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