George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes
and servants who now came to her with their problems, ‘to an extent’, remembered Mary Sibree, ‘that quite oppressed her’.19 It was a phenomenon which was to last the rest of her life. Seven years later, when she was staying alone in a Geneva pension, she found herself a magnet for every lonely or anxious guest who needed someone to talk to. Twenty years on she was regularly besieged in letter and in person by men and women from around the world who were convinced that she, and she alone, could understand their story.
Thanks to growing family pressure, Mary Sibree had little contact with Mary Ann over the next few decades. But in 1873, as Mrs John Cash, wife of a prosperous manufacturer and the new mistress of Rosehill, she visited the woman who was now known as Marian Lewes in London. ‘It touched me deeply to find how much she had retained of her kind interest in all that concerned me and mine, and I remarked on this to Mr Lewes, who came to the door with my daughter and myself at parting. “Wonderful sympathy,” I said. “Is it not?” said he; and when I added, inquiringly, “The power lies there?” “Unquestionably it does,” was his answer.’20
Mary Ann spent her first day home after the holy war at Rosehill reading letters which Charles Hennell had written to his sister Cara while working on An Inquiry. It was not just intellectual curiosity that made the experience so delightful. The fact that Hennell had responded to his sister’s religious doubts by devoting two years of his hard-pressed time to produce this magnificent piece of work resonated deep within Mary Ann. Her own brother Isaac had met his sister’s crisis of conscience with coldness, calculation and a complete lack of understanding. Charles Hennell, by contrast, seemed to have all the qualities desirable in an ideal brother – lover.
So it was painful to learn that he was already in love with someone else. Elizabeth Rebecca Brabant was the talented daughter of an intellectually minded doctor whose patients had included Thomas Moore and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, she got her nickname – ‘Rufa’ – from some verses the latter had written about her striking red hair. Dr Robert Brabant had taught himself German in order to study the work of eminent theologians such as David Friedrich Strauss, who had done so much to reveal the man-made origins of the Bible. In 1839 Dr Brabant was an inevitable early reader of Charles Hennell’s An Inquiry, which reached many of the same conclusions as Strauss. Delighted by the book, Brabant invited its author to his home in Devizes. Hennell, in turn, was enchanted by Rufa Brabant, to whom he quickly proposed. The good doctor, however, opposed the match when he examined the young man and found him to be consumptive. It is hard, now, to conceive the terror that tuberculosis generated a hundred and fifty years ago: the nearest analogy might be to finding that one has a slow-growing malignant tumour. The young couple agreed not to see each other but, by way of continuing their relationship, Rufa undertook to translate Strauss’s most important book, Das Leben Jesu (1835–6), for her suitor. Remarkably, Hennell, who did not know German, had written An Inquiry without detailed knowledge of its contents.
When Rufa arrived in Coventry to visit the Brays in October 1842 it was inevitable that Mary Ann would not like her. All the more so when Charles Hennell turned up the next day, presumably against Dr Brabant’s wishes. Rufa not only had the kind of hair which inspired poets, she read German theology in the original and enjoyed the love of a kind, clever man. However, during the next three weeks Mary Ann was able to draw on the emotional discipline which was eventually to become an integrated part of her personality. Writing to Sara Hennell on 3 November, she admits that her first impression of Rufa ‘was unfavourable and unjust, for in spite of what some caustic people may say, I fall not in love with everyone’. On further acquaintance, she is happy to report: ‘I admire your friend exceedingly; there is a tender seriousness about her that is very much to my taste, and thorough amiability and retiredness, all which qualities make her almost worthy of Mr Hennell.’21
There followed a tricky nine months during which events conspired to push Mary Ann and the officially unengaged Charles Hennell together. In March 1843 he turned up at Rosehill for a fortnight. In May he accompanied her and the Brays on a visit to Malvern. In July things came to a painful head when the same party, this time supplemented by Rufa, took a longer trip to Wales. During a ten-day stay in Tenby, Rufa badgered Mary Ann into attending a ball at the pavilion. Excruciatingly, no one asked her to dance. Doubtless Rufa was trying to be kind, but the news that she had resumed her engagement to Charles Hennell, this time with her father’s approval, only pointed up the differences between the two young women. Both were clever and serious. But one was pretty and well connected and the other was not. And it was Rufa, with her magnificent hair and a pedigree rooted in the intellectual middle classes, who had bagged Charles Hennell.
There was a consolation prize of sorts. Mary Ann was to be a bridesmaid at the wedding, which took place on 1 November in London. The service was conducted by the country’s leading Unitarian minister, William Johnson Fox, at the Finsbury Chapel. Escorted by Charles Bray, Mary Ann spent a week in London, staying with Sara Hennell, who lived with her mother in Hackney. When she had previously visited the city in 1838 with Isaac, it had been during the height of her Evangelical phase. The gloomy teenager who had glowered at the suggestion of a trip to the theatre had been replaced by a young woman eager to pack as many cultural experiences as possible into the time available. But despite the fun and bustle, Mary Ann was still feeling left out and left behind by the Brabant – Hennell marriage. This was her third time as a bridesmaid and it was hard to imagine that it would ever be her turn to enjoy the loving attention which other women seemed to claim by right. So in these dispiriting circumstances it was delightful to receive an invitation from Rufa’s father, asking her to accompany him home to Devizes for a holiday. She had first met the sixty-two-year-old Dr Brabant when he had joined the Brays’ party in Wales and, persuaded by the fact that Rufa had come into some money, had given permission for the young couple to marry. If she could not have Charles Hennell as a brother – lover, then perhaps she might claim Robert Brabant as a more congenial substitute for the still disapproving and distant Robert Evans.
Luckily, Dr Brabant was ripe for the role in which he had been cast. He begged Mary Ann to consider Devizes her home for as long as she was deprived of a permanent arrangement in Warwickshire. Even now, eighteen months after the holy war, Isaac and Robert Evans were still making noises about moving Mary Ann back to the country. To have a charming, educated older man telling her that she must consider his library as her particular domain must have been intoxicating. She responded eagerly to his attentions, rapturously boasting in a letter to Cara that her host had christened her ‘Deutera, which means second and sounds a little like daughter’.22 Her next letter, on 20 November, continues in the same breathless vein. ‘I am in a little heaven here, Dr. Brabant being its archangel … time would fail me to tell of all his charming qualities. We read, walk and talk together, and I am never weary of his company.’23 She wrote to her father asking him if she could extend her stay to 13 December.
Not everyone in the Devizes household shared Mary Ann’s view of paradise, especially Dr Brabant’s wife and her sister. The latter, Miss Susan Hughes, had alerted Mrs Brabant, who was blind, to the fact that Miss Evans was permanently entwined with the doctor. Mrs Brabant immediately wrote to Rufa to ask her to tear herself away from her new husband and come down to Devizes to see if she could calm her over-ardent friend. Rufa in turn told her sister-in-law Cara what was going on and begged her to caution Mary Ann by letter about her behaviour. Miss Hughes, meanwhile, took the most direct path by advising Mary Ann on the train times home, three weeks before her proposed departure.
Mary Ann was too enraptured to take the hint. She insisted on extending her stay and when Cara wrote warning her to beware of Dr Brabant, she snapped back, ‘He really is a finer character than you think.’24 The time had come for Mrs Brabant, whom Mary Ann had previously described as ‘perfectly polite’, to put her foot down. She demanded that Mary Ann depart immediately, a fortnight early, and swore that if she were ever to return then she, Mrs Brabant, would leave at once. It would be nice to