Hand in hand with this emotional estrangement there went an intellectual one. In July 1848, during a season in which all Europe was in revolt against the old ways, Mary Ann wrote to Sara defending her new regard for the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand. From her tone it is clear that she felt or knew that Sara would disapprove of her reading authors whose names were synonymous with sexual freedom and political revolt. ‘I wish you thoroughly to understand that the writers who have most profoundly influenced me … are not in the least oracles to me … For instance it would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were to stun me with proofs that Rousseau’s view of life, religion, and government are miserably erroneous.’ The point was, she maintained, that it was Rousseau’s art which had made her look at the world in quite a different way, sending ‘that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has awakened me to new perceptions’.62
George Sand had an even more wretched personal reputation than Rousseau in Britain. A woman who dressed as a man and lived apart from her husband stood out in comparison with Elizabeth Gaskell and even the eccentric Brontës. Mary Ann, who as a novelist would become known as ‘the English George Sand’, worked hard to reassure Sara that she was not about to take the original as her model. ‘I should never dream of going to her writings as a moral code or text-book.’ What excited her, she said, was that, like Rousseau, Sand was able ‘to delineate human passion and its results’.63 Both these French writers might lead irregular lives and be indifferent literary stylists, but their ability to see characters truly and whole moved her with a sense of what the novel might achieve.
During the height of her friendship with Sara Hennell – 1843 to 1848 – there was no room in Mary Ann’s life for another significant emotional attachment. Not that that stopped her family trying to find her suitable suitors. The ‘problem’ of Mary Ann’s singleness continued to rumble on, with Isaac always ready to hint that she was being selfish by remaining a drain on her family’s resources. Even the sensible Fanny Houghton, her half-sister, was keen to introduce Mary Ann to potential partners. In March 1845 she told Mary Ann about a young picture restorer working on the big house at Baginton, who she thought might be suitable. A meeting was arranged and, true to form, within two days Mary Ann was bewitched, believing the boy to be ‘the most interesting young man she had seen and superior to all the rest of mankind’. On the third day the young man made an informal proposal through Mr Houghton saying ‘she was the most fascinating creature he had ever beheld, that if it were not too presumptuous to hope etc. etc., a person of such superior excellence and powers of mind’. Turning down a definite engagement, Mary Ann none the less gave permission for him to write. Cara describes the girl as ‘brimful of happiness; – though she said she had not fallen in love with him yet, but admired his character so much that she was sure she should’.64
This was the first time that Mary Ann had been involved with a man who was available and who returned her feelings. The fact that both Francis Watts and Robert Brabant were older and married had allowed her to express intense longing, safe in the knowledge that no commitment would be required of her. With the young picture restorer it was different. Now that real emotional engagement was on offer, Mary Ann backed off. In the few days following her return from Baginton she was racked with dreadful headaches, which only leeches could relieve. By the time the young man appeared at Foleshill she had decided that he wouldn’t do at all ‘owing to his great agitation, from youth – or something or other’, reported Cara vaguely to Sara. The next day Mary Ann ‘made up her mind that she could never love or respect him enough to marry him and that it would involve too great a sacrifice of her mind and pursuits’.65
However, Mary Ann did not get any relief from giving the young man her decision, especially when her letter ending the affair crossed with his to Mr Evans asking for permission to marry her. All she felt was enormous guilt at having led him on. She toyed with the idea of starting the relationship up again. ‘Not that she cares much for him,’ reported Cara, ‘but she is so grieved to have wounded his feelings.’66
But there may have been more to it than that. On 21 April, three weeks after what was supposed to be her final decision, Mary Ann is writing to Martha Jackson about the relationship as if it may continue. ‘What should you say to my becoming a wife?… I did meditate an engagement, but I have determined, whether wisely or not I cannot tell, to defer it, at least for the present.’67 Although Mary Ann had no real interest in this particular man, she was enjoying the experience of being the courted one, the adored. An offer of marriage, no matter how unsuitable, brought her into the fold of ordinary, lovable women.
To Sara, however, she gives a very different version of events. A letter written two weeks before the one to Martha Jackson speaks as though the relationship is well and truly a thing of the past. ‘I have now dismissed it from my mind, and only keep it recorded in my book of reference, article “Precipitancy, ill effects of”.’ She ends by confirming that her first allegiance is to Sara whose ‘true Gemahlinn’ or wife she is, which ‘means that I have no loves but those that you can share with me – intellectual and religious loves’.68 At this relatively early stage in their friendship Mary Ann was anxious not to alienate Sara by any suggestion of ‘infidelity’. At the age of twenty-five her emotional allegiance was still to an unavailable partner, a woman. It would be nearly another decade before she would risk falling in love – this time lastingly – with an almost available man.
It was not just the Evans clan who tried to matchmake Mary Ann. Although Robert and Isaac were convinced that the Brays were cavalierly indifferent to her marriage prospects, in fact, Cara was quietly working away behind the scenes. In July 1844, returning from a holiday in the Lake District, the Brays took Mary Ann to stay with Cara’s young cousins in Manchester. The two young men, Philip and Frank, escorted the party round the city on a fact-finding mission to see whether Engels’s recently published description of the slums was accurate. It was. Cara wrote in horror to her sister-in-law Rufa, ‘The streets and houses where humans do actually live and breathe there are worse than a book can tell.’69 But this was not her only disappointment. ‘I wish friend Philip would fall in love with her [Mary Ann],’ she wrote wistfully to her mother a few weeks later, ‘but there certainly were no symptoms of it.’70 But at the party’s next stop, in Liverpool, romance seemed more likely. One of the guests at dinner was William Ballantyne Hodgson, Principal of the Liverpool Mechanics Institute, who was interested in the increasingly popular subjects of mesmerism and clairvoyance. He put Mary Ann in a hypnotic trance, which terrified her, since she was unable to open her eyes ‘and begged him most piteously to do it for her’.71 Hodgson’s concentration on Mary Ann during dinner suggests a definite romantic interest in her. Writing to a friend afterwards he described the evening as ‘Altogether a delightful party’ and admiringly listed the modern and classic languages which the extraordinary Miss Evans was able to read.72
Men like Hodgson, Watts, Brabant and Bray who expressed a fascination with Mary Ann’s mind were used to mixing with clever women. Far from being comfortable with the simpering Angel in the House, the women in their lives were educated, well read and independent-thinking. So it is a clue to Mary Ann’s outstanding intellectual and spiritual radiance that she was so consistently the object of male attention. Indeed, the American poet Emerson, who met her during a visit to Rosehill in July 1848, could only repeat over and over to Charles Bray, ‘That