An earlier version of this review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (17 March 2023), entitled online "Rejoice with trembling: Love and marriage in George Eliot’s life and fiction." Sub-headings, page numbers, links and illustrations have been added here. [Click on the images for larger pictures and, after the first one, for more information.]
hat greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life", says the narrator in George Eliot's Adam Bede. There is only one drawback to the happy ending that follows — after marrying Adam, Dinah Morris is required to forgo her vocation as a Methodist preacher and devote herself to domesticity. As Clare Carlisle puts it in this new, richly layered and absorbing biography of the author, "Dinah's voice fades once she becomes a wife" (80). George Eliot's relationship with George Henry Lewes was not sealed by marriage vows, but nor did it lead to such a diminution. On the contrary, it proved empowering. This, however, had nothing to do with luck. Carlisle explores not just one but several kinds of "doubleness" that her subject deliberately sought out and kept in play within her life.
Eliot's Relationship with G.H. Lewes
In connection with marriage, especially in the Victorian context, "double life" conjures up real-life tales of secret households: of Wilkie Collins, for instance, morphing into William Dawson on the way to his second family, or of the artist William Powell Frith painting himself as the genial Papa of one family, while establishing another just a stone's throw away. The women in these arrangements risked heavier censure than the men, and had more reason to keep their liaisons quiet. With much justice, Claire Tomalin called her biography of Dickens's mistress Nelly Ternan, The Invisible Woman. It was against such a background that Marian Evans travelled to St Katherine Wharf on 20 July 1854, and waited with fast-beating heart for a married man to join her on the steamer Ravensbourne. An editor and translator at this point, not yet George Eliot the novelist, Marian knew very well that she was crossing into dangerous territory. For all his reputation as an intellectual, Lewes himself was not quite the regular establishment figure. Of illegitimate birth, he was already associated with free love and free-thinking. That his wife had left him made little difference: "Scandal and shame lurked at a distance in the form of disapproving gossip back home" (29). Indeed, when the phrenologist George Coombe, who had once admired Marian's large brain, got to hear of the affair, he doubted her sanity.
Portrait of George Eliot, by François D'Albert Durade (1804-86), 1849, replica.
Moreover, her relationship with George Henry Lewes was unconventional even for a "double life." There was to be no secrecy about it. Flouting the priestly sanction and public commitment of a wedding ceremony took courage, especially at a time when, as Carlisle shows later, marriage had become "more churchy" (53) But proceeding to claim the privileges of marriage, as Marian did, seemed positively brazen. Not only did she promptly take Lewes's name, but she insisted on others addressing her by it too. Lewes supported her fully in this: "You must not call her Marian Evans again," he wrote in the postscript to her letter to the radical Barbara Bodichon, "that individual is extinct, rolled up, mashed, absorbed in the Lewesian magnificence" (88), However gleefully tongue-in-cheek this was, it seems objectionable now. But in relation to this unusual couple, these words reflect something other than the outcome of a destructive power struggle. Rather, they express ideas from Spinoza's Ethics: "if two like-minded people, sharing 'the same nature,' live together, they will become a 'double individual more powerful than the single'" (34). Lewes and Marian had read and discussed this work together early in their relationship, and Marian translated it from the German on their European "honeymoon." In fact, If there was any imbalance in this doubleness, as Carlisle points out much later, Lewes was probably the one to be most affected by it, perhaps even "eclipsed" by his partner (230).
Marian had yearned for such a double state for a long time. Her friend Charles Bray had diagnosed her need to be loved when she was still a young woman, and Carlisle traces the growing intensity of this need through a variety of approaches, from biographical and psychological to literary. She finds reasons for it in her subject's childhood, during which her mother's illness and her father's long working hours helped foster the sensitive girl's "hunger of the heart" — words the novelist would use herself when writing The Mill on the Floss. Evidence of emotional neediness appears in her early womanhood, for example in her relationship with Bray's sister-in-law, Sara Hennell. The two women became close while collaborating on a translation of David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. In their correspondence, the younger collaborator addresses Sara as a "Dearly beloved spouse," signing off as "your loving wife" (11). A brief, unsatisfactory courtship in her mid-twenties was followed by romantic interludes in London with the publisher John Chapman and the philosopher Herbert Spencer. To the latter, Marian unabashedly confessed her feeling of dependence: "If you become attached to someone else, then I must die" (16) she had written to him. She would later argue, when editing Lewes's work after his death, that such feelings were useful, checking egotism and encouraging sympathy for others, but it is hard to see anything other than pure desperation here.
