Transformation of Rage. Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone
that "the very monotony of her life at Griff, and the narrow field it presented for observation of society, added immeasurably to the intensity of a naturally keen mental vision, concentrating into a focus what might perhaps have become dissipated in more liberal surroundings" (18).
With Isaac’s marriage coming up, Mr. Evans solved the problem of his and Mary Ann’s living situation with the decision to move with Mary Ann to Foleshill, near Coventry, and leave the house at Griff to Isaac and his wife, who married on June 8, 1841. After only a short time in the larger community of Coventry, Mary Ann began to benefit from the fresh opportunities offered by her new surroundings. With more time for her own studies, she attended lectures on chemistry, continued her language lessons, and read more widely. She also met new people, including Charles and Cara Bray, who became lifelong friends. As Charles was notorious for his progressive views, Mary Ann’s friendship with him contributed to her growing sense of conflict with her family. The well-known "Holy War" with her father, beginning in January 1842 with her refusal to go to church, marks her open rejection of Christianity as she knew it–a shift in point of view which Haight believes would have happened with or without the influence of the Brays (Biography 39). Mr. Evans was so upset that he very nearly insisted that Mary Ann leave the household, and indeed, she did visit Isaac at Griff for a few weeks. With the help of other relatives, however, she and her father finally reached a compromise whereby "Mary Ann agreed to attend church with him as usual, and he tacitly conceded her the right to think what she liked during service" (Haight 44). The shift in her attitude is reflected in her letters. Her correspondence with Maria Lewis is replaced by letters to her new friends, and her style and tone seem more natural, as she emerges from the hold of evangelicalism on her mind (Letters 1:117 ff.). At this stage, she was also becoming known in the community for her intellectual capacities. By 1844 she had been invited to do a translation of Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, a fifteen-hundred page project which took her two years to complete. When the book, The Life of Jesus, was published in June 1846, she was not credited for the translation, and she was paid only twenty pounds for the work (Haight, Biography 53-59).
During the three years following, until her father’s death on May 31, 1849, Mary Ann’s time was increasingly taken up with his care, although at this stage she also began to publish reviews and essays in the Coventry Herald. Toward the end of her father’s life, she found solace in work on a translation of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. She suffered a severe reaction to Mr. Evans’s death, which, besides leaving her without a parent, also left her without a home. After the funeral, she took a recuperative trip to the Continent. Upon her return to England, after a series of family visits, she made a decision to live temporarily with her friends the Brays. It was during her stay at their home that John Chapman, a publisher who knew of her as the translator of Strauss, offered her the opportunity to write the notice of Robert William Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect for the Westminster Review, a quarterly journal established in 1824, which had become, as Rosemary Ashton describes it, "the chief organ [in Britain] of political, philosophical, and religious radicalism" (GHL 29). When Mary Ann delivered the completed article to Chapman’s place of business and boardinghouse in London in November 1850, she also began a trial visit of two weeks, during which she made the decision to move to London to work for him, beginning in January 1851.
Mary Ann’s initial stay in London in early 1851 was marred by her much-discussed flirtation with Chapman, a notorious womanizer whose jealous wife and mistress teamed up to drive her out of the household by the end of March. Soon afterward, however, Chapman had the opportunity to purchase the Westminster Review, and although he was to be the nominal editor, he desperately needed Marian (as she had begun to spell her name in the spring of 1851) to do the work. She agreed to write the "Introductory Prospectus," and eventually the two women in Chapman’s household agreed to her return to do editorial work there, beginning in September 1851. Despite the difficult personal adjustment to her new literary life in London, "The work she had been brought there to do was superbly done," as Marghanita Laski expresses it in her biography (38). Although as her letters at the time reveal, her two years at the Chapman establishment were marked by ill health, depressions, and shifting loyalties to men, they are also distinguished by the quality of her editorial work, and by her "grasp of the needs and problems of the paper" (Laski 38). By all reports, however, she was paid little or nothing for the work, although she probably received free room and board (Laski 38-39; Haight, Biography 91).
During her years at the Chapmans' household, Marian also formed her lifelong friendships with Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes. The friendship with Lewes became a love affair, probably by the fall of 1853, when Marian moved into her own lodgings, although she continued to do editorial work for Chapman. She had also begun working on a translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthums, a substantial work for which Chapman had agreed to pay her two shillings a page, or thirty pounds. When the book, The Essence of Christianity, was finally published in July 1854, as "Number VI of Chapman’s Quarterly Series," the translator’s name, Marian Evans, appeared on the title page. That same month, she left England for a trip to the Continent with Lewes.
Marian’s decision to elope with Lewes, a married man, naturally created a scandal. Although Marian was not the cause of Lewes’s permanent estrangement and attempted divorce from his wife Agnes, such a liaison could not be condoned in Victorian England, and Marian was socially ostracized. It was not until late in her career that she finally experienced a degree of social acceptance. Lewes’s marriage had begun to deteriorate, as Marian’s friend Charles Bray explained it to a mutual friend, "when Mrs. Lewes after the birth of her 3rd child took one of those strong and unaccountable dislikes to her husband that sometimes does occur under similar circumstances amounting to monomania and [I have also heard] that Lewes was most sincerely attached to his wife and greatly distressed by it" (qtd. in Ashton, GHL 156). No doubt the couple’s belief in free love also contributed to the deterioration of the marriage. After bearing Lewes’s fourth son, Agnes had born his friend Thornton Hunt’s child and become pregnant with a second; at that point Lewes seems to have given up on his relationship with Agnes. Whatever the complex causes of the failed marriage, Lewes and Marian soon became "most sincerely attached" to each other. As they established on their trip to the Continent what became their lifelong pattern of helping each other with their work, they also found strength in each other’s company. They managed to support themselves on the income they received from their writing. At the time, Lewes was working on a biography of Goethe, along with some columns for the Leader. During the eight months in Germany, Marian wrote articles for the Westminster Review and the Leader, translated a German article on "The Romantic School of Music," worked on her translation of Spinoza’s Ethics, translated passages of Goethe for Lewes’s biography, and when Lewes was ill, wrote down articles that he dictated. She also read intensively, especially in German literature (Haight, Biography 173-74).
When they returned to England, Marian spent five weeks writing and reading alone in Dover while Lewes worked out the details of his permanent separation from Agnes. During that time Chapman invited her to take on the "Belles Lettres" section of the "Contemporary Literature" reviews in the Westminster Review. Haight records that during the seven quarters that she covered the section, "The 'Belles Lettres' . . . noticed 166 different books, and Marian doubtless looked at many more that were not worth mention." As he observes, "The work gave her a close practical acquaintance with the literary market-place." During this period she also wrote thirty-one articles for the Leader, one two-part article for Fraser's, four articles for the Saturday Review, and five long articles commissioned by Chapman for the Westminster(186).
Lewes’s biography of Goethe, published in November 1855, received excellent reviews. Marian continued to write articles for the Westminster and the Leader, although her translation of Spinoza was her main task for the early months of 1856. She finished it in February, but it was never published; the manuscript remains at the Beinecke Library at Yale University (200). In May, Lewes’s interest in marine life took them to Ilfracombe, where he did research for his Sea-side Studies. During their stay there, Marian wrote what Haight calls "one of her finest articles for the Westminster,”"The Natural History of German Life" (201). From Ilfracombe they went on to Tenby for a five-week