Observing his wife’s temperament in later life, John Cross believed that the pony incident provided the key to understanding George Eliot’s personality. ‘In her moral development she showed, from the earliest years, the trait that was most marked in her all through life – namely, the absolute need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and to whom she should be all in all.’40 Later biographers have been quick to point out how this passage has become the cornerstone for a character reading of Eliot as needy, dependent and leaning heavily on male lovers and women friends for approval. Yet Eliot’s later comments on her own personality, together with the pattern of her subsequent relationships, suggest that Cross was doing no more than telling it how it was. The early withdrawal of her mother’s affection had left her with a vulnerability to rejection that would last a lifetime.
So when Mary Anne was sent away to boarding-school at the age of five, it was inevitable that she would take it hard. Even this was not the child’s first time away from home. For the previous two years she and Isaac had spent every day at a little dame school at the bottom of the drive. In her two-up-two-down cottage, Mrs Moore looked after a handful of local children and attempted to teach them their letters in an arrangement that went little beyond cheap baby-sitting. But now Mary Anne was to join Chrissey at Miss Lathom’s school three miles away in Attleborough, while Isaac was sent to a boys’ establishment in Coventry: hence the reference to ‘school divided us’ in the ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets. Boarding-school was not unusual for farmers’ daughters, but five was an exceptionally early age to start. After only eleven years of marriage Christiana Evans had managed to clear Griff House of the five young people who were supposed to be living there.41
School did not turn out to be an emotional second start for Mary Anne. Although she sometimes came home on Saturdays, and saw her nearby Aunt Evarard more often, she felt utterly abandoned. At the end of her life she told John Cross that her chief memory of Miss Lathom’s was of trying to push her way towards the fireplace through a semicircle of bigger girls. Faced with a wall of implacable backs, she resigned herself to living in a state of permanent chill. The scene stuck in her memory because it reinforced her feelings of being excluded from the warmth of her mother’s lap. No wonder, then, that her childhood nights were filled with dreadful dreams during which, reported Cross, ‘all her soul … [became] a quivering fear’.42 It was a terror which stayed with her throughout her life, edging into consciousness during those times when she was most stressed, depressed or alone. Even in late middle age she had not forgotten that churning sickness, working it brilliantly into the pathology of Gwendolen Harleth, the neurotic heroine of her last novel, Daniel Deronda.
Children who are separated from their parents often imagine that their bad behaviour is to blame. Mary Anne was no exception. She interpreted her banishment from Griff as a sign that she had been naughty and adopted the classic strategy of becoming very good. The older girls at Miss Lathom’s nicknamed her, with unconscious irony, ‘Little Mama’ and were careful not to upset her by messing up her clothes.43 The toddler who had once loved to play mud pies with Isaac grew into a grave child who found other little girls silly. When, at the age of nine or ten, she was asked why she was sitting on the sidelines at a party, she replied stiffly, ‘I don’t like to play with children; I like to talk to grown-up people.’44
As part of her plunge into goodness, Mary Anne buried herself in books. Her half-sister Fanny, who had once worked as a governess, recalled for John Cross the surprising fact that the child had been initially slow to read, preferring to play out of doors with her brother. But once Isaac withdrew his companionship Mary Anne was left, like so many lonely children, to construct an imaginary world of her own. In 1839 she told her old schoolmistress Maria Lewis how as a little girl ‘I was constantly living in a world of my own creation, and was quite contented to have no companions that I might be left to my own musings and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress. Conceive what a character novels would give to these Utopias. I was early supplied with them by those who kindly sought to gratify my appetite for reading and of course I made use of the materials they supplied for building my castles in the air.’45 Quite who ‘supplied’ these novels is unclear. At the age of seven or so Mary Anne would have found very few books lying around Griff. The Evanses were literate but not literary and the little girl was obliged to read nursery standards like Aesop’s Fables and Pilgrim’s Progress over and over. Her father’s gift of a picture book, The Linnet’s Life, was special enough to make Mary Anne cherish it until the end of her life, handing it over to John Cross with a warm dedication.46 Joe Miller’s Jest Book was learned by heart and repeated ad nauseam to whoever would listen. In middle age Eliot recalled that an unnamed ‘old gentleman’ used to bring her reading material, but no more is known.47 For the girl who was to grow up to be the best-read woman of the century, it was an oddly unbookish start.
An Evangelical Girlhood 1828–40
AT THE AGE of eight Mary Anne took a step towards a new world, urban and refined. In 1828 she followed Chrissey to school in Nuneaton. Miss Lathom’s had been only three miles from Griff and was attended by farmers’ daughters with thick Warwickshire tongues, broad butter-making hands and little hope of going much beyond the three Rs. The Elms, run by Mrs Wallington, was a different proposition altogether. The lady herself was a genteel, hard-up widow from Cork. She had followed one of the few options available to her by opening a school and advertising for boarders whom she taught alongside her own daughters. There were hundreds of these ‘ladies’ seminaries’ struggling to survive in the first half of the nineteenth century and most of them were dreadful. What marked out The Elms was its excellent teaching: by the time Mary Anne arrived, the school was reckoned to be one of the best in Nuneaton. Responsibility for the thirty pupils was shared between Mrs Wallington, her daughter Nancy, now twenty-five, and another Irishwoman, Maria Lewis, who was about twenty-eight.
The change of environment did nothing to help Mary Anne shed her shyness. Adults and children still steered clear, assuming they had nothing to offer the little girl whom they privately described as ‘uncanny’.1 Only the assistant governess Miss Lewis, with her ugly squint and her Irishness, recognised in Mary Anne something of her own isolation. Looking beyond the smooth, hard shell of perfection, she saw a deeply unhappy child ‘given to great bursts of weeping’. Within months of her arrival at Nuneaton Mary Anne had formed an attachment to Miss Lewis, which was to be the pivot of both women’s lives for the next ten years. Miss Lewis became ‘like an elder sister’ to the Evans girls, often staying at Griff during the holidays.2
Mr and Mrs Evans were delighted with Mrs Wallington’s in general and Maria Lewis in particular. In their different ways they both set great store by their youngest girl getting an education. Shrewdly practical, Robert Evans had already schooled his eldest daughter, Fanny, to a standard that had enabled her to work as a governess to the Newdigates before her marriage to a prosperous farmer, Henry Houghton. Anticipating that the quiet, odd-looking Mary Anne might remain a spinster all her life, Evans was determined that she would not be reduced to relying on her brothers for support. A life as a governess was not, as Miss Lewis’s example was increasingly to show, either secure or