marian evans, george henry lewes and “george eliot”

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Notes

notes

1. All three quotations are from Gordon S. Haight (George Eliot 369). Later biographers would reiterate the point; see, for example, Ashton, George Eliot 164–67, and Bodenheimer, Real Life 242–43.

2. Marian Evans's language proficiency included French, German, Latin, Italian, Ancient Greek, and Hebrew. Her knowledge of history, science and philosophy also was wide and deep.

3. The “women's periodicals,” started by Bessie Rayner Parkes and others, date from 1858. See Brake 268 n. 14.

4. In her generous response to an earlier version of this essay presented at the University of Utrecht, Liedeke Plate reminded me of Virginia Woolf's comment that “anon” was very often a woman's “signature.”

5. Alexis Easley rightly refuses the tendency to view Evans's journalistic writing in terms of an either/or polarity: “masculine” or “feminist.” Rather, she argues that Evans's voice “is complexly gendered and indeterminate” (148).

6. The story is complex. In brief, Lewes and his wife, Agnes, held “freethinking” ideas about love and marriage. Lewes's friend, Thornton Hunt, was in a sexual relationship with Agnes who gave birth to a child by him. Because Lewes registered the birth of this child under his own name he thereby “condoned” Agnes's adultery and so foreclosed the possibility of divorcing her on that ground. All this took place before he met and fell in love with Marian Evans. Agnes gave birth to other children fathered by Hunt. Evans and Lewes contributed to the financial support of Agnes and the children.

7. Although Impressions of Theophrastus Such was published in 1879 it was completed before Lewes's death. Evans spent many months after Lewes's death completing the final volume of his magnum opus, Problems of Life and Mind. On the question of her contribution, see Haight, George Eliot, and Ashton, George Eliot. The extent of her authorship provides further evidence of the degree to which their works can be considered as joint creations.

8. This section of my paper, dealing with Evans's various names, is greatly indebted to Bodenheimer (“A Woman of Many Names” 20–37). See also Bodenheimer, Real Life.

9. Bodenheimer (Real Life 114) notes the ironic fact that “Mary Ann Evans Lewes” became Evans's “legal” name for a short time after Lewes's death. Evans was obliged to change her name by deed poll in order to facilitate access to her finances and assets, which were held in Lewes's name.

10. The momentousness of the decision might be gleaned from Chapman's alarm when he heard the news: “I can only pray, against hope, that he may prove constant to her; otherwise she is utterly lost” (qtd in Haight, George Eliot 167; emphasis in original). His response gains added force when one notes that Chapman himself led a “freethinking” lifestyle. He, his wife, and his mistress, and their children, all lived in the one house.

11. As Evans wrote in a letter: “Women who are satisfied with [light and easily broken ties] do not act as I have done – they obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner” (The George Eliot Letters (hereinafter “GEL,” followed by volume and page number) II: 215; emphasis in original).

12. It was not only Evans's lifestyle that was seen to be scandalous. Her association with biblical criticism through her translations of Strauss and Feuerbach also meant that her name was associated with atheism. The only book that was published under the name “Marian Evans” is her translation of Feuerbach. By the mores of the period, her “atheism” and her lifestyle amounted to gross immorality.

13. Eliot's disillusionment with the power of either religion or philosophy (or, at least, moral “theory”) to supply reliable maxims for life is recorded in an early letter where she writes that because “agreement between intellects seems unattainable … we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union” (GEL I: 162; emphasis in original).

14. In this essay she identifies four sub-genres of the lady novelists’ “silly novels”: the “mind-and-millinery,” the “oracular,” the “white neck-cloth,” and the “modern-antique.”

15. Consider, in this context, the kind of literature (“silly novels”) favoured by Mrs Transome and Esther Lyon (in Felix Holt), by Gwendolene Harleth (in Daniel Deronda), and by Rosamund Vincy (in Middlemarch), along with the misleading expectations of life that such novels promote. The “hard facts” of women's existence and an accurate grasp of the possibilities for action open to them would have been more helpful in dealing with the various challenges each of these characters confront.

16. See “Women in France: Madame de Sablé” [October 1854], in Selected Essays 8–37.

17. Problems of Life and Mind II: 16–17, qtd in Levine, Realistic Imagination 348 fn. 23; emphasis in original.

18. Lewes, “The Principles of Success in Literature” 239; emphasis added.

19. Ibid. 229. Though each – philosophy and art – does so according to its own distinctive processes.

20. In case some might think I am unduly collapsing the respective aesthetic views of Evans and Lewes, see the dense paragraph in Impressions of Theophrastus Such on “intense inward representation” (110–11). The striking similarity with Lewes's notion of the “Principle of Vision” is noteworthy. See also Adam Bede, chapter 17.

21. “The Natural History of German Life” [1856] in Selected Essays 128.

22. Evans undertook extraordinary amounts of research for each of her novels. To take just one example – the research she undertook for Romola – see Harris and Johnston 99–118.

23. G. Levine, “George Eliot and the Art of Realism” in Levine, Cambridge Companion 16, 18.

24. I say “realizable” because Marian Evans was not a “revolutionary” or “utopian” thinker. Her view of social change was an “evolutionary” or “gradualist” one. See “The Natural History of German Life” [1856] in Selected Essays.

25. The catalepsy from which Silas suffers might be interpreted as an invitation to read Silas Marner as a fable about modernity. His condition is described as “the suspension of consciousness” (9) and likened to a “chasm in his consciousness” (110). In other words, it is a condition in which he is unable to link his past and present experiences as the experience of a continuous consciousness. This is the sine qua non of lived experience under modernity.

26. C.G. Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle [1892], qtd in Rose, Parallel Lives 198.