George Eliot: The Last Victorian

Ironically, it was just this kind of loving acceptance which drew Mary Anne away from her family’s middle-of-the-road Anglicanism towards the Evangelicalism of Miss Lewis. At nine years old she was hardly able to comprehend the doctrinal differences between the two ways of worship, but she was easily able to register that Maria Lewis gave her the kind of sustained attention which her own mother could not. If loving God was what it took to keep Miss Lewis loving her, Mary Anne was happy to oblige. With the insecure child’s eager need to please, she adopted her teacher’s serious piety with relish. After her death, when family and friends were busy offering commentaries on Eliot’s early influences, the idea grew that it was Maria Lewis’s indoctrination that had provoked Mary Anne into the flamboyant gesture of abandoning God at the age of twenty-two. In fact Miss Lewis’s observance, though rigorous, was always sweet and sentimental. She was hardly a hell-fire preacher, more a gentle woman who talked earnestly of God’s tender mercies. But she was not so gentle, however, that she was not prepared to push the blame in the direction where she believed it lay. Reminiscing after Eliot’s death, she maintained that it was Mary Anne’s next teachers, the Baptist Franklin sisters, who were to blame for the girl’s ‘fall into infidelity’.7

The Franklins, whose establishment was in the smartest part of Coventry, ran the best girls’ school in the Midlands. The ambitious curriculum and pious ambience attracted girls from as far away as New York. Too rarefied for Chrissey Evans, who returned home to Griff after her stint at Mrs Wallington’s, it was none the less the perfect place for twelve-year-old Mary Anne.

The Franklin sisters, Mary, thirty, and Rebecca, twenty-eight, were the daughters of a local Baptist minister who preached at a chapel in Cow Lane. Despite these stern-sounding origins, they were generally agreed to be the last word in female charm and culture. In what was becoming a classic pattern for the early nineteenth-century schoolmistress, Miss Rebecca had spent time in Paris perfecting her French before coming home to pass on her elegant accent to her pupils. Indeed, her combination of refinement and learning had given the younger Miss Franklin a personal reputation as one of the cleverest women in the county.

In such an exquisite atmosphere Mary Anne could hardly fail to flourish. Her French improved by leaps and bounds, and she won a copy of Pascal’s Pensées for her efforts, a triumph which still gave her pleasure at the very end of her life. Her English compositions were immaculate, read with admiration by Miss Franklin ‘who rarely found anything to correct’.8 As the best pianist in the school, she was sometimes asked to play for visitors, even if she often fled from the parlour in ‘an agony of tears’ at her failure to excel.9

Mary Anne’s educational progress went hand in hand with her social transformation. She had already lost her accent by listening carefully to Miss Lewis’s pedantic, old-fashioned diction. Now she took Miss Rebecca as her model, developing the low, musical voice which in later life continued to hint at the effort it had taken to acquire. These were the years when the question of who or what was ‘genteel’ pressed hard upon the provincial middle classes. Women of the previous generation – like her brisk Pearson aunts – rooted their self-worth in keeping a spotless home and helping their husbands run a thriving business. They felt no shame in being spotted up to their elbows in whey or poring over an account book. But from the 1820s middle-class women were increasingly required to behave in ways which showed that they were ‘ladies’. Ladies did not involve themselves in profit making and they employed domestic servants to do the rougher housework. Instead of curing bacon they spent their time in a series of highly ornamental activities – painting, music and fine needlework – which advertised the fact that their husbands and fathers could afford to keep them in leisure. Evangelicalism went some way towards curbing the worst excesses of this faux-gentility, but even a serious Christian like Mary Anne Evans was expected to drop the ways of speaking and behaving which she had learned in her parents’ farmhouse.

