Six Victorian marriages, part 6: George Eliot and George Lewes

Mary Ann Evans by George Barker, ca. 1845. Image source: George Eliot Archive

This is the sixth and last in a series of posts based on Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives (Knopf, 1984) and Diane Johnson's True History of the First Mrs. Meredith (NY Review Books, 2020).

Marian Evans (George Eliot) and George Henry Lewes

Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world. . .she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection. [1]

This description of Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, could as well be applied to her creator. For both, a relationship involving mutual love and intellectual sympathy was attained only after fixing their ardent emotions on unsuitable men incapable of returning their affections. Like Dorothea, as a young woman Mary Ann Evans hungered after intense and intimate friendships with men and women who inspired her intellectual admiration.

Daguerreotype of Charles Bray, ca. 1849. Image source: Herbert Art Gallery & Museum

Charles Bray and the Rosehill Circle. The first of these was Charles Bray, who, together with his wife Cara, gathered a circle of freethinkers at their home Rosehill in Coventry. Visitors included the utopian socialist Robert Owen, the social philosopher Herbert Spencer, the social reformer Harriet Martineau, and Trancendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was a heady atmosphere in which religious, social and sexual conventions were questioned, and there has been speculation that for a time Charles Bray and Mary Ann may have become lovers.

Dr. Robert Brabant. Also in the Rosehill Circle was Dr. Robert Brabant, who had been the physician of the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Moore. After his daughter's wedding, Dr. Brabant invited her bridesmaid Mary Ann to his home for an extended visit. His interest in her did not long remain fatherly, however. Mary Ann's stay was cut short when his wife demanded that she leave the house; Mrs. Brabant had evidently caught wind of something suspicious in the tête-à-têtes between her husband and their guest.

John Chapman. It was through the Brays as well that Mary Ann met the London publisher John Chapman, who published her first book (a translation of German theologian David Strauss' The Life of Jesus, which denied the literal reality of the miracles attributed to Christ). After Mary Ann's father died and left her a legacy of £2000, enough to provide an independent, if meagre, annual income, she decided to go to London and support herself by writing. In January 1851, at age 31, she moved into lodgings at Chapman's, whose household included his wife Susanna, their children, and the children's governess Elisabeth Tilley, who was also Chapman's mistress. 

Mary Ann—who now began signing herself Marian, perhaps thinking that Mary Ann sounded too provincial—fell in love with the charismatic Chapman. Although he ultimately confessed that he could not fully reciprocate her feelings, he was not above taking sexual advantage of them. Chapman's wife and mistress grew jealous of Marian; the evidence of his diary, which records all three women's menstrual periods, suggests that they had reason. After ten weeks, emotions in the household became so fraught that Mary Ann moved back to Coventry. Chapman eventually convinced her to return to London—and, incredibly, even back to his house—to be the co-editor of the newly-acquired Westminster Review; and in that role she started to become known in London literary and intellectual circles.

Herbert Spencer, ca. 1860s. Image source: U.S. National Library of Medicine

Herbert Spencer was one of the writers who contributed to the Westminster Review, and conveniently he lived across the street. He received free reviewer's tickets to the opera, theater, and concerts, and often invited Marian to accompany him. It gradually dawned on him that others—or worse, Marian—might impute romantic meanings to his attentions. He wrote her a letter explaining that he did not, and could not, love her, but it was too late: she had fallen in love, and declared her feelings to him. When he told her that he could never return them, she wrote him a letter begging him not to abandon her; Rose calls her letter "surely one of the saddest I have ever read":

I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, that you will always be with me as much as you can and share your thoughts and feelings with me. If you become attached to some one else, then I must die, but until then I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me. I do not ask you to sacrifice anything—I would be very good and cheerful and never annoy you. But I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions. If I had your assurance, I could trust that, and live upon it.

She went on,

Those who have known me best have already said that if ever I loved any one thoroughly, my whole life must turn upon that feeling, and I find they said truly. You curse the destiny which has made the feeling concentrate itself on you―but if you will only have patience with me you shall not curse it long. You will find that I can be satisfied with very little, if I am delivered from the dread of losing it.

The letter ends, "I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this―but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar women might say." [2]

Spencer later wrote that "the lack of physical attraction was fatal. Strongly as my judgment prompted, my instincts would not respond." [3] But there may have been something more behind his rejection. In 1854 Spencer (who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" and embraced Social Darwinism and racist eugenic theories) published an essay, "Personal Beauty," in which he associated facial traits that Marian possessed, such as a large jaw, wide mouth, and prominent cheekbones, with intellectual and racial inferiority. In that essay he wrote, "mental and facial perfection are fundamentally connected, and will, when the present causes of incongruity have worked themselves out, be ever found united." [4]

Spencer felt guilty about involving Marian's feelings, and apparently thought he was honor-bound to marry her. She did not want marriage unaccompanied by love or sexual attraction, however, so she refused his offer. Nonetheless, they continued to see one another as friends.

George Henry Lewes, 1870s. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

George Henry Lewes (pronounced, like the town near Glyndebourne, "Lewis") was an acquaintance of Spencer's, a novelist, playwright, and regular contributor to literary periodicals including the Westminster Review. One afternoon in late 1852 or early 1853 he accompanied Spencer on a visit to Marian at Chapman's; a few visits later, he stayed behind after Spencer left, and soon thereafter began visiting her on his own. 

