George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes
sustained them, they did not rush to condemn her. As people who set great store by the authority of individual conscience in deciding outward behaviour, they would never have urged her towards hypocrisy. At the same time, they were aware that much of the crisis was due to the inability of either Mary Ann, Robert or Isaac Evans to inhabit a world of uncertainty, tolerance and compromise. Their duty, as they saw it, was to hold the family together long enough for a workable solution to emerge.
In the middle of March Robert Evans called on the Franklin sisters and, bewildered and exasperated, complained that Cara Bray had badgered his daughter into becoming a Unitarian. Miss Rebecca quickly responded that ‘she did not think Mrs. B. had shown any disposition to proselytize’. Along with Elizabeth Pears she impressed upon the old man that disowning Mary Ann was wrong and that ‘the world would condemn him’.48
In the meantime the energetic Miss Franklin tried everything she could to reconvert her star pupil. She asked a clever, well-read Baptist minister friend to talk to the girl. He returned from their encounter insisting, ‘That young lady must have had the devil at her elbow to suggest her doubts, for there was not a book that I recommended to her in support of Christian evidences that she had not read.’49
Next the Sibrees tried. In the small space of time she had known them Mary Ann had become attached to these pious, educated people who represented a family culture so different from her own. Mrs Sibree, an Evangelical Anglican, believed that ‘argument and expostulation might do much’ to bring Mary Ann back into the fold. For this reason she was careful to maintain a friendly welcome to the young neighbour. Mary Ann, for her part, was pathetically keen not to be rejected. ‘Now, Mrs Sibree, you won’t care to have anything more to do with me,’ she teased anxiously. ‘On the contrary,’ replied the older woman, ‘I shall feel more interested in you than ever.’50
First Mr Sibree himself tried to convince Mary Ann of the literal truth of the Gospels in a series of encounters so intense that Mary Ann was left shaking.51 Next Mrs Sibree asked the Revd Francis Watts, a professor of theology from Birmingham, to try. Watts was a highly educated man with a formidable grounding in the German biblical criticism that had done so much to cast doubt on the divine authority of the Scriptures. But he too confessed himself beaten, murmuring only, ‘She has gone into the question.’52
Despite the fact that the most subtle and clever men in the Midlands could not persuade Mary Ann to change her mind, on 15 May 1842 Robert Evans was able to record the end of the holy war: ‘Went to Trinity Church. Mary Ann went with me to day.’53 On the surface it seemed as if Mary Ann had done the very thing she had declared she would not – compromised her convictions for the sake of social respectability. But it was, as she began to see for the first time in her life, more complicated than that. Agreeing to attend church while keeping her own counsel involved giving up the glamour and notoriety of the past few months. At the height of the holy war she had written a letter to Maria Lewis in which she spoke of her realisation that the martyr is motivated by the same egotistical impulse as the court sycophant.54 It was gradually dawning on her that her high-minded rebellion had been fuelled by her old enemy, Ambition.
A month or so later there was another suggestion, this time in a letter written to Mrs Pears from Griff, that Mary Ann no longer believed herself fully justified in the actions she had taken: ‘on a retrospection of the past month, I regret nothing so much as my own impetuosity both of feeling and judging’.55 It was a conclusion which was to stay with her for the rest of her life, for decades later she told John Cross that ‘although she did not think she had been to blame, few things had occasioned her more regret than this temporary collision with her father, which might, she thought, have been avoided by a little management’.56
It was not that she believed her commitment to seek God outside a formal structure was mistaken, simply that she began to realise that she had other obligations no less important. Her needs as an individual had to be balanced against her duties as a daughter. Ultimately, what sustained humanity was not adhering blindly to a theory, political belief or religious practice, but the ties of feeling which bound one imperfect person to another. She would not give up her new beliefs for the sake of respectability, but she would forgo the glamour of shouting them from the roof-tops. She would endure people thinking that she had fudged her integrity if it meant that she could stay with the beloved father whom she had so deeply hurt. Far from giving up the authority of private conscience, she was stripping it of all its worldly rewards, including the glamour of being thought a martyr.
Eighteen months later, in October 1843, Mary Ann wrote out her fullest statement on the matter in the form of a letter to Sara Hennell, Cara’s elder sister, who had since become her best friend. By now she had had time to absorb and reflect upon the turbulence and pain of the holy war. Her personal feelings of regret had been broadened into the kind of generalised observation on human nature which would come to typify the wise, tolerant narrative voice of her novels. ‘The first impulse of a young and ingenuous mind is to withhold the slightest sanction from all that contains even a mixture of supposed error. When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.’ This soul, continues Mary Ann, believes that its new state of spiritual awareness more than compensates for the old world of error and confusion left behind. What’s more, it is determined to spread the good news by proselytising to all and sundry. A year or two on, however, and the situation appears quite different. ‘Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union. We find that the intellectual errors which we once fancied were a mere incrustation have grown into the living body and that we cannot in the majority of causes, wrench them away without destroying vitality.’ Finally she broadens her argument, linking her own experience within the Evans family to a model of the world at large.
The results of non-conformity in a family are just an epitome of what happens on a larger scale in the world. An influential member chooses to omit an observance which in the minds of all the rest is associated with what is highest and most venerable. He cannot make his reasons intelligible, and so his conduct is regarded as a relaxation of the hold that moral ties had on him previously. The rest are infected with the disease they imagine in him; all the screws by which order was maintained are loosened, and in more than one case a person’s happiness may be ruined by the confusion of ideas which took the form of principles.57
The conclusions Mary Ann drew from the holy war prepared the way for her response to the difficult situation, fifteen years later, of being the unmarried ‘wife’ of George Henry Lewes. Living outside the law, she was socially ostracised in the same way Robert Evans feared would result from her non-attendance at church. However, much to the chagrin of her feminist friends, she refused to be known by her single name and insisted on being called ‘Mrs Lewes’. She steered clear of giving support to a whole cluster of causes, including female suffrage, which might be supposed to be dear to the heart of a woman who had shocked convention by living with a man outside wedlock. This fundamental separation of private conscience from public behaviour was the founding point of Eliot’s social conservatism. The fact that she loved a married man might authorise her own decision to live with him, but it could never justify a wider reorganisation of public morality. Family and community remained the best place for nurturing the individual moral self. Social change must come gradually and only after a thousand individuals had slightly widened their perceptions of how to live, bending the shape of public life to suit its new will. Revolution, liberation and upheaval were to have no place in Mary Ann’s moral world.
Nor