The Franklins’ brand of Baptism was mild, but still they believed in the conversion experience, that moment when an individual realises his sinfulness and asks to be born again in Christ. It is not clear if Mary Anne underwent a sharply defined crisis in her mid-teens, but it is certainly the case that she became more ponderously religious than ever before. She was always first to lead her schoolmates in spontaneous prayer, a habit that aroused in them feelings of queasy awe. One of the daughters of these unfortunate girls recalled years later that Mary Anne’s schoolfellows ‘loved her as much as they could venture to love one whom they felt to be so immeasurably superior to themselves’.10

Delighted with her growing reputation for perfection, Mary Anne’s response was to compose a poem entitled ‘On Being Called a Saint’ in which she tortured herself deliriously with the possibility that she was not quite as perfect as everyone believed. Her opening stanza sighs,

A Saint! Oh would that I could claim

The privileg’d, the honor’d name

And confidently take my stand

Though lowest in the saintly band!11

Saints, of course, are not supposed to worry about what they look like. At a time when even her most pious classmates were becoming interested in their looks and the things that went with them – flirtation, courtship, marriage – Mary Anne was increasingly aware that she was unlikely to attract many admirers. Her big nose, long upper lip and lank hair were really not so very ugly, especially at a time when many a teenage girl had to worry about black teeth and smallpox scars, but her mother’s early lessons about her unacceptability had been well learned. Believing herself a fright, she became one.

Evangelical and dissenting Protestantism had always warned against the pleasures of the flesh, identifying vanity as a particularly besetting sin. Mary Anne seized on this licence with enthusiasm, deliberately playing up her plainness by looking unkempt and adopting a severe style of dress, including an unflattering Quaker-type cap.12 If being pretty was the one thing at which she did not excel, she would turn the situation on its head and become expert at looking plain. In a plodding essay on ‘Affectation and Conceit’ written at this time, she upbraids pretty, vapid women who ‘study no graces of mind or intellect. Their whole thoughts are how they shall best maintain their empire over their surrounding inferiors, and the right fit of a dress or bonnet will occupy their minds for hours together.’13 At fifteen Mary Anne was a long way from the realisation that she was just as guilty of manipulating her appearance in order to maintain superiority over her peers.

Throughout her adult life, other people made periodic attempts to get Mary Anne interested in her appearance. But her sense of hopelessness in this area was so embedded that nothing made much difference. While she was staying in a boarding-house in Geneva in 1849 a fellow guest – a marquise no less – insisted on giving her a more up-to-date hairstyle. Mary Anne felt ridiculous: ‘All the world says I look infinitely better so I comply, though to myself I seem uglier than ever – if possible.’14

Years later, in 1863, when she and Lewes held a housewarming party at their new home off Regent’s Park, their interior designer Owen Jones gave Mary Anne a talking-to about ‘her general neglect of personal adornment’ and insisted on shoehorning her into a splendid moiré dress bought especially for the occasion.15

Mary Anne reported these two incidents to her correspondents with amused disbelief. She was so convinced of her own ugliness, other people’s kind attentions were always suspected as possible teases. As a result she never acquired the confidence which would have allowed her to make the best of herself. In middle age, when she was seen regularly at the theatre and in concert halls, she became well known for the awful mishmash of her outfits, part high fashion, part provincial dowdiness. At the end of her life, and married to the much younger John Cross, her attempts to put together a flattering new image earned her sniggers from the effortlessly elegant.

Yet behind the poker-faced demeanour which sometimes confused visitors into thinking she was a third Miss Franklin, Mary Anne’s emotions worked as violently as ever. One schoolmate recalled her shock at finding a passionate demand for love scribbled in the back of the paragon’s German dictionary.16 The tearful exits which usually followed her piano recitals in the Franklins’ drawing-room suggest the intensity with which she lived. Performance of all kinds was to remain a tricky business throughout her life. She longed for the praise, acclaim and love that went with setting her fiction before the public, but could not bear the criticism and gossip that naturally accompanied them. Her need to be right and perfect went beyond vanity and became a matter of survival, to the point where Lewes realised he had better suppress all but the most flattering reviews if she were not to plunge into a paralysing despair. The teenage Mary Anne was, if anything, even more thin-skinned. Performing for the Misses Franklin and their visitors offered the possibility of reaching an instant of perfection and, better still, having it witnessed by others. When that moment of transcendence failed to appear – because, in her own eyes, she had failed to reach the required standard – it was as if she had blown her last chance at love.

