George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes
intimate with Edward Noel, she reacted with Mrs Grundy-ish horror when Mary Ann went to live with George Henry Lewes in 1854. For five years she refused to communicate properly with her friend, let alone to see her. That a woman as progressive and principled as Cara should display such embarrassed confusion over sex outside marriage is a reminder of how deeply entrenched were codes of respectable behaviour – especially female behaviour – in even the most liberal Victorian circles.
Although the Brays’ attitude could seem contradictory, in other lights it was subtle and realistic. Just as Mary Ann had learned during the holy war that spectacular rebellion is often the result of wilful egotism, so the Brays realised that there was little to be gained by publicly embracing the open relationships advocated by their friend the socialist Utopian Robert Owen. They preferred to remain within society and work for its improvement, rather than withdraw to an isolated and principled position on its margins. Whether the world thought them scandalous or hypocritical did not concern them. It was this example of adherence to a complex inner necessity, regardless of how one’s behaviour might be interpreted, which Mary Ann now absorbed. It would stand her in good stead in the years to come when she lived with Lewes and, on his death, went through an Anglican marriage service with John Cross. Her apparent inconsistency bewildered family and friends. Isaac Evans was scandalised by the union with Lewes, but appeased by the marriage to Cross. Her old friend Maria Congreve, on the other hand, was serene about Lewes, but disappointed by what she perceived to be the hypocrisy of the 1880 wedding service. In these apparent switches of principle Mary Ann demonstrated her determination to live flexibly according to the fluctuations of her own inner life rather than in observance of other people’s needs and rules.
Whether Mary Ann actually had a physical relationship with Charles Bray remains frustratingly unclear. The fact that all her letters to him prior to 1848 have disappeared suggests that they were at least emotionally intimate and that someone wanted the evidence destroyed. But even if they were lovers, it was more than a sexual affair that was responsible for the blossoming of Mary Ann’s personality during these Rosehill years. The loving acceptance of Cara Bray and the intellectual companionship of Sara Hennell gave her a sense of being wanted – the first she had experienced since those early days with Isaac. Her young neighbour, Mary Sibree, recalled that ‘Mr and Mrs Bray and Miss Hennell, with their friends, were her world, and on my saying to her once, as we closed the garden door [at Rosehill] together, that we seemed to be entering a Paradise, she said, “I do indeed feel that I shut the world out when I shut that door.”’ 10
This new happiness permeated every part of Mary Ann’s being. Now she played the piano and sang in front of other people without bursting into tears. Instead of refusing to read novels, she argued for them on the grounds that ‘they perform an office for the mind which nothing else can’.11 She relaxed sufficiently about her appearance to allow Cara to paint her portrait – a sweet, flattering water-colour which fooled no one and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.12 She accompanied the Brays on holidays to other parts of the country and became a favourite with the friends and family they visited on the way.
With Mary Ann soaking up every new subject which the Brays pushed her way, it was inevitable that she should become interested in phrenology. The practice of bump-reading might seem like so much mumbo-jumbo now, but during the mid-nineteenth century it held considerable appeal for those who were trying to make connections between man’s physical constitution and his psychological processes. During a trip to London in July 1844 Charles Bray persuaded Mary Ann to have a cast made of her head – luckily it was no longer necessary to have one’s hair shaved off – and set about analysing its shape. Writing at the end of his life, and after hers, Bray naturally relied on post hoc knowledge to give his findings extra bite. In the following extract from his autobiography he creeps from phrenological ‘fact’ to interpretations of Mary Ann’s subsequent behaviour.
In the Feelings, the Animal and Moral regions are about equal; the moral being quite sufficient to keep the animal in order and in due subservience, but would not be spontaneously active. The social feelings were very active, particularly the adhesiveness. She was of a most affectionate disposition, always requiring some one to lean upon, preferring what has hitherto been considered the stronger sex to the other and more impressible. She was not fitted to stand alone.13
As Mary Ann’s willingness to contemplate phrenology suggests, her intellectual relationship with others softened during this period. During the high drama of the holy war, the competitive Evangelical had given way to the combative free-thinker. Now, during the 1840s, Mary Ann began the long journey towards empathy and tolerance which was to mark the mature narrative voice of George Eliot. A passage from Bray’s autobiography describes her at the very beginning of this bumpy process.
I consider her the most delightful companion I have ever known; she knew everything. She had little self-assertion; her aim was always to show her friends off to the best advantage – not herself. She would polish up their witticisms, and give them the full credit of them. But there were two sides; hers was the temperament of genius which has always its sunny and shady side. She was frequently very depressed – and often very provoking, as much so as she could be agreeable – and we had violent quarrels; but the next day, or whenever we met, they were quite forgotten, and no allusions made to them.14
Increasingly Mary Ann was able to move beyond these violent reactions and come to rest in a position of disciplined tolerance towards others. This was particularly true in matters of faith. In the immediate aftermath of the holy war Mrs Sibree had been doubtful about letting Mary Sibree take German lessons from Mary Ann in case the older girl should unsettle her daughter’s religious beliefs. Mr Sibree, however, did not ‘see any danger’ and the lessons began on Saturday afternoons. During these Mary Ann was always careful to steer clear of theological discussion, to the disappointment of Mary who tried to provoke the infamous Miss Evans into saying something controversial. Every time Mary tried to steer the conversation round to a dangerous topic, Mary Ann countered with a gentle reminder of ‘the positive immorality of frittering … [time] away in ill-natured or in poor profitless talk’. On one occasion the sixteen-year-old girl announced provocatively ‘how sure I was that there could be no true morality without evangelical belief. “Oh, it is so, is it?” she [Mary Ann] said, with the kindest smile, and nothing further passed.’15
Mary Ann’s deflective comments concealed the kernel of her argument with organised religion. In a letter of 3 August 1842 she told the Revd Francis Watts, one of the men who had tried to argue her out of infidelity, that feeling obliged to serve humanity out of a sense of duty and fear of punishment worked against ‘that choice of the good for its own sake, that answers my ideal’.16 Now that she was no longer burdened with having to save her soul through conspicuous good works, Mary Ann was able to concentrate on what really needed to be done. Finding that she was unsuited to some kinds of philanthropy – an attempt to help Cara at the infants’ school had not been a success – she thought carefully about how she could be most useful. Often this turned out to be as inglorious as making a direct financial contribution. When one of the Sibrees’ servants became burdened with the responsibility for newly orphaned nephews and nieces, she offered to pay for the care and education of ‘a chubby-faced little girl four or five years of age’.17 Again, she contributed two guineas to the Industrial Home for young women for which Mrs Sibree was collecting funds. ‘I tell of this’, says Mary Sibree, writing after Mary Ann’s death, ‘as one among many indications of Miss Evans’s ever-growing zeal to serve humanity in a broader way, motivated as she felt by a higher aim than what she termed “desire to save one’s soul by making up coarse flannel for the poor”.’18
Other people sensed this expansion in Mary Ann’s inner life and responded