As I look back on my study of George Eliot, I am impressed by her remarkable capacity for growth. Each shift in her circumstances, no matter how painful, eventually resulted in a new level of accomplishment. Moreover, the pattern of ongoing intellectual, creative, and emotional growth that began early in Eliot’s life continued throughout her fiction-writing career. I will argue that it was through her intellectually demanding work that she was initially able to defend herself against the inner rage that followed from her sense of loss, and through her fiction writing that she was ultimately able to achieve her sense of identity. To put it in Kohut’s terms, her intellectual and creative work served to provide her with the necessary process of self-strengthening that would finally ease the depressive symptoms of her rage.
Born Mary Anne Evans into a conventional Warwickshire (Midlands) household in 1819, her first major early childhood loss, as I will argue in my chapter on Silas Marner, seems to have been her sense of disconnection from her mother following the deaths of newborn twins when Mary Anne was a toddler; her mother, who suffered from ill health afterward, appears to have been virtually missing from Mary Anne’s life after that time. The Evans household at Griff provided her with other attachments, however, and she became very close to her older brother Isaac, her chief playmate before their school days, and to her father, who apparently treated her as his favorite of the three children of his second wife. When Isaac was eight years old, he was sent to a boarding school near Coventry, at the same time that Mary Anne, age five, was sent with her older sister Chrissey to a boarding school three miles from home. The two girls came home only occasionally, on Saturdays and holidays. The young Mary Anne’s reaction to the separation from loved ones at home is evident in the middle-aged Eliot’s lingering memory, as John Cross, her husband during the last six months of her life, records, of "the difficulty of getting near enough the fire in winter, to become thoroughly warmed, owing to the circle of girls forming round too narrow a fireplace. This suffering from cold was the beginning of a low general state of health: also at this time she began to be subject to fears at night. . . . she told me that this liability to have 'all her soul become a quivering fear,' which remained with her afterwards, had been one of the supremely important influences dominating at times her future life" (8-9). Mary Anne’s early childhood closeness to her brother was never restored. According to Eliot’s biographer, Gordon Haight, Isaac, whom she now saw only on holidays, began to grow away from her, and Mary Anne turned to books for consolation (Biography 7). Thus began what I see as a lifelong pattern of response to loss.
In 1828, Mary Anne was sent to Mrs. Wallington’s Boarding School in Nuneaton, where she studied English, drawing, French, and piano, and where she came under the influence of the principal governess, Maria Lewis, a devoted Church of England Evangelical who was to remain a close friend for many years, even after Mary Anne left the school. During her four years at Mrs. Wallington's, following Lewis’s example, Mary Anne read repeatedly the whole King James version of the Bible, at the same time that she developed the habit of introspection. In Haight’s view, these early practices contributed both to the later development of her "vigorous prose," and to her extraordinary capacity for psychological analysis (9). When she had mastered the offerings at Mrs. Wallington’s school, her parents were advised to send her to the Misses Franklins' school in Coventry, which she entered in 1832. There she studied English, French, history, arithmetic, drawing, and music. She seems to have excelled in every subject; she was remembered by a fellow student as "immeasurably superior" to the others (Laski 16-17). At the Franklins' school she also dropped her Midland dialect as she learned a more "cultivated" version of English pronunciation (Haight, Biography 11), and she was exposed to the writings of many English authors, including Shakespeare, Milton, Isaac Watts, Pope, Young, Cowper, Southey, Moore, and Byron. She also read historical novels by Bulwer Lytton, Scott (her lifelong favorite), and G. P. R. James, and wrote her own first piece of fiction, "Edward Neville," a romance that reflects the influence of her current reading; it begins "on a bright and sunny morning toward the end of the Autumn of the year 1650" when "a stranger mounted on a fine black horse descended the hill which leads into the small but picturesque town of Chepstow" (Haight, Biography 10-15; text 554-60). Mary Anne participated in the serious religious life of the school, where conversion was taught to be the beginning of the religious life. In Haight’s view, her increasing interest in the "gloomy Calvinism" that had resulted in new practices of self-denial only served to increase the distance from her brother, who had "imbibed High Church views" at his own school (19).
Because of her mother’s worsening health, the term ending Christmas 1835 was the last spent at the Franklins' school. Mrs. Evans died on February 3, 1836. According to Cross’s account of Mary Anne’s reaction, "the mother died, after a long and painful illness, in which she was nursed with great devotion by her daughters. … to a highly wrought, sensitive girl of sixteen, such a loss seems an unendurable calamity" (15). Ina Taylor’s biography also stresses the severity of Mary Anne’s reaction to her mother’s death, which besides involving so much torture for her mother, had "symbolized [for herself] the end of childhood and the orderly world of school" (23). Haight suggests that her mother’s illness and death were the source of a marked increase in Mary Anne’s "religious zeal" (Biography 22). Certainly her life changed drastically and permanently. For a little over a year afterward, she and Chrissey kept house for their father, until Chrissey’s marriage on May 30, 1837. On that day, Haight notes, Mary Ann, as bridesmaid, signed her name in the register for the first time without the final e (22). Cross writes of the wedding day that "one of Mr. Isaac Evans’s most vivid recollections is that on the day of the marriage, after the bride’s departure, he and his younger sister had ’a good cry' together over the break up of the old home-life, which of course could never be the same with the mother and the elder sister wanting" (15).
From 1837 until her brother Isaac’s marriage in 1841, Mary Ann took on the role of housekeeper at Griff. Besides her domestic responsibilities there, she also spent time in the community doing charitable works, such as "visiting the poor and organising clothing clubs." "Over and above this," as Cross reports, "she was always prosecuting an active intellectual life of her own" (17). Besides taking private lessons in German, French, Italian, Greek, and Latin, she continued her music lessons and pursued her own reading, especially in works related to theology. Except for one letter dated a few months before her mother’s death, the surviving letters of this period, many of them written to her friend Maria Lewis, begin in May 1838. The language of the letters is stilted, at the same time the tone is ardent; they reflect Mary Ann’s struggles to live up to the ideals of nineteenth-century evangelical Christianity, with its demands for daily Bible study, self-examination, and self-denial. One aspect of her strained religious practice is her dutiful attitude toward reading. Questioning the value of most fiction, she writes Lewis in a long letter on the subject, that "as to the discipline our minds receive from the perusal of fictions I can conceive none that is beneficial but may be attained by that of history" (Eliot, Letters 1:23). Her close involvement with her family is also reflected in her frequent expressions of interest in Chrissey’s rapidly growing family, and in her anxiety over how her brother’s impending marriage might affect her own position at Griff (1:50, 59). At this stage she had also begun to think of publishing her own writing. She spent six months beginning in 1839 working on a Chart of Ecclesiastical History before a similar work was published first by someone else. Her own first publication, a poem in the Christian Observer, appeared in January 1840. Cross observes of this period in her life that although Mary Ann was free to pursue her own interests, her life was "very monotonous, very difficult, very discouraging." At the same time, he feels, she also experienced "the soothing, strengthening, sacred influences of the home life,