Mary Anne’s surviving exercise book, too, reveals a deep interest in the whole drama of rejection. In her neat hand she copied out a trashy poem called ‘The Forsaken’ in which a young woman is jilted by a casual, arrogant man. Melodramatic though this might have been, it explores Mary Anne’s experience of her brother’s early coldness. The man in the poem behaves much as Isaac had done – leaving his sweetheart – sister bereft, while he sets out to explore a wider world, returning in this case not with a pony but with another woman. By way of a fantasy revenge, one of the last poems Mary Anne copied out in her notebook is ‘To a Sister’ in which a far-away brother begs his sister to remember him.17 These verses and the trauma behind her choice of them laid the basis for Mary Anne’s pessimistic expectations about adult sexuality: women are doomed to love men who will not love them back. The future she imagined for herself was the one which came to pass. Until the age of thirty-four she was to endure one romantic rejection after another.

In 1835 Christiana Evans fell ill with breast cancer, and at Christmas Mary Anne was called home from school to nurse her. All the French prizes and piano performances in the world could not rescue the cleverest girl in the school from the expectations which the nineteenth-century family placed on its unmarried daughters. Any hopes Mary Anne might have harboured about moving on from the Franklins to an even more prestigious school, perhaps on the Continent, were dashed by the summons home to Griff.

Mary Anne’s entire education had been shaped by the demands of her mother’s health. At five she had been sent away because Christiana was too frail to manage her and at sixteen she was being called back because she was dying. Characteristically, any grievance Mary Anne felt was kept well buried. The one surviving letter of this time, written to Maria Lewis, uses the conventional pieties of the sickroom, ‘We dare not hope that there will be a permanent improvement.’18 There wasn’t. In the early hours of 3 February 1836 Christiana Evans died.

In a letter to his employer a few weeks later Robert Evans appeared to accept the situation stoically: ‘I have gone through a great deal of pain and Greif, but it is the work of God therefore I submit to it chearfully as far as Human Nature will permit.’19 In fact, he was far from resigned. When it became apparent in late December that Christiana was about to die, Evans had fallen violently and suddenly ill with a kidney complaint. The man who had always seemed as solid as an oak crumpled at the prospect of losing a wife for the second time. For a while it looked as if he too might die. But tender nursing and ferocious bleeding with leeches had their effect, and by mid-January he was shakily mobile. For a difficult few weeks it had seemed as if the Evans family – always a more fragile structure than it appeared – might collapse completely.

For the first time, almost, since Mary Anne’s birth the three children of Robert Evans’s second marriage were living under one roof. Chrissey was the housekeeper, Isaac the apprentice and Mary Anne her father’s surrogate wife. It was she who accompanied the old man on shopping trips to Coventry, mended his clothes and read from Walter Scott, the author whom they both loved. There is no evidence that the placid Chrissey resented her younger sister’s place in their father’s affections. Always her mother’s favourite daughter, the elder girl was released by Mrs Evans’s death into forming an attachment outside the family. A little over a year later she was married and her housekeeping duties devolved on Mary Anne.

With Isaac, the situation was not so easy. This could have been a time of reconciliation, with brother and sister moving beyond their childhood estrangement to build a new, adult relationship. But a single surviving anecdote which Cross tells from their intervening boarding-school years suggests that the tensions between them were as alive as ever. ‘On coming home for their holidays the sister and brother began … the habit of acting charades together before the Griff household and the aunts, who were greatly impressed with the cleverness of the performance; and the girl was now recognised in the family circle as no ordinary child.’20 No teenage boy enjoys being outshone by his younger sister, especially in front of those family members who had previously placed him first. Between the lines of an anecdote anxiously repeated by John Cross to emphasise the harmony between Isaac and Mary Anne, there lurked a rivalry which was to reemerge now that the two were once more under the same roof.

On the surface theirs was an argument about religion. Isaac was a High Anglican, at the very opposite end of the spectrum from Mary Anne. At its most intellectually sophisticated, the Anglo-Catholic movement was rigorous and ascetic, favouring a return to the liturgy and monastic practices of the pre-Reform church. But Isaac had imbibed, probably from the tutor in Birmingham where he had finished his education, a more comfortable version, which celebrated the pleasures of the material world. While Mary Anne’s transformation from village girl to young lady had been modelled on Evangelical ideals of genteel behaviour, Isaac’s parallel metamorphosis into a gentleman – and that, indeed, is how he described himself in 1844 when he acted as executor to Aunt Evarard’s will – had been along decidedly High Church lines. His was a faith which allowed a man to hunt, drink and dine, before absolving himself from sin through the sacrament. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast with Mary Anne’s conscience-scourging, Bible-reading puritanism.

