going back to the cottage at Packington and a week after that he put the lease of Bird Grove with an agent. In response, Mary Ann decided to go into lodgings in Leamington and look for a job as a governess. Mrs Pears promised to go with her to help her settle in. With Mary Ann’s obvious erudition it might seem as though any family would be delighted to employ her. But her unorthodox religious views were not obvious recommendations for a post in a provincial middle-class home. And even if she did manage to find one, the unhappy example of Maria Lewis meant that she was under no illusions about the hardship of a governess’s life, with its ‘doleful lodgings, scanty meals’. Still, anything was better than the current ‘wretched suspense’.43
In the end Mary Ann never got to Leamington. By the middle of March Isaac had given up ‘schooling’ and started mediating and the situation looked as though it might be resolved. Cara Bray reported the whole sequence of events in a letter written to her sister Mary. She tells how she had met Mary Ann in the street and had noticed ‘a face very different from the long dismal one she has lately worn’.44 The reason for the change of mood was that Isaac had sent a conciliatory reply to the letter she had written to her father explaining her motives. In this, Isaac accepted that Mary Ann had no wish to upset the family and acknowledged that she had been treated ‘very harshly’ simply for wanting to act according to her principles. He stressed that ‘the sending her away’ was entirely Robert’s idea and had nothing to do with money, but arose simply because ‘he could not bear the place after what had happened’. Isaac then finished the letter by ‘begging’ Mary Ann not to go into lodgings, but to come to stay at Griff instead, ‘not doubting but that Mr Evans would send for her back again very soon’. In the meanwhile, explains Cara, Mr Evans has taken Bird Grove off the market and will stay there until Michaelmas, ‘and before that time we quite expect that his daughter will be reinstated and all right again’.45
But Cara was jumping ahead, perhaps because, despite what she publicly protested, she felt responsible for Mary Ann’s religious rebellion and wanted to reassure herself that no great harm had been done. Certainly Griff provided a welcome and welcoming interlude for Mary Ann, who was delighted not only with Isaac’s new friendliness towards her, but also with the way in which old acquaintances greeted her cheerfully, despite knowing all about her unfortunate position. However, according to a letter she wrote from there on 31 March, nothing had really changed: Robert Evans was pushing ahead with improvements on the Packington cottage, where he presumably intended to live alone. Agonised by the lack of clarity about her own future, Mary Ann swung between defiant assertion and indirect pleading, declaring vehemently to Mrs Pears that she did ‘not intend to remain here longer than three weeks, or at the very farthest, a month, and if I am not then recalled, I shall write for definite directions. I must have a home, not a visiting place. I wish you would learn something from my Father, and send me word how he seems disposed.’46
With the three weeks up, there was a small amount of progress to report. After an unexpected intervention from Isaac’s wife Sarah, Mr Evans had agreed that Mary Ann should return to live with him. The young Mrs Evans had explained to the old man that making Mary Ann’s material comfort dependent on a change of heart was the best way of ensuring she would never compromise. Doubtless Sarah had no intention of sharing or giving up Griff now that she was happily settled, and was keen to argue for reconciliation and a continuation of the status quo. But although Mr Evans had softened sufficiently to agree to take his daughter back, he still could not decide where they were to make their home. In Coventry she had become ‘the town gazing-stock’ and Evans was not certain whether he could bear the embarrassment of continuing to live there. His latest idea was to move to what Mary Ann described gloomily as ‘a most lugubrious looking’ house in the parish of Fillongley, where Lord Aylesford was one of the chief landowners. This constant change of plan was sending Mary Ann to the brink: ‘I must have a settled home if my mind is to become healthy and composed, and I shall therefore write to my Father in a week and request his decision. It is important, I know, for him as well as myself that I should return to him without delay, and unless I draw a circle round him and require an answer within it, he will go on hesitating and hoping for weeks and weeks.’47 Presumably Mary Ann drew that circle and got a satisfactory reply. By 30 April she was back at Foleshill with her father. A bargain had been struck: she would accompany him to church while he would let her think whatever she liked during the services.
While the Evanses were sulking, conferring and writing letters to one another about money, Mary Ann’s Evangelical and dissenting friends stood by, ready to do what they could. Elizabeth Pears, Rebecca Franklin and the Sibree family displayed tact and sensitivity in their dealings with both Mary Ann and her father. Although disappointed