George Eliot: The Last Victorian

On taking up Strauss, Mary Ann asked Dr Brabant, via Sara Hennell, for some work he was rumoured to have done already on the concluding section. When the translation finally arrived it turned out, true to form, to be scrappy and incomplete. In any case, Mary Ann soon realised that trying to follow someone else’s translation was ‘like hearing another piano going just a note before you in the same tune you are playing’.41 Putting aside the doctor’s jottings, she started again from scratch.

Translating Strauss was to dominate her life for the next two years. Unable to concentrate for more than four hours a day, she evolved the method she was to follow when writing fiction of working from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. This meant that she managed to cover about six pages of Strauss a day. Sara, who had turned down the translation before it had been offered to Rufa, agreed to act as Mary Ann’s editor. Letters went back and forth between London and Coventry discussing various points of translation as they arose. When a section of the work was completed, Mary Ann mailed it to Sara to read through and check against the original. This reliance on the post caused constant worries about late and non-arriving packages. ‘I sent a parcel of MS to you on Friday. Have you received it? I thought I should have heard that it had arrived safely when you sent the proof,’ was a typically anxious communication between Mary Ann and Sara during a particularly difficult stretch.42

The translation was a remarkably difficult piece of work, which would have taxed the most scholarly, university-educated brain. There were fifteen hundred pages of what Mary Ann described despairingly as ‘leathery’ German, with many quotations in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. At times it was only Sara’s brisk enthusiasm that kept her going: ‘Thank you for the encouragement you sent me – I only need it when my head is weak and I am unable to do much.’43 Even more tricky than finding literal meaning was the teasing out of nuance. Was it ‘Sacrament’ or ‘The Sacrament’? Was ‘Dogmatism’ quite what Strauss meant by ‘das Dogma’?44 And then there were pedantic, Rebecca Franklin-ish bickerings about English. Was ‘as though’ as good as ‘as if’? Was it ‘finally’ or ‘lastly’?45

Although the title of the work was The Life of Jesus, it is the subtitle – Critically Examined – which provides the key to Strauss’s methodology. He takes each episode in the life of Jesus, as told in the four Gospels, and shows how it ‘may be considered not as the expression of a fact, but as the product of an idea of his earliest followers’.46 Steeped in the Jewish tradition of the returning Messiah, Jesus’s disciples shaped their understanding of their master’s life to fit inherited expectations. Strauss’s aim was to unpick that process and show how the ‘historical’ Jesus had been created out of a series of Evangelical ‘mythi’.

There was nothing in Strauss that was new or strange to Mary Ann. She had long since come to the conclusion that Jesus was a gifted human teacher and not the Son of God. However, she did worry about the theologian’s relentlessly totalitarianising approach, which insisted on subsuming inconvenient exceptions into the arc of his narrative. ‘I am never pained when I think Strauss right,’ she wrote in the autumn of 1845, ‘but in many cases I think him wrong, as every man must be in working out into detail an idea which has general truth, but is only one element in a perfect theory, not a perfect theory in itself.’47 The crucifixion was a case in point. Strauss had to concede that the Jews’ expectations of the Messiah did not include one who was to suffer and die, let alone rise again. So where did this part of the Gospel narrative come from? Strauss was obliged to conclude weakly that ‘Jesus Himself may have reached the conclusion of the necessity of his death … or the whole idea might have been added after his death.’48

It was this stripping away of all that was ‘miraculous and highly improbable’ from the Gospels which oppressed Mary Ann the deeper she went into Das Leben Jesu. All her life she had read the Bible not simply as the revelation of God, but as the metaphorical language of her own experience. The quotations in her letters to Maria Lewis were not just for pious show, but a way of describing complex inner states. To be robbed of that language – for that is what she experienced Strauss as doing – was to be deprived of a vital part of herself. Her disillusionment with Das Leben Jesu became particularly acute at the beginning of 1846, when she tackled the detailed analysis of the crucifixion and resurrection. Describing herself as ‘Strauss-sick’, she fled to Rosehill, avoiding the first-floor study at Bird Grove, where she was supposed to be getting on with her work. She was, reported Cara in a letter to Sara, deathly pale and suffering from dreadful headaches.49 To pull herself through this Slough of Despond she placed a cast of the Risen Christ together with an engraving in a prominent place by her desk. This was her way of reasserting the mystery and hopeful joy of the New Testament narratives which continued to sustain her long after she had given up orthodox Christianity.

