At times this battle against love, beauty and imagination became too much. When, in March 1840, desire threatened to press in on Mary Ann from all sides, she broke down completely. Shortly after arriving at a party given by an old family friend she realised that ‘I was not in a situation to maintain the Protestant character of the true Christian’ and decided to distance herself. Standing sternly in the corner, she looked on from the sidelines while the other guests danced, chatted and flirted. Battling with an urge to surrender to the rhythm of the music and also, perhaps, to be the centre of attention, she took refuge first in a headache, then in an attack of screaming hysterics ‘so that I regularly disgraced myself’.56
The fact that Mary Ann repeated the story in a letter to Maria Lewis suggests that, far from feeling embarrassed by the incident, she was secretly delighted. As she saw it, her shouting and weeping attested to her holiness. For her hostess, the ‘extremely kind’ Mrs Bull, it probably suggested something quite different. Here, clearly, was a young woman in deep distress. As Mary Ann was no longer able to hold together the two parts of herself, the saint and the ambitious dreamer, something would surely have to give.
FROM THE END of 1839 there were signs that Evangelicalism was losing its constricting grip on Mary Ann. Her reading, which for so many years had been pegged exclusively to God, now began to range over areas which she had previously outlawed. Where once she had warned darkly of Shakespeare ‘we have need of as nice a power of distillation as the bee to suck nothing but honey from his pages’,1 now she quoted him with unselfconscious ease. She also used her increasing facility in German to read the decidedly secular Goethe and Schiller.
More crucially, she returned to the Romantic poets, whom she had not touched since her faith intensified in her mid-teens. She mentions both Shelley and Byron, men whose scandalous private lives would have disqualified them from her reading list only a couple of years previously. Through them, she entered a realm where the self dissolved luxuriously into feeling and imagination – the very process she had struggled to resist through her hysterical resistance to novel reading and musical performance. She also learned about the authority of individual experience in determining personal morality, even if that meant rebelling against social convention. It was, however, the more sober Wordsworth who particularly impressed her. Investing in a six-volume edition of his work to mark her twentieth birthday on 22 November 1839, she declared, ‘I never before met with so many of my own feelings, expressed just as I could … like them.’2 It was an admiration which was to grow to become one of the most enduring influences on her life and work. Wordsworth’s insistence, particularly in ‘The Prelude’, on the importance of landscape and childhood in shaping the adult self gave an external validation to the connections she was now making between her own past and the emerging conflicts of the present.
Those conflicts concerned the what and how of daily faith. As she continued her careful comparison of the different denominations, Mary Ann’s sympathies began to shift and broaden. By March 1840, she could read a book by the Anglo-Catholic William Gresley and find herself ‘pleased with the spirit of piety that breathes throughout’. In the same letter she mentions with approval three of the most celebrated texts of the High Church Oxford Movement – Oxford Tracts, Lyra Apostolica and The Christian Year. The last of these became a particular favourite, and several of her letters now quoted the ‘sweet poetry’ of its author John Keble, the kind of thing which only eight months earlier she would have characterised as the work of Satan.3
Mary Ann was also reading widely in the natural sciences. The elaborate geological metaphor she had used despairingly to Maria Lewis to describe the random contents of her mind suggests that she was well acquainted with Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the work which paved the way for Darwin’s implicit questioning of Genesis. Now, when she came across a book like The Doctrine of The Deluge, which attempted to sustain the scriptural account of the beginning of the world, she found it ‘allusive and elliptical’ where once she would have treated it as Gospel.4
Maria Lewis could hardly fail to pick up the clues that Mary Ann was moving away from the Evangelicalism which had sustained their friendship during the past ten years. If she had not taken account of the drift in her former pupil’s reading matter, she surely noticed a new tone in her letters. Although not necessarily less pious, they were shorter, lighter and not so inclined to quote from the Bible. A few months earlier Martha Jackson had signified her secession from intellectual competition with Mary Ann by assigning them both flower names and retreating into the language of conventional letter writing. Now Mary Ann, armed with her own flower name dictionary, dubbed Maria Lewis ‘Veronica’, meaning ‘fidelity in friendship’, and showered her with sugary declarations of love. Instead of the sober and stilted greetings with which she had used to open her letters, she employed the kind of arch flourish associated with young ladies’ correspondence: ‘Your letter this morning, my Veronica, was sweet to me as the early incense of the Jasmine, and sent a thrill from my heart to my finger ends that impels them at the risk of indigestion, to employ the half hour after dinner, being the only one at liberty, to thank you for the affection that same letter breathes.’5
But the fulsomeness of the tone calls attention to the lack of real feeling it is trying to conceal. Interspersed with these overblown protestations of love were alarming, and surely intentional, hints that Maria was no longer the emotional centre of her life. By May 1841 Mary Ann had moved from Griff to the outskirts of Coventry, and was keen to let Maria know that she was busy making new and exciting contacts. In a letter of the 21st she mentions ‘my neighbour who is growing into the more precious character of a friend’.6 This teasingly unnamed acquaintance was, in fact, Elizabeth Pears, the woman who was to introduce Mary Ann to the circle of people who would replace Maria as her confidante. For Miss Lewis, now middle-aged and soon to be out of a job, it must have felt as if every anchor in her life was being pulled away.
As the power balance between the two women shifted, their roles polarised. Maria became the junior member of the partnership, asking Mary Ann for advice about where she should look for work next. Mary Ann, in return, slipped easily into the role of advice-giver, discouraging Maria from running a school of her own by citing a whole string of horrors including ‘rent, taxes, bad debts, servants untrustworthy,