Brother and sister were on a collision course and the crash came in August 1838. They spent a few days together in London, during which Mary Anne was picky about everything. The choir at St Paul’s was frivolous and silly. Going to the theatre was sinful and she preferred to spend the evening reading. The only time she cheered up was on a visit to Greenwich Hospital. Finally, brother and sister went to a bookshop where he bought a couple of hunting sketches, while she pounced triumphantly on a copy of Josephus’s History of the Jews.21

Here was a return to the power struggle of a decade earlier. Isaac’s rejection of his little sister in favour of a pony had been the catalyst for her plunge into books and religion. Now she was using the intellectual muscle developed as a result to try and regain control of him. No longer sufficiently undefended to ask openly for love, she insisted that he bend down and do her will instead. The fact that he did not, that he constantly eluded her with his sociability and worldliness, only made her angrier. Her response was to become even more censorious, sniping at what she admitted later were his perfectly ‘lawful amusements’22 and adopting a superior, critical tone whenever talking about him. ‘Isaac is determinately busy, and altogether improving,’ she wrote smugly to Maria Lewis on 13 March 1840, as if discussing an annoying child.23

There had been a brief rapprochement fifteen months before the trip to London when, on 30 May 1837, Chrissey married Edward Clarke at Chilvers Coton. On that occasion brother and sister broke down and had ‘a good cry’ at the realisation that life at Griff was moving into a new and unknown phase.24 It was now that Mary Ann – newly elevated to ‘Miss Evans’ and minus the final ‘e’ of her Christian name – became the official housekeeper. Quite possibly her father offered to hire someone to do the job, leaving her free to study full-time at home. That she did not accept this tempting proposal suggests that she had a great deal at stake in becoming the mistress of Griff. John Cross, always anxious to absolve his late wife of anything that might hint at oddness or masculinity, emphasised the pleasure she took in ‘the soothing, strengthening, sacred influences of the home life, the home loves, the home duties’.25

A mix of motives is more likely. Running a working farmhouse was one of the few opportunities for a middle-class woman to exercise her energy and organisational skills, and Mary Ann certainly enjoyed being ‘an important personage at home’.26 When the aunts came to dinner they could not fail to have noticed the gleaming tiles, polished furniture and well-stocked cupboards. The awkward, bookish little girl whom none of them had really cared for turned out to be a Pearson after all.

Keeping house for her father was also a way for Mary Ann to bind him closer to her. With her mother and elder sister out of the way, she was finally able to occupy the position of wife to Robert Evans. Over sixty and in indifferent health, Evans was devolving more and more responsibility for the estate business on to Isaac. In time-honoured tradition, he expected his youngest daughter to be the comforter of his declining years, filling his evenings with companionship, reading and music, before nursing him to his grave. It was a dull, heavy burden, but one which allowed Mary Ann to monopolise the member of her family who, she maintained on the eve of his death a decade later, was ‘the one deep strong love I have ever known’.27

But it would be wrong to imagine something gloomy and gothic for Mary Ann Evans. Chilvers Coton was not Haworth; Robert Evans was not Patrick Brontë; and the girl herself was certainly not running mad over the moors. Griff was a working farmhouse, Robert Evans was still active and Isaac had a sociable, busy life. Mary Ann found herself playing hostess to a steady stream of visitors. The Pearson aunts and her married sisters all lived near enough to make frequent appearances at Griff. Then there were the Derbyshire Evanses, Samuel and his wife Elizabeth, who visited in early 1839. Mary Ann’s former schoolteachers, Miss Lewis and the Misses Franklin, came to stay several times. Old family friends put up at Griff, sometimes for days at a stretch.

Nor was she entirely confined to home. In November 1839 she stayed with her old school friend Jessie Barclay in London, making her first train journey to get there. The following year her father took her to visit his brothers’ families in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, making a detour on the way home to sightsee in Lincoln. Still, long-distance travel was neither easy nor cheap and the mail remained the chief way in which middle-class girls living at home continued their school friendships. Indeed, Hannah More, whose pious books Mary Ann much admired, referred to these post-school, pre-marriage years as the ‘epistolary period of life’. Many of Mary Ann’s letters from these years have not survived, but luckily forty-five remain, the majority written to Maria Lewis and Martha Jackson, an old classmate.

