George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes

Ann’s confidence about putting together an ecclesiastical chart reflects the scope of her reading during these Griff years. Although she had refused her father’s offer of a housekeeper, she allowed him to fund her continuing education in other ways. Twice a week Signor Joseph Brezzi arrived from Leamington to teach her Italian and German – the language which was to play such an important part in her personal and professional life. Robert Evans also happily settled her bills at Short’s, the Nuneaton bookseller who did his best to keep up with her often obscure demands. It was now that she embarked on a habit of private reading which was to form the foundation for one of the greatest self-educations of the century. During these gloomy Evangelical years of 1837–40 the books she chose were inevitably religious. None the less, her practice of careful study, shrewd analysis and clear summary writing (in the form of letters to Maria Lewis and Martha Jackson) laid the basis for the critical skills which she was to apply across the huge range of subject matter which she tackled during her working life.

      Her letters to Maria Lewis, who was now installed unhappily as a governess in a clergyman’s family near Wellingborough, set out a formidable list of titles during the years 1838 to 1839. The core text remained the Bible, which she read every day. To this was added a series of commentaries and theological works, which helped define her position on the doctrinal controversies that were close to tearing apart the Established Church. The Tracts for the Times, with their yearnings for an Anglican Church reconciled with Rome, predictably repelled her. She looked more favourably on Joseph Milner’s History of the Church of Christ (1794–7) with its mild Evangelicalism and cautious tolerance towards dissenters. Another book she liked was John Hoppus’s Schism as Opposed to Unity of the Church (1839), which attacked the assumption of Roman Catholics and Anglicans that the structure of their Church rested on the direct authority of God. Years later it was this ability to empathise with intellectual and psychological positions far from her own that would mark George Eliot’s mature art. At the age of twenty, however, open-mindedness simply muddled her. ‘I am powerfully attracted in a certain direction but when I am about to settle there, counter assertions shake me from my position.’³⁶

      Mary Ann’s Evangelical conscience did not allow her to read for pleasure. Works of fiction, which took the reader away from the stern business of soul-saving and into a compensatory world of fantasy, were, she believed, particularly harmful. In an essay disguised as a letter to Maria Lewis on 16 March 1839 she set out her objection to novels: ‘For my part I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing even a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life. Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?’ With the convenient exception of her beloved Scott, plus a few individual works such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, Mary Ann sternly outlawed all novels in favour of religious and historical texts. Even fiction on religious themes, of which there was a huge outpouring at this time, ‘should be destroyed for the public good as soon as born’.³⁷

      Instead Mary Ann filled up her tiny amounts of free time by plunging into biographies of the good and the great, identifying with their struggles while going out of her way to deny any hubris. The experiences of William Wilberforce, the Evangelical reformer who campaigned against slavery, struck an immediate chord: ‘There is a similarity, if I may compare myself with such a man, between his temptations or rather besetments and my own that makes his experience very interesting to me. O that I might be made as useful in my lowly and obscure station as he was in the exalted one assigned to him.’³⁸ Other model lives devoured included John Williams, an obscure dissenting South Seas missionary, and the sentimental Hannah More whose Evangelical pieties were immensely popular in middle-class households. Favoured poets included those twins of religious verse, Cowper and Young.

      Although piety was the cloak Mary Ann threw over her intellectual energy, at times the full scope of her ambition peeps through the learned references and pious quotations with which she peppers her letters to Maria Lewis. Her early drive did not dissipate just because she was now at home making cheese. If anything, frustrations about the limitations on her time intensified it. Her letters to Maria Lewis are didactic and pedagogic, anxious to display their superior knowledge. She lectures her former teacher on German pronunciation, recommends books, and generally acts like the older woman’s spiritual and intellectual adviser.

      But Mary Ann remained painfully aware that this desire to show off was the result of Ambition, her besetting sin. As a good Evangelical Christian, she should stamp on any impulse to push herself forward – these early letters are full of apologies for egotism, for talking too much about herself, for ‘the frequent use of the personal pronoun’.³⁹ At twenty she was not able to integrate these two sides of her personality – the desire for attention and the wish to surrender the self – and the result is a series of emotionally and tonally uneven letters. A demand for attention from Maria is followed by a humble withdrawal, in which Mary Ann imagines Miss Lewis thinking critically of her and rushes to apologise.

      You will think me interminably loquacious, and still worse you will be ready to compare my scribbled sheet to the walls of an Egyptian tomb for mystery, and determine not to imitate certain wise antiquaries or antiquarian wiseacres who ‘waste their precious years, how soon to fail?’ in deciphering information which has only the lichen and moss of age to make it more valuable than the facts graphically conveyed by an upholsterer’s pattern book.⁴⁰

      Ironically, the end point of this dance between advance and withdrawal was a dazzling display of learning and verbal dexterity, seen here in the elaborate comparison of her handwriting with Egyptian hieroglyphics. In these bursts of words we begin to see Mary Ann flushed with pleasure as she realises what she is capable of. For if literature was forbidden as sinful, language was somehow another matter. In May 1840 she sings to Maria, ‘I am beguiled by the fascinations that the study of languages has for my capricious mind, and could e’en give myself up to making discoveries in the world of words.’⁴¹ Eighteen months later she crows, ‘I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.’⁴²

      These early letters, with their see-sawing between assertion and self-denial, were the crucible in which Eliot’s mature prose style was formed. At this point Mary Ann had very little real sense of her correspondent as a real and separate person with problems of her own. There are a few sympathetic noises when Maria describes a particularly unpleasant row with her employers, but the focus quickly shifts back to Mary Ann. Maria Lewis functioned as a kind of imaginary audience, whose reactions were to be anticipated and described by Mary Ann herself, with no reference to what was really felt or thought.⁴³ This inventing of Miss Lewis’s response to her loquacity is the embryo of a stylistic practice which Eliot was to employ heavily at the beginning of her novel-writing career. In Scenes of Clerical Life, for instance, she often breaks off her narrative to deal with an imaginary reader’s response. Of Mr Gilfil, for instance, ‘You already suspect that the Vicar did not shine in the more spiritual functions of his office.’⁴⁴

      The letters to Martha Jackson are different. Martha had attended the Franklin school where she was a pale imitation of Mary Ann, being both clever and ‘serious’ in her religion. Now back at home with her parents, Martha continued to be edgy about Mary Ann’s intellectual superiority. In January 1840 Mary Ann, perhaps anticipating slow progress on the ecclesiastical chart, sent a warning shot to Martha not to tread too closely on her patch. ‘I am right glad to read of your enjoyments … and of your determination to study, though, by the bye, it is hardly fair of you to trench on my field; I shall have you publishing metaphysics before my work is ready, a result of the superior development of a certain region of your brain over that of my poor snailship.’⁴⁵