Unsurprisingly then, her hunger for love overrode everything in her new relationship, including the fact that the object of her new affection was already married. Adopting Marian's nom de plume from this point, Carlisle now turns to Eliot's first forays into fiction, and shows just how central "the marriage question" is to her
Tom amd Maggie Tulliver facing disaster in each other's arms, at the end of The Mill on the Floss (from the cover of the Harper edition of 1871, in the Internet Archive.
Eliot's need for love overrode even her bond with her brother Isaac. Carlisle shows her reliving this bond in The Mill on the Floss, where Maggie Tulliver's feelings for her brother Tom memorably inform the novel's climax. Stressing Eliot's painful identification with Maggie as the siblings are swept away together in the flood, Carlisle reminds us that she wept as she wrote about it. But, whatever the emotional cost, in her own life the prospect of support from a devoted partner had been stronger than the pull of the past: in contrast to Maggie therefore, as Carlisle says, "Eliot lives, and all the ties to her childhood loves are cut" (94). Carlyle's readings of this novel, and of her subject's own very different choice, are traditional enough, but much enriched by her familiarity with the philosophical crosscurrents of the period. She has shown Maggie being seduced, now by ideas of ascetic withdrawal from life, now by the tide of Romanticism with its promise of creativity and passion, with her heart still "fragmented, dispersed in different directions" at the end (106). Equally, she has shown Eliot impelled by her own needs, and strengthened by her own reading, to adopt a very different course of action.
G. E. Lewes, a photographed from a drawing of him by Rudolf Lehmann, in 1867. [Click on the image for more information.]
Early in her relationship with Lewes, Eliot had translated the radical Ludwig Feuerbach's influential The Essence of Christianity from the German — and Feuerbach had insisted that "marriage should be the 'the free bond of love,' not merely 'an external restriction'" (6). By now, her capacious mind was absorbing not only Spinoza, Strauss and Feuerbach, but Comte, Goethe, Schiller and others as well. Following the couple through their European "honeymoon" and beyond it, Carlisle shows that these were living presences to both of them. In Weimar, for instance, they visit Goethe's and Schiller's homes and stand reverently in their studies, and Eliot generally feels exhilarated by contact with great minds. Along with reciprocity of feeling and close partnership, this was something for which she had yearned. "I had a double lot," she noted in a poetic dialogue between "Self" and "Life" in The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, published in 1874: "Ardour, cheated with alloy/Wept the more for dreams of joy" (qtd. p. 92). At last, she was moving from the narrow world of her younger days, from which she had longed to escape, to the wider culture for which she had longed with equal intensity. This was much more profound than "opening up" in the modern sense of sharing something once considered shameful, yet it allowed her to be open in this way too.
New Commitments
Still, there were forebodings. As Eliot launched out on this whole new, infinitely enriching shared life, she was under no illusions about the commitments involved. Carlisle choses as her own prefatory quotation from Eliot's writings not the celebrated one from Adam Bede about being "joined for life," but one from a letter to the Oxford theologian and classicist Benjamin Jowett written nearly twenty years later: "About marriages one can only rejoice with trembling" (qtd. p. v). While her own "double life" helped her "to feel and think with double strength" (qtd. p. x), Eliot would also need to navigate between being a mother to Lewes's sons and producing her own creative work. Eliot's entire oeuvre comes under her biographer's eye here, and this aspect of it gives Carlisle a particularly useful entry to Silas Marner. Here, the title character too finds himself in loco parentis: Silas, the miserly old weaver, is profoundly changed by the experience of looking after little Eppie — someone else's child. Eliot knew that dutiful parenting would be rewarding for her, and not only by extending her sympathies. It would, as Carlisle says, support her claim to be Lewes's wife. But she was put to the test when all three boys were staying with them, and then more particularly and poignantly, when Lewes's second son, Thornton, returned home after contracting a painful and fatal illness in Africa. He required full-time nursing care. While fully recognising the strain this put on Eliot, Carlisle notes that her sickroom duties still left time for writing. Eliot produced a good deal of poetry and three chapters of Middlemarch in this difficult period.