Evangelicalism, with its roots in the Puritan doctrines of the seventeenth century, had always placed the well-tended home at the heart of Christian life. Becoming mistress of Griff gave Mary Ann a larger sphere for her religious activities than she had hitherto known. Making jam and churning butter were not simply routine domestic tasks, but crucial ways of worshipping God. Determined to give up all worldly pleasures since ‘I find, as Dr. Johnson said respecting his wine, total abstinence much easier than moderation’,28 she was in the powerful position of being able to make sure that everyone else at Griff did too – or else endure her smouldering disapproval. Every Michaelmas she sulked at having to organise a harvest festival supper. The pagan overtones of the feasting and drunkenness made the event ‘nauseating’ to her. Equally unpleasant was having to give up a day to the ‘disagreeable bustle’ of preparing for Isaac’s twenty-third birthday, on 19 May 1839, which was to be marked by a crow-shooting party.29 The one saving grace was that since the birthday itself fell on the Sabbath, the celebrations were held over until the next day. By the time she came to write Adam Bede twenty years later, Eliot’s mature vision had transformed both the harvest supper and the coming-of-age party into occasions which celebrated the cohesion of village ties and the enduring nature of community life. At this point, though, they seemed witless and wanton.

That same crucial shift in perception is apparent in another incident which occurred around now. In early 1839 Mary Ann’s Methodist aunt and uncle were visiting from Derbyshire. Elizabeth Evans was a devout Methodist and a one-time preacher. Her vocation and a few details about her career notoriously formed the basis of Eliot’s portrayal of Dinah in Adam Bede. A genuinely good woman, Elizabeth Evans radiated the kind of generous fellow feeling which was anathema to her sour-minded niece. During the course of the visit Mrs Evans spoke joyfully about a minister she knew who had recently died. Undeterred by the fact that he was a drinker – a quality not likely to endear him to the abstinent Evangelical and dissenting conscience – she spoke enthusiastically about the man’s good qualities and concluded that he was now surely in heaven. ‘This was at the time an offence to my stern, ascetic hard views,’ explained the middle-aged Mary Ann, ‘how beautiful it is to me now!’30

Despite disapproving of her aunt’s reluctance to condemn, Mary Ann seized upon Elizabeth Evans as the one person within the extended family network with whom she could share the daily experience of her faith. Sadly, most of this experience was a kind of torture. In a letter written just after the 1839 visit, Mary Ann pours out her despair at her failure to reach God. Even at this point, two and a half years before she gave up going to church, she was battling with the realisation that her gloomy and self-denying faith had little to do with the divine and a great deal to do with her own internal dramas.

Instead of putting my light under a bushel, I am in danger of ostentatiously displaying a false one. You have much too high an opinion my dear Aunt, of my spiritual condition and of my personal and circumstantial advantages … I feel that my besetting sin is the one of all others most destroying, as it is the fruitful parent of them all, Ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures. This seems the centre whence all my actions proceed.31

Certainly it was ambition rather than fellow feeling which powered Mary Ann’s drive to become one of the most important figures in the parish. During these years she started a clothing club, organised bazaars, ran a Sunday School and visited the local workhouse, Coton College. ‘We shall never have another Mary Ann Evans’ was the ambiguous lament of those on the receiving end of her charity when she left for Coventry in 1841.32 Spiritual and social yearnings dovetailed nicely when this pious busyness brought Mary Ann to the attention of Mrs Newdegate (who used the older spelling of the family name), the new mistress of Arbury Hall. Old Francis Parker-Newdigate had died in 1835 and the inheritance had passed to his cousin’s wife, Maria Newdegate, and her son Charles. While Francis Parker-Newdigate had been indifferent to the welfare of his tenants, his successor was irritatingly involved. Devoutly Evangelical, Mrs Newdegate insisted that all the farmers should attend church at least once on Sunday. This new regime at Arbury Hall exactly suited Mary Ann, who soon became a pet of her father’s new employer.