George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes

and Emerson came into contact with Mary Ann only briefly. Other men, equally swept up by the exhilaration of talking to a woman whose mind ranged as widely as their own, found their lives profoundly altered by contact with Mary Ann Evans. John Sibree, the elder brother of her pupil Mary, was studying to become an Independent minister at Spring Hill College, Birmingham. Like Sara Hennell, he had made Mary Ann’s acquaintance by proxy, through letters which Mary had written to him while he was at Halle University, describing the drama of the holy war. During one of his holidays from Spring Hill, Sibree finally got to meet the woman about whom he had heard so much. Characteristically, they forged their friendship by reading Greek together and, once Sibree returned to college in Birmingham, the correspondence continued. The letters which Mary Ann wrote to Sibree during the first half of 1848 are unlike any others she was to write during her whole life. As performance-oriented as ever, she none the less imagines him as a very different audience from Sara Hennell or Maria Lewis. This time she is at pains to show herself as a fun, flirtatious and even daring woman. For instance, Hannah More, whose pious work she had used to recommend to all and sundry, is now dismissed as ‘that most disagreeable of all monsters, a bluestocking – a monster that can only exist in a miserably false state of society, in which a woman with but a smattering of learning or philosophy is classed along with singing mice and card playing pigs’.⁷⁴ Doubtless Mary Ann was attempting to distance herself from the drab image of a bluestocking, all the while trying to impress Sibree with her references to Handel, Hegel and Disraeli.

      The letters to Sibree are also unusual in discussing politics. Throughout her life Mary Ann seldom mentioned contemporary events. But in spring 1848, with much of Europe in turmoil, it was impossible not to be drawn in. To those who know her in her mature incarnation as a conservative thinker, Mary Ann’s brash enthusiasm for sudden change comes as a shock. She starts off by using the language of the barricades: ‘decayed monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have a hospital for them, or a sort of Zoological Garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be preserved’. Of Louis Philippe, who with his ‘moustachioed sons’ had recently escaped to Britain, ‘for heaven’s sake preserve me from sentimentalizing over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions of unfed souls and bodies’. Victoria, meanwhile, is ‘our little humbug of a queen’. When it comes to predicting whether revolution will happen in Britain, Mary Ann has already identified her country’s unique capacity for slow constitutional change which, as a mature writer, she would elevate over political solutions. Writing to Sibree, however, she sees this as second-best to the thrill of revolution: ‘There is nothing in our constitution to obstruct the slow progress of political reform. This is all we are fit for at present. The social reform which may prepare us for great changes is more and more the object of effort both in Parliament and out of it. But we English are slow crawlers.’⁷⁵

      Whenever Mary Ann engaged with a man intellectually, her emotions were not far behind. The tone of the Sibree letters quickly turned personal. On 8 March 1848 she ticked him off for writing too formally and asked for some details about his innermost life. ‘Every one talks of himself or herself to me,’ she boastfully claims and demands that he write to her about his religious beliefs. ‘I want you to write me a Confession of Faith – not merely what you believe but why you believe it.’⁷⁶ Sibree had already read Mary Ann’s translation of Strauss and was starting to have his doubts about his calling. The act of marshalling an account of his faith seems to have been the final stage in resolving to abandon the ministry. This was, of course, a massive step for, as Mary Sibree explained decades later to John Cross, ‘the giving up of the ministry to a young man without other resources was no light matter’.⁷⁷

      Just how influential Mary Ann was in Sibree’s decision to give up his orthodox faith is not absolutely clear. Certainly she read the letters which Mrs Sibree and Mary wrote to John during the whole crisis, and she herself enclosed a letter with the former’s correspondence. In this letter she says, ‘You have my hearty and not inexperienced sympathy … I have gone through a trial of the same genus as yours … I sincerely rejoice in the step you have taken – it is an absolutely necessary condition for any true development of your nature.’⁷⁸

      While the Sibrees had been tolerant and understanding when Mary Ann had given up church-going, it was quite a different matter when their own son took a similar course. It is not clear how much they blamed Mary Ann for influencing him, but they certainly felt she played a significant part. From 1848 Mary Ann had fewer meetings with Mary and the German lessons seem to have stopped. When Mary Ann moved to Geneva for eight months in 1849, Mary Sibree asked her to write to her care of Rosehill, presumably because she did not want her parents to know that their friendship was continuing. Mary Ann refused, telling the Brays: ‘Please to give my love to her [Mary] and tell her that I cannot carry on a correspondence with anyone who will not avow it.’ Perhaps she was feeling particularly annoyed with all things Sibree because Mr Sibree senior had just turned up with his brother in Geneva, which Mary Ann thought ‘a piece of impertinent curiosity’, suspecting that they had come to spy on her.⁷⁹ In the same way that she had been scathing about Brabant, Mary Ann now declared that Mr Sibree, whom she had once wanted as a substitute father, looked ‘silly’ while his brother was ‘vulgar-looking’.⁸⁰ She could not get over her hurt that the Sibrees had not given her the total understanding she craved. They were, she said in a later letter, benignly selfish, exhibiting ‘the egotism that eats up all the bread and butter and is ready to die of confusion and distress after having done it’.⁸¹

      As the John Sibree episode suggests, Mary Ann’s relationships with men during this period were tinder-box affairs. She formed sudden bonds with dramatic results. Either she was thrown out of their house, or they were thrown out of a job. There were tears and headaches, and leeches and embarrassments, which in some cases lasted down the years. She began to despair that anyone would want a peaceful, sustained relationship with her. Often known as Polly, an old Warwickshire form of ‘Mary’, she allowed Sara to make an unflattering pun on her name by changing it again to ‘Pollian’, a play on Apollyon, the monster in Revelation who also makes an appearance in Pilgrim’s Progress. It chimed with her growing sense of herself as repulsive and wrong. In October 1846 she wrote an extended fantasy for Charles Bray – surely influenced by her reading of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus – in which she pictures herself as an old, ugly translator whose only hope now is to form a rational marriage with a dusty old German theologian. ‘The other day as I was sitting in my study, Mary [Sibree] came with a rather risible cast of expression to deliver to me a card, saying that a gentleman was below requesting to see me. The name on the card ran thus – Professor Bücherwurm, Moderig University [Professor Bookworm of Musty University] … ’ The professor then addresses Mary Ann:

      ‘I am determined if possible to secure a translator in the person of a wife. I have made the most anxious and extensive inquiries in London after all female translators of German. I find them very abundant, but I require, besides ability to translate, a very decided ugliness of person … After the most toilsome inquiries I have been referred to you, Madam, as presenting the required combination of attributes, and though I am rather disappointed to see that you have no beard, an attribute which I have ever regarded as the most unfailing indication of a strong-minded woman, I confess that in other respects your person at least comes up to my ideal.’

      Mary Ann then describes herself as responding: ‘I thought it possible we might come to terms, always provided he acceded to my irrevocable conditions. “For you must know, learned Professor,” I said, “that I require nothing more in a husband than to save me from the horrific disgrace of spinster-hood and to take me out of England.”’⁸² Professor Bookworm is clearly based on that German professor of theology to whom Mary Ann had already given up two years of her life, D. F. Strauss. And although she