The relationship with Margaret Jourdain which sustained her, and which ended only with Margaret’s death in 1951, seems to have held no ‘secrets’ of the sexual sort (they adopted each other, they weren’t lovers). Only, shockingly, it was based on the assumption that living in any ambitious or indeed ‘normal’ way was hideously dangerous. To start with, Ivy played the invalid – there were ‘months, even years, when she lay about the flat eating sweets, reading Wilkie Collins and silently watching Margaret’s callers’ before producing Pastors and Masters in 1925. They perfected what one might call, travestying F. R. Leavis, an irreverent closedness before life. Not in the social sense (their tea parties, like the Mad Hatter’s, were never-ending) but in the sense of an offensive neutrality (‘we are neuters’) in the midst of the permanent state of hostilities represented by marriage and the family.
Like Ivy, Margaret Jourdain was a veteran of that battlefield. Her vicarage family was large, proud, almost penniless and wretchedly quarrelsome, though full of energy and talent. Three elder sisters were teachers (Eleanor eventually became Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford), Margaret herself became an eminent historian of furniture and the domestic arts, brother Frank was a founding father of British ornithology, and Philip was a distinguished mathematician though afflicted, like the youngest sister, Milly, with multiple sclerosis, thought to be hereditary.
Mrs Spurling, who is especially good on this kind of thing, traces their histories in some detail: Margaret’s early poetical leanings, suppressed in favour of furniture; the family’s disgust at Philip’s marriage; Eleanor’s intrigues and forced retirement; Milly’s lucid poems on her own decay. The final score is daunting:
Margaret died, like her four sisters, unmarried, and though the five brothers each took a wife … only Frank had children: they were born before the disease affecting Philip and Milly had declared itself fully, and all three died … without issue, so that by the middle of the century it was clear that the Jourdains like the Compton-Burnetts – families of 10 and 13 children respectively – drew the line at reproducing themselves.
Margaret – formidable, mocking, protective – had had other protégés, though none so (eventually), successful as Ivy. Though it’s clearly not the case, as she once confided to a strange man from Gollancz on a bus, that she was the real author (‘I write all her books’), her strength and her acid wit helped stake out Ivy’s special ‘no-man’s-land’. As did her 1920s Country Life set, which included Firbankian figures like Ernest Thesiger, cousin to the Viceroy of India, actor, narcissist and needleman (nothing was more terrible, wrote Beverley Nichols, than to see Ernest ‘sitting under the lamplight doing this embroidery’), or interior decorator Herman Schrijver (whom Margaret referred to as ‘Ivy’s Jewish friend’) who bet Ivy she couldn’t name one heterosexual male among their acquaintance. The bleak, unillusioned tone of the novels was, as Mrs Spurling points out, part forged in this heretical set, for all ‘Ivy’s old-world style’.
In fact, it matched the times increasingly well. As Edward Sackville-West wrote in 1946, ‘Apart from physical violence and starvation, there is no feature of the totalitarian regime which has not its counterpart in the atrocious families depicted in these books.’ Or, as Mrs Spurling more moderately puts it, ‘the moral economy of Ivy’s books had always been organised on a war footing’. After the war her fame burgeoned. People at the tea parties included Angus Wilson, Nathalie Sarraute, Mary McCarthy … and Ivy perfected her techniques of evasion.
She did, however (especially after Margaret’s death), unbend to some of the younger writers who sought her out, like Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Kay Dick, who provide evidence of her kindness and generosity as well as her more ‘frightening’ habits, like interspersing conversations with muttered asides to imaginary characters. In 1967, two years before her death, she was made a Dame, which it’s hard not to see as a tribute to her tea-table persona, as much as to her writing. She had kept her counsel; her atrocities were committed in the books. Hilary Spurling’s brilliant and meticulous account – studded with scones, sticky with honey – is a study in secret survivalism.
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