Good as her Word: Selected Journalism. Lorna Sage

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       Honest woman

      Selections from George Eliot’s Letters EDITED BY GORDON S. HAIGHT

      GEORGE ELIOT’S PERSONAL LIFE is one of the grand anomalies of Victorian culture. She ought to have been an outsider, a Bohemian, a George like George Sand, whereas of course she made her way to the centre of things, to become the lion of her day and its literary conscience.

      Boston Brahmin Charles Eliot Norton, nervously contemplating paying a call on her at ‘The Priory’ in 1869, described her position with such comic, twitching refinement that it’s worth quoting the whole passage:

      She is an object of great interest and great curiosity to society here. She is not received in general society, and the women who visit her are either so emancipée as not to mind what the world says about them, or have no social position to maintain. Lewes dines out a good deal, and some of the men with whom he dines go without their wives to his house on Sundays. No one whom I have heard speak, speaks in other than terms of respect of Mrs Lewes, but the common feeling is that it will not do.

      However, as you can tell from his tone (he protests altogether too much), he managed to transcend ‘common feeling’ and not only go along to one of ‘Mrs Lewes’s Sundays’ but to take Mrs Norton too. George Eliot’s enormous critical prestige and popular success had overborne the old story that years before someone called Mary Ann Evans openly set up house with George Henry Lewes when he couldn’t divorce his wife. But it wasn’t just that: she had a special authority precisely because people came to her on her own terms, as an author, which they wouldn’t have done anything like so much if she had been ‘received in general society’. She was condemned – and freed – to live in a world more concentratedly literary than that of any of her female contemporaries.

      In the letters, selected by Gordon S. Haight from his monumental nine-volume edition (1954–78), you can see the effects of this. Instead of (say) Jane Austen’s network of family ties, here there’s a surrogate family of colleagues, peers and (latterly) admirers. She did salvage a few old friends, and she developed a motherly relationship with Lewes’s sons, but for the most part these are personal bonds created around the writing, and the warmth and respect it generated.

      She had, as people remarked, a talent for friendship, and apart from a few early, preachy and pretentious letters addressed to school-friends and an ex-teacher from her evangelical days, she’s a generous, concerned, thoroughly unselfish correspondent. She even worries about the egoism of not wanting to seem an egoist: ‘… my anxiety not to appear what I should hate to be … is surely not an ignoble egoistic anxiety …’ And this is the way she hides herself. Or rather, the way she contrives to remain pseudonymous, removed from the mere marketplace of prejudices and opinions and controversy. This must have been part of the secret of her impressive ‘rightness’ – that she questioned conventional rigidities less by what she said than by what she was.

      The other side of this is that there is always – nearly always – an embargo on intimacy. Only one letter here reveals the passionate and needy self she kept to herself, the woman who found fulfilment with Lewes, and it is, ironically enough, a letter not to him but to that cold fish Herbert Spencer with whom she had fallen horribly in love in pre-Lewes days:

      I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, that you will always be with me as much as you can … I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions … I have struggled – indeed I have – to renounce everything and be entirely unselfish, but I find myself utterly unequal to it … I suppose no other woman ever before wrote such a letter as this – but I am not ashamed.

      One is grateful that Spencer was cad enough to preserve this explosive, desperate stuff, because it enables one to measure something of the achievement of the creation of ‘George Eliot,’ the person she became with Lewes. As do, more indirectly, the letters to friends and publishers in which he figures as Muse, critic and go-between, her constant and loving companion.

      Their union (too close for letters) is the unspoken theme of the collection, the necessary condition for the warmth and sanity she is able to summon on topics as diverse as women’s suffrage, table-rapping or the Franco-Prussian war. Their mutual solitude, as she knew, was what enabled her range and freedom as a writer. ‘I prefer excommunication,’ she wrote to one of her closest women friends, Barbara Bodichon, who had suggested that perhaps Lewes might be able to get a dubious divorce abroad. ‘I have no earthly thing I care for, to gain by being brought within the pale of people’s personal attention, and I have many things to care for that I should lose – my freedom from petty worldly torments … and that isolation which really keeps my charity warm …

      Not that ‘petty wordly torments’ are lacking. The letters are splendidly domestic in their running commentary on the myriad, wracking changes of the weather and touchingly ordinary and wifely – and ominous – in their concern with Lewes’s fragile health. His death (in 1878) is marked by a wordless gap, as though she ceased to exist for weeks on end. When she comes back she seems stunned, and only recovers herself when she can replace him (it’s hard to see it in any other light) with their young friend, her devoted admirer, John Cross.

      Their marriage was more shocking, in its way, than the years with Lewes had been. But as Anne Ritchie (Thackeray’s daughter, who had herself married a man 17 years her junior) wrote: ‘She is an honest woman, and goes in with all her might for what she is about.’ It’s this honesty of need, perhaps, that makes her so eloquent an advocate of what she calls, in one letter, the ‘impersonal life’, the life that we identify with the George Eliot of the novels:

      I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity – possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.