Although Marian was initially unimpressed—for one thing, he wrote a review of Charlotte Brontë's Villette for the Westminster Review that did not do justice to the high regard in which Marian held it―he also received free reviewer's tickets and began escorting her to operas and plays. Marian wrote to Cara Bray, "Mr. Lewes especially is kind and attentive and he has quite won my regard after having a good deal of my vituperation. Like a few other people in the world, he is much better than he seems—a man of heart and conscience wearing a mask of flippancy." [5] Their relationship grew and deepened over the next several months; Rose speculates that "it was, in fact, the lightness and buoyancy of his spirits that made him attractive to her, so dreadfully given herself to despondency." [6]

It was probably during this time, the spring or summer of 1853, that Marian learned of Lewes' unorthodox marital situation. His best friend, Thornton Leigh Hunt, had fallen in love with Lewes' wife Agnes, and she with him. In April 1850 Agnes gave birth to a son by Hunt, but on the birth certificate Lewes recorded the child's name as "Edmund Lewes" and listed himself as the father. By acknowledging the child as his own, Lewes appeared to condone his wife's adultery, and so could not obtain a divorce from her. Agnes gave birth to another child by Hunt, a daughter, in October 1851; by mid-1852 Lewes had moved out of the family home, and by mid-1853 he and Marian were falling in love. [7]

Although in March 1853 Marian had written to Charles Bray that "I think I shall never have the energy to move―it seems to be of so little consequence where I am or what I do," by October she had moved out of Chapman's house and into her own lodgings closer to Lewes. [8] In the summer of 1854 Marian left on a trip to Germany; Lewes joined her at the dock, and from that time on they travelled and lived together openly as a couple, "Mr. and Mrs. Lewes." For the next 24 years, until Lewes' death, they would never again be apart for any extended period of time.

As Rose writes,

Before Lewes, she had been attracted to men who demanded looking up to, who would require sacrifices and were prepared to give little in return: Dr. Brabant, Chapman, Herbert Spencer. Towards these men she experienced the impulse towards self-surrender which she portrayed so brilliantly in Dorothea Brooke's response to Mr. Casaubon, the feminine impulse to over-value a man's work and to derive one's identity from it. [9]

But her relationship with Lewes was one not only of intellectual accord but mutual support and encouragement. She was interested in trying her hand at fiction; as she later wrote,

. . .one morning as I was thinking what should be the subject of my first story, my thoughts merged themselves into a dreamy doze, and I imagined myself writing a story of which the title was—'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton.' I was soon wide awake again, and told G. He said, 'O what a capital title!' and from that time I had settled in my mind that this should be my first story. [10]

Lewes sent the anonymous manuscript to the publisher John Blackwood, claiming that it had been written by a clergyman friend who soon identified himself as "George Eliot." The first name is clearly a reference to Lewes, and Eliot biographer Blanche Williams has speculated that the last name is as well: "To L—I owe 't." The novelist was born.

The three stories that made up Scenes of Clerical Life, of which "Amos Barton" was the first, were, in Eliot's words, "a great literary success, but not a great popular success." That was achieved with the publication of her second novel, Adam Bede. It sold an astonishing 14,000 copies between its publication in February 1859 and the fall of that year, when she wrote in a letter to François D'Albert Durade, a Swiss painter with whose family she had stayed during her first trip to Europe almost a decade before:

Under the influence of the intense happiness I have enjoyed in my married life from thorough moral and intellectual sympathy, I have at last found out my true vocation, after which my nature had always been feeling and striving uneasily without finding it. . .I have turned out to be an artist—not, as you are, with the pencil and pallet, but with words. [11]

George Eliot by Sir Frederic William Burton, 1865. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

She would go on live in "intense happiness" with Lewes for nearly two more decades, and to write six more novels, among them The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Daniel Deronda, and Middlemarch, frequently chosen (here, for example) as the greatest English-language novel ever written.

Other posts in this series:

• Harriet Hardy Taylor and John Stuart Mill
• Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens
• Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls and George Meredith
• Effie Gray and John Ruskin
• Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle

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1. George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book I: Miss Brooke, Chapter I. http://gutenberg.org/files/145/145-h/145-h.htm#chap01
2. Gordon S. Haight, editor, Selections from George Eliot's Letters, Yale University Press, 1985. To Herbert Spencer, [?14 July 1852], pp. 101-102. Quoted in Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives, p. 201.
   
3. Quoted in Haight, p. 102.  
4. Herbert Spencer, "Personal Beauty," reprinted in Essays: moral, political and aesthetic, Appleton, 1881. https://archive.org/details/essaysmoralpolit00spen/page/162/mode/1up
5. Quoted in Haight, To Mrs. Charles Bray, [16 April 1853], p. 121. Re: Villette, Marian had written to Cara Bray that it is "a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power." (Quoted in Haight, To Mrs. Charles Bray, 15 February [1853], p. 116.)
   
6. Rose, p. 223.
7. Agnes would go on to have two more children with Hunt; Lewes and, later, Eliot supported them their entire lives. Meanwhile, Hunt continued to live with his wife, and she also continued to get pregnant.
   
8. Quoted in Haight, To Charles Bray, [18 March 1853], p. 120.
9. Rose, p. 223.
   
10. John W. Cross, editor, George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and Journals, Chapter VII. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/43043/43043-h/43043-h.htm
    
11. Quoted in Haight, To François D'Albert Durade, 18 October 1859, p. 230.