Good, bad and ugly
Jane Ridley
GEORGE ELIOT: THE LAST VICTORIAN by Kathryn Hughes Fourth Estate, £20, pp. 384 George Eliot's reputation as a writer has never stood higher, but she lacks a definitive biography. Rosemary Ashton wrote a life in 1996 which dealt with Eliot the writer. Now Kathryn Hughes has writ- ten a sparkling life of Eliot the woman; she drags her down from her pedestal and out of the classroom, strips off her blue stock- ings and reinvents her for us in the 1990s. Mary Anne Evans had a big ugly head and a long lumpy nose; she was plain but clever. Her father was agent and man of business to the Newdigate family of Warwickshire landowners, a self-made man strong as oak who would stand no non- sense. Her ill, tight-lipped mother sent her away at five to boarding-school. Jilted by her adored brother Isaac, Mary Anne grew up thin-skinned and awkward. When she was 15 her mother died, and she came home to the comfortable Midlands farm to keep house — a sour, priggish girl, deePlY religious and struggling with a demon ambition.
After Isaac married, Mary Anne and her father moved to Coventry, to find her a husband. One January Sunday she refused to go to church, and her world collapsed. Not going to church put her outside the Coventry marriage market, defying her father's patriarchal authority. It plunged her into a dense, tangled thicket of theo- logical argument. And it brought her close to Charles Bray, a free-loving, free-thinking ribbon manufacturer, with whom she may have had an affair. Mary Anne translated Strauss's Life of Jesus, gossiped on a bear rug under the Brays' acacia tree and fell unrequitedly in love with almost everyone she met, men and women alike.
Aged 30, Marian, as she now called her- self, moved to London, to live as a lodger With the publisher John Chapman and his Wife. She fell in love with him. Of course the threesome didn't work out, but he came to depend on her skill in editing his ailing magazine, the Westminster Review. She earned a reputation for sleeping around (George Eliot of all people!); but her cleverness apparently made her irre- sistibly attractive to literary men. Herbert Spencer was another lover, though excep- tionally this time there was no sex.
Fear of rejection and abandonment, says Hughes, runs like a black thread through Marian's life. When she met G. H. Lewes, a dapper little man who resembled a mon- key, a self-educated hack like herself, the curse was lifted. Unfortunately, Lewes was married; and though his wife had a lover by Whom she had several children, Lewes could not divorce her because he had con- doned the relationship. So Marian and Lewes eloped, and lived in sin in suburban Wandsworth, shunned and ostracised. When her brother Isaac found out, he refused to speak to her. Oddly, though, Marian insisted on calling herself Mrs Lewes, not Miss Eliot.
Encouraged by Lewes, she began to write fiction. In Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss she celebrated the Midlands land- scape of her youth, reinventing her father and brother who had rejected her, but Preaching a message of acceptance. Her heroines always conform in the end. Femi- nists are irritated; but this tension between flouting the rules in real life and preaching Fonformity in fiction gives Hughes's book its edge. Maybe the life is more relevant to us now than the books. Eliot became known for her 'goodness', for a kind of lib- eral understanding in a godless universe. 'Yet her treatment of her stepsons, Lewes's sons, was not kind. Childless by choice (she Was ahead of her time even in contracep- tion), she grudged her earnings for their school fees, but forked out to banish them as far away from home as possible. Her bestselling books made her rich. She and Lewes moved from their suburban exile to Marylebone and then to the Priory, Regents Park. They held At Homes each Sunday. She was received, accepted even, hut she remained morbidly sensitive to crit- icism. Lewes censored her reviews, allow- ing her only to read the praise. The result, aS Hughes shows, was to isolate her, to put her out of touch; and it was her power of sYrripathy that made her books great. She laboured over duds, like Romola, but she could never have produced Middle- march without Lewes's mothering encour- agement.
Kathryn Hughes's narrative is unclut- tered by literary criticism. She has created a psychological drama which is both acute and compelling and is a joy to read.
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