On this occasion as on others, divergent opinions are mostly found in Carlisle's substantial endnotes. Middlemarch benefits most from her good judgement in not cluttering up her chapters with them, but they are well worth consulting. For example, Eliot was starting Middlemarch as Lewes finished revising his Biographical History of Philosophy, with its considerably enlarged section on Hegel. The new novel owed much to the couple's discussions of the philosopher, especially with respect to "Lordship and Bonding" in his Phenomenology of Spirit. While exploring its complex influence on the marriage relationships of the novel, Carlisle summarises Isobel Armstrong's influential article on this subject in one of those longer notes. To Armstrong's point that Eliot changes the political context of Hegel's ideas to "a psychological or existential register," she responds, "Of course, one might argue that, precisely because of these power dynamics, marriage is as 'political' as any other social relationship" (335). Indeed, Carlisle shows that all these elements are woven together in the struggles between Eliot's two most important couples, Dorothea and Casaubon, and Rosamond and Lydgate. Going further, Carlisle suggests in the main body of her text that the feelings expressed in Lydgate's sorrowful, "I meant everything to be different with me" not only derive from the interplay of those elements but, in their very ordinariness, transcend them: "Within the quotidian experiences of married life a series of possible worlds arise, as silent pangs of regret or jealousy or longing, barely discernible to an observer, flare with inward intensity. In these moments George Eliot reveals to her readers the nature of human consciousness, even the nature of reality itself" (200) This new biography is not weighed down with its learning. Like her subject, Carlisle conveys the fruits of her studies and reflection with a light, sometimes even lyrical, touch.
Left to right: (a) Dorothea finds Casaubon dead in the garden (b) Rosamond and a perplexed Lydgate. (c) The vulnerable but determined Gwendolen Harleth.
In depth of vision, Eliot's career might seem to have reached its apogee in Middlemarch. But the power and scope of her next and last major work, Daniel Deronda, have earned increasing critical acclaim. Its Jewish interest and use of ideas from the Kabbalah speak more to contemporary multiculturalism, and its heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, has gained extra currency not simply for remaining single, but, as Carlisle suggests, for being "full of 'fire and will,' overflowing with energy and wit and intelligence" (231). At the same time, Gwendolen is vulnerable, haunted by her wretched marriage, uneasy widowhood, and unfulfilled love for the Daniel of the title. Although she has been tempered by her experiences, and faces the future bravely, all these must leave her with even more intense regrets than Lydgate's. Carlisle sees much of the author in this novel, too, but mainly in the woman Daniel does marry: the young Jewish performer, Mirah Lapidoth, who had been cruelly used by her father, and whom Daniel has saved from suicide. Did Eliot herself feel exploited? Carlisle certainly shows that she was alive to and sometimes pressured by the financial aspects of her literary career, which Lewes had been handling for her.
A Short-Lived Formal Union
St George's Hanover Square by F. Hopkinson Smith, 1913.
Anxiety about such practicalities, and about her place in the literary pantheon and final legacy, loomed larger after Lewes's death. Eliot found herself once more in a close relationship with another woman — the novelist and critic Edith Simcox. But after only fifteen months of singledom, she addressed the "marriage question" for the last time by wedding her much younger assistant, John Cross, at the fashionable church of St George's, Hanover Square. Amusingly, Carlisle reports that her editor was aghast when she imputed mixed motives to Eliot here. But Carlisle is convinced that she sought out the "double life" again not simply from the old emotional neediness, but because Cross would make her respectable, and could be trusted to present the world with an admiring account of her life, thus safeguarding her reputation in two ways. Taking this step did restore her to her brother Isaac's graces. In another respect, however, it was less satisfactory. No particular theory is adduced for Cross's apparent suicide attempt during their honeymoon in Venice. Carlisle wisely consigns others' speculations about this bizarre turn of events to her notes. But it smacks of desperation, and the bride's embarrassment, as tongues started wagging again, can easily be imagined.
However, Eliot's literary reputation already had a life of its own. It not only survived this latest debacle but continued to grow. In a reflective last chapter, Carlisle reminds us that in 1980 a memorial stone was finally laid for her in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. References here to Princess Diana, who was married just one year later, seem unnecessary, and the comparison between her and Gwendolen Harleth ("a statuesque English goddess, forever young, mythical and archetypal as well as ordinary, at once tragic and triumphant...," 269) seems overdone. As Carlisle herself has shown, by balancing breadth of knowledge with an empathetic close reading of her subject's life and work, George Eliot's greatness — her continuing relevance — needs no special pleading.
Bibliography
Carlisle, Clare. The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life. London: Allen Lane, 2023. 400pp. £25.00. 978-0241-44717-8.
Created 15 February 2024