George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes

      Observing his wife’s temperament in later life, John Cross believed that the pony incident provided the key to understanding George Eliot’s personality. ‘In her moral development she showed, from the earliest years, the trait that was most marked in her all through life – namely, the absolute need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and to whom she should be all in all.’⁴⁰ Later biographers have been quick to point out how this passage has become the cornerstone for a character reading of Eliot as needy, dependent and leaning heavily on male lovers and women friends for approval. Yet Eliot’s later comments on her own personality, together with the pattern of her subsequent relationships, suggest that Cross was doing no more than telling it how it was. The early withdrawal of her mother’s affection had left her with a vulnerability to rejection that would last a lifetime.

      So when Mary Anne was sent away to boarding-school at the age of five, it was inevitable that she would take it hard. Even this was not the child’s first time away from home. For the previous two years she and Isaac had spent every day at a little dame school at the bottom of the drive. In her two-up-two-down cottage, Mrs Moore looked after a handful of local children and attempted to teach them their letters in an arrangement that went little beyond cheap baby-sitting. But now Mary Anne was to join Chrissey at Miss Lathom’s school three miles away in Attleborough, while Isaac was sent to a boys’ establishment in Coventry: hence the reference to ‘school divided us’ in the ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets. Boarding-school was not unusual for farmers’ daughters, but five was an exceptionally early age to start. After only eleven years of marriage Christiana Evans had managed to clear Griff House of the five young people who were supposed to be living there.⁴¹

      School did not turn out to be an emotional second start for Mary Anne. Although she sometimes came home on Saturdays, and saw her nearby Aunt Evarard more often, she felt utterly abandoned. At the end of her life she told John Cross that her chief memory of Miss Lathom’s was of trying to push her way towards the fireplace through a semicircle of bigger girls. Faced with a wall of implacable backs, she resigned herself to living in a state of permanent chill. The scene stuck in her memory because it reinforced her feelings of being excluded from the warmth of her mother’s lap. No wonder, then, that her childhood nights were filled with dreadful dreams during which, reported Cross, ‘all her soul … [became] a quivering fear’.⁴² It was a terror which stayed with her throughout her life, edging into consciousness during those times when she was most stressed, depressed or alone. Even in late middle age she had not forgotten that churning sickness, working it brilliantly into the pathology of Gwendolen Harleth, the neurotic heroine of her last novel, Daniel Deronda.

      Children who are separated from their parents often imagine that their bad behaviour is to blame. Mary Anne was no exception. She interpreted her banishment from Griff as a sign that she had been naughty and adopted the classic strategy of becoming very good. The older girls at Miss Lathom’s nicknamed her, with unconscious irony, ‘Little Mama’ and were careful not to upset her by messing up her clothes.⁴³ The toddler who had once loved to play mud pies with Isaac grew into a grave child who found other little girls silly. When, at the age of nine or ten, she was asked why she was sitting on the sidelines at a party, she replied stiffly, ‘I don’t like to play with children; I like to talk to grown-up people.’⁴⁴

      As part of her plunge into goodness, Mary Anne buried herself in books. Her half-sister Fanny, who had once worked as a governess, recalled for John Cross the surprising fact that the child had been initially slow to read, preferring to play out of doors with her brother. But once Isaac withdrew his companionship Mary Anne was left, like so many lonely children, to construct an imaginary world of her own. In 1839 she told her old schoolmistress Maria Lewis how as a little girl ‘I was constantly living in a world of my own creation, and was quite contented to have no companions that I might be left to my own musings and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress. Conceive what a character novels would give to these Utopias. I was early supplied with them by those who kindly sought to gratify my appetite for reading and of course I made use of the materials they supplied for building my castles in the air.’⁴⁵ Quite who ‘supplied’ these novels is unclear. At the age of seven or so Mary Anne would have found very few books lying around Griff. The Evanses were literate but not literary and the little girl was obliged to read nursery standards like Aesop’s Fables and Pilgrim’s Progress over and over. Her father’s gift of a picture book, The Linnet’s Life, was special enough to make Mary Anne cherish it until the end of her life, handing it over to John Cross with a warm dedication.⁴⁶ Joe Miller’s Jest Book was learned by heart and repeated ad nauseam to whoever would listen. In middle age Eliot recalled that an unnamed ‘old gentleman’ used to bring her reading material, but no more is known.⁴⁷ For the girl who was to grow up to be the best-read woman of the century, it was an oddly unbookish start.