George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes
gossiping London. Brabant insisted on introducing her to Strauss, whom he claimed as a kind of friend. The meeting, which took place over breakfast in a hotel in Cologne, turned out dismally. Strauss spoke little English and Mary Ann not much German. For this reason, or perhaps the buzzing presence of the insufferable Dr Brabant, Strauss appeared ‘strange and cast-down’ and the encounter drew to an embarrassed close.53
Once the exhilaration of being released from her task had settled, Mary Ann was in a position to assess the Strauss experience. Despite her dedication, a strain of ambivalence runs through her comments about the whole business of translation. It was, when all was said and done, not original or creative work, but ‘trifling’ stuff. She resented having had to worry about whether or not Parkes would come through with the money for something which was ‘not important enough to demand the sacrifice of one’s whole soul’.54 Even at this stage Mary Ann knew that she wanted to be something more than a mediator of other people’s words, although in later life she told a correspondent that at this point she stayed with translation because she felt that it was all she could do well.55 Although she had completed three substantial translations by the time she started to write fiction, she never drew attention to the fact and would have been quite happy for her involvement in them to have remained little known.
Yet in the immediate aftermath of Strauss her loftiness concealed considerable pride in her achievement. She was pleased with Charles Wicksteed’s review in the Prospective Review praising the ‘faithful, elegant, and scholarlike translation’.56 And when an old school friend approached her for advice about how she might earn her living as a translator, Mary Ann was quick to defend her own patch. Although she conceded that Miss Bradley Jenkins was clever, she poured scorn on her assumption that ‘she could sit from morn till noon, from noon till dewy eve, translating German or French without feeling the least fatigue’.57 It was one thing for Mary Ann Evans to think translation beneath her, quite another for an old classmate to assume she could do the same thing just as well.
One important legacy of the Strauss years was the deepening of Mary Ann’s friendship with Sara Hennell. They had first met by proxy, during those difficult months of the holy war in the spring of 1842. From Cara, Mary Ann had heard all about her clever elder sister who had worked as a governess to the Bonham Carter family. Sara, meanwhile, followed the trials of Cara’s interesting young neighbour through the letters she regularly received from Rosehill. The two women were finally introduced that summer, when Sara spent one of her many holidays in Coventry. Six weeks of music and talk laid the foundations of a friendship which would become the most important of both women’s lives for the next few years.
In many ways Sara Hennell was a clever, sophisticated version of that first governess in Mary Ann’s life, Maria Lewis. While Miss Lewis worked in the house of a Midlands clergyman, Miss Hennell had taught the daughters of a wealthy, cultured Unitarian Liberal MP. Instead of a relationship with her employers marked by resentment and insecurity, Sara Hennell was treated respectfully, enjoying the friendship of her eldest pupil long after she had ceased to teach her. While Maria Lewis’s notions of good behaviour were provincial and old-fashioned, Sara Hennell was used to fitting gracefully into life in the best circles. Most significantly, while Miss Lewis remained narrowly Evangelical, Sara Hennell set out from the Unitarianism of her childhood to explore and expand her faith through careful study of the new biblical criticism. She followed her brother Charles into print, publishing several books on theology throughout her long life.
When Mary Ann handed the letters she had so abruptly demanded back from Maria Lewis to Sara, she was signposting the similarities in the position the two women occupied in her life. Like Maria, Sara was located at a convenient distance, available for holiday visits and intense correspondence, but not the tedium and messiness of everyday contact. Mary Ann’s letters to Sara are less self-enclosed than those to Maria, but still there is a sense that she uses them as a way of exploring her own thoughts rather than as a means of exchanging ideas and feelings. One of the first letters she writes to Sara is the important reassessment of the lesson learned during the holy war, in which she elevates the community of feeling over the hair-splitting of intellectual debate. Throughout the correspondence it is Sara’s job to provide an informed listening ear rather than a provocative intervention in her young friend’s flow of thought. It is the idea of Sara, rather than Sara herself, which becomes the enabling force.
Mary Ann was guiltily aware of the narcissism running through her correspondence and indeed, the first few letters to Sara recall the early ones to Maria Lewis in their anxiety about appearing egotistical. ‘An unfortunate lady wrote a note, one page of which contained thirty I’s. I dare not count mine lest they should equal hers in number.’58 However, after a tentative start in which Mary Ann struggled to find a voice to speak to the Sara whom she held in her mind’s eye, the correspondence started to flow. Within a year, Mary Ann was addressing Sara as ‘Liebe Gemahlinn’, ‘Cara Sposa’ and ‘Beloved Achates’ – all terms which claimed her as something more than a friend.
Eliot’s early biographers, from her husband John Cross right down to Gordon Haight in the 1960s, felt uncomfortable with the language of sexual affection the two women used to one another. Cross simply left out the offending passages, while Haight anxiously explained them away in terms of contemporary conventions of female friendship. In fact, the language in the letters exceeds that used by even the closest women friends during the period. ‘This letter is only to tell you how sweet the genuine words of love in your letter to Cara have been to my soul. That you should really wish for me is a thought which I keep by me as a little cud to chew now and then,’ writes Mary Ann on 15 November 1847.59 Eighteen months later Mary Ann is teasing Sara with the idea that she may have been unfaithful. ‘I have given you a sad excuse for flirtation, but I have not been beyond seas long enough to make it lawful for you to take a new husband – therefore I come back to you with all a husband’s privileges and command you to love me … I sometimes talk to you in my soul as lovingly as Solomon’s Song.’60
By the autumn of 1842 it was already a joke in the Bray – Hennell circle that Mary Ann fell in love with everyone she met. At twenty-three she was still searching for that intense maternal love which her own mother had been unable to provide at the crucial stage in her development. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, neither Watts nor Brabant had been in a position to give her the kind of replacement mothering she craved. Both had backed off with differing degrees of grace. Sara Hennell, however, was in an altogether different position. Single and living with her mother, she was emotionally free to enter into an intense and absorbing relationship. Seven years older to the week than Mary Ann, she was young enough to seem a contemporary in the way that Maria Lewis never had, yet sufficiently mature to take on the role of mentor and nurturer.
The erotic language which Mary Ann used is a signal of the insecurity she felt about just how much Sara really loved her. By playing with ideas of possession, fidelity, flirtation and jealousy, she was both expressing and containing her fear that Sara might abandon her, just as Isaac Evans, Francis Watts, Robert Brabant and Robert Evans had all done. Yet by the time she was using analogies to Solomon’s Song in 1849 – the most explicitly erotic section of the Old Testament – she was already less dependent on the relationship. This echoed the pattern with Maria Lewis: it was at the point when Mary Ann wanted to leave the friendship that her declarations of love became most extravagant.
The reasons for the drift apart were familiar too. If Mary Ann was the one who used the language of love, it was Sara whose feelings stood the test of time. Unattached to any man except her brother, Sara’s devotion to Mary Ann did not wax and wane every time an interesting diversion appeared. Mary Ann, by contrast, used her relationship with Sara as a small child would her mother – as a secure emotional base from which to explore the world. Five years into the friendship the discrepancy in the amount the