George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes
‘I Fall Not In Love With Everyone’
FROM NOW ON Mary Ann spent every free moment with the Brays. Although Rosehill was less than a mile from Bird Grove, the contrast could hardly have been greater. While the Evans household was conservative, conventional and nominally devout, the Brays’ was radical, avant-garde and truth-seeking. Here was the perfect atmosphere for Mary Ann to explore her new beliefs and the emotional release that came with them.
At the time Mary Ann first went to Rosehill Charles Bray was at the height of his reforming zeal. Prosperous, young and boundlessly energetic, he pursued a bundle of good and forward-thinking causes in the city and beyond. A passionate advocate of non-sectarian education, he built a school for children from dissenting families who had been excluded from Anglican institutions. He campaigned for sanitary reform and set up a public dispensary. He ran an anti-Corn Law campaign. Other projects were more visionary than feasible. He built a teetotal Working Men’s Club to lure labourers away from pubs, set up an allotment scheme so that they could produce their own food and established a co-operative store to undercut local shop prices. Unfortunately, the working classes of Coventry did not share Bray’s ideas about how they should live. Both the club and the gardening scheme failed through lack of support, while the store was forced to close by local shopkeepers determined to retain their monopoly.
Bray’s generosity and intellectual open-mindedness – many called it sloppiness – meant that he attracted friends easily. Rosehill had quickly become established as the place where any visiting reformer, philosopher or thinker could be assured of a warm welcome. Indeed, said Bray in the puffed-up autobiography he wrote at the end of his life, anyone who ‘was supposed to be a “little cracked”, was sent up to Rosehill’.1 During these years Mary Ann met virtually everyone who was anyone in free-thinking, progressive society. The socialist Robert Owen, the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mental health reformer Dr John Conolly were just a few of the people who took their turn sitting on the bear rug which the Brays spread out in the garden every summer. Here, under a favourite acacia tree, they spent long afternoons in vigorous debate, intellectual gossip and various degrees of flirtation.
For just as the Brays challenged conventional thinking in every area of life, so their attitudes to marriage and sexual love were markedly unorthodox. Nor was this openness confined to daring chat. As people who thought deep and hard about how to live, they had come to the conclusion that the monogamy demanded by the marriage vows did not suit human nature, or at least did not suit theirs. Although enduringly attached to one another, both had taken long-term lovers.
Just how this arrangement had come about, and how openly it was acknowledged by others, is obscured by the reticence which the couple were obliged to observe in order to remain active in Coventry public life. Indeed, the main account of their irregular marriage was written down in code and not untangled until the 1970s. The stenographer was the phrenologist George Combe, who examined Bray’s head for lumps and bumps in 1851 and concluded that his ‘animal’ qualities were impressively predominant. Probing further, Combe extracted the following confession from his friend: ‘At twelve years of age he was seduced by his father’s Cook and indulged extensively in illicit intercourse with women. He abstained from 18 to 22 but suffered in health. He married and his wife has no children. He consoled himself with another woman by whom he had a daughter. He adopted his child with his wife’s consent and she now lives with him. He still keeps the mother of the child and has another by her.’2
This makes sense of some odd references in Mary Ann’s letters to Cara Bray during May 1845. Writing from Coventry to her friend on holiday in Hastings, Mary Ann says reassuringly, ‘Of Baby you shall hear to-morrow, but do not be alarmed.’3 A couple of days later she writes, ‘The Baby is quite well and not at all triste on account of the absence of Papa and Mamma.’4 Whoever this baby was, it did not last long at Rosehill. A month later an entry in Cara’s diary suggests that the baby was removed from the household. Clearly this first attempt at adoption had not worked out. Baby’s real mother may have wanted her back or perhaps Cara, while dedicated to young children through her teaching and writing, did not take to this particular infant. An attempt the following year with another baby, sister of the first, was successful and this time the Brays adopted Elinor, known as Nelly. Over the years Mary Ann became attached to the girl and when news of her early death came in 1865 it touched her deeply.
The fact that the first baby had been returned to its mother suggests that the Brays’ family life did not run as rationally or smoothly as Charles liked to believe. Although the details are sketchy, it appears that for a time he tried to get the children’s mother, Hannah Steane, to live at Rosehill as nursemaid. One version has Cara accepting this, but changing her mind when Hannah produced an illegitimate son, named Charles after his father. Henceforth Hannah, now reincarnated as Mrs Charles Gray, wife of a conveniently absent travelling salesman, was established in a nearby house – into which Bray could slip discreetly – with her growing family, five excluding Nelly.5
Cara’s answering love affair was more circumspect. According to a gossipy report from her sister-in-law in 1851, ‘Mrs Bray is and has been for years decidedly in love with Mr Noel, and … Mr Bray promotes her wish that Mr Noel should visit Rosehill as much as possible.’ Edward Noel was an illegitimate cousin of Byron’s wife, a poet, translator and owner of an estate on a Greek island. He was also married with a family. Whether he and Cara became physically intimate is not clear: one version maintains this was an unreciprocated passion. All the same, once Noel’s wife died from consumption in 1845, the way was clear for him to become a familiar fixture on the edge of Rosehill life.6
The Brays’ was the first of three sexually unconventional households which had a great impact on the young Mary Ann, whose romantic experience at this point was confined to a crush on her language teacher. Later she would find herself in a curious ménage à quatre with John Chapman, the publisher with whom she boarded in London during the early 1850s. And her subsequent dilemma over whether to live with George Henry Lewes was the result of his inability to divorce on the grounds that he had condoned his wife’s affair with another man.
It would be good to think that these open marriages were founded on a principled rejection of the ownership of one person by another, and in particular of women by men, of the kind which John Stuart Mill would set out in The Subjection of Women in 1869. But in fact there was more than a whiff of male sexual opportunism and hypocrisy about the various set-ups. Charles Bray, after all, maintained in public that ‘Matrimony is the law of our being, and it is in that state that Amativeness comes into its proper use and action, and is the least likely to be indulged in excess’,7 yet he did not confine himself to adultery with Hannah. There were rumours that ‘the Don Juan of Coventry’ had previously enjoyed an affair with Mary Hennell, one of Cara’s elder sisters. And there was even a suggestion that he and Mary Ann became lovers at some point. Certainly Maria Lewis objected to the way the two clung together and Sara Hennell admitted after Mary Ann’s death that she had always disapproved of the girl depending too much on male affection – perhaps specifically on the affection of her brother-in-law.8 Bessie Rayner Parkes, who was later to become one of Mary Ann’s best friends in London, certainly always believed that Mary Ann and Charles Bray had been lovers.9
Cara Bray, too, was inconsistent on the question