Once the work was finished, except for routine worries over proofs, Mary Ann’s spirits began to rise. At the end of May 1846 she headed off to see Sara in London with the promise that ‘we will be merry and sad, wise and nonsensical, devout and wicked together!’50 It was not simply liberation from the daily grind of translation that gave her such a delightful feeling of relief. The fact that the book was coming out at all was reason for celebration. Only a year earlier it had looked as though Strauss might go the same way as the ecclesiastical chart and Vinet – into oblivion. In May 1845 Joseph Parkes’s assurance that he would finance the publication started to look shaky and Mary Ann began ‘utterly to despair that Strauss will ever be published unless I … print it myself. I have no confidence in Mr Parkes and shall not be surprized if he fail in his engagement altogether.’51

In the end, the book did come out, published by John Chapman of Newgate Street. Mary Ann received only twenty pounds for her two years’ work and her name does not appear on the title page – or indeed anywhere else. None the less, its impact on her life was huge. Das Leben Jesu was a supremely important book and the name of its translator could not fail to circulate among well-informed people. Mary Ann’s meeting with the publisher John Chapman, while staying with Sara in summer 1846, was the catalyst for her move to London three years later and the start of her journalistic career. And, of course, the translation brought her to the notice of Strauss himself, who provided a preface in which he described her work as ‘accurata et perspicua’.52 In 1854 they finally met, thanks to the fussy ministrations of none other than Dr Brabant. Whether by chance or not, the good doctor popped up on the train on which Mary Ann and G. H. Lewes were travelling to Germany to start their life together, having fled gossiping London. Brabant insisted on introducing her to Strauss, whom he claimed as a kind of friend. The meeting, which took place over breakfast in a hotel in Cologne, turned out dismally. Strauss spoke little English and Mary Ann not much German. For this reason, or perhaps the buzzing presence of the insufferable Dr Brabant, Strauss appeared ‘strange and cast-down’ and the encounter drew to an embarrassed close.53

Once the exhilaration of being released from her task had settled, Mary Ann was in a position to assess the Strauss experience. Despite her dedication, a strain of ambivalence runs through her comments about the whole business of translation. It was, when all was said and done, not original or creative work, but ‘trifling’ stuff. She resented having had to worry about whether or not Parkes would come through with the money for something which was ‘not important enough to demand the sacrifice of one’s whole soul’.54 Even at this stage Mary Ann knew that she wanted to be something more than a mediator of other people’s words, although in later life she told a correspondent that at this point she stayed with translation because she felt that it was all she could do well.55 Although she had completed three substantial translations by the time she started to write fiction, she never drew attention to the fact and would have been quite happy for her involvement in them to have remained little known.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of Strauss her loftiness concealed considerable pride in her achievement. She was pleased with Charles Wicksteed’s review in the Prospective Review praising the ‘faithful, elegant, and scholarlike translation’.56 And when an old school friend approached her for advice about how she might earn her living as a translator, Mary Ann was quick to defend her own patch. Although she conceded that Miss Bradley Jenkins was clever, she poured scorn on her assumption that ‘she could sit from morn till noon, from noon till dewy eve, translating German or French without feeling the least fatigue’.57 It was one thing for Mary Ann Evans to think translation beneath her, quite another for an old classmate to assume she could do the same thing just as well.

One important legacy of the Strauss years was the deepening of Mary Ann’s friendship with Sara Hennell. They had first met by proxy, during those difficult months of the holy war in the spring of 1842. From Cara, Mary Ann had heard all about her clever elder sister who had worked as a governess to the Bonham Carter family. Sara, meanwhile, followed the trials of Cara’s interesting young neighbour through the letters she regularly received from Rosehill. The two women were finally introduced that summer, when Sara spent one of her many holidays in Coventry. Six weeks of music and talk laid the foundations of a friendship which would become the most important of both women’s lives for the next few years.

In many ways Sara Hennell was a clever, sophisticated version of that first governess in Mary Ann’s life, Maria Lewis. While Miss Lewis worked in the house of a Midlands clergyman, Miss Hennell had taught the daughters of a wealthy, cultured Unitarian Liberal MP. Instead of a relationship with her employers marked by resentment and insecurity, Sara Hennell was treated respectfully, enjoying the friendship of her eldest pupil long after she had ceased to teach her. While Maria Lewis’s notions of good behaviour were provincial and old-fashioned, Sara Hennell was used to fitting gracefully into life in the best circles. Most significantly, while Miss Lewis remained narrowly Evangelical, Sara Hennell set out from the Unitarianism of her childhood to explore and expand her faith through careful study of the new biblical criticism. She followed her brother Charles into print, publishing several books on theology throughout her long life.

When Mary Ann handed the letters she had so abruptly demanded back from Maria Lewis to Sara, she was signposting the similarities in the position the two women occupied in her life. Like Maria, Sara was located at a convenient distance, available for holiday visits and intense correspondence, but not the tedium and messiness of everyday contact. Mary Ann’s letters to Sara are less self-enclosed than those to Maria, but still there is a sense that she uses them as a way of exploring her own thoughts rather than as a means of exchanging ideas and feelings. One of the first letters she writes to Sara is the important reassessment of the lesson learned during the holy war, in which she elevates the community of feeling over the hair-splitting of intellectual debate. Throughout the correspondence it is Sara’s job to provide an informed listening ear rather than a provocative intervention in her young friend’s flow of thought. It is the idea of Sara, rather than Sara herself, which becomes the enabling force.

Mary Ann was guiltily aware of the narcissism running through her correspondence and indeed, the first few letters to Sara recall the early ones to Maria Lewis in their anxiety about appearing egotistical. ‘An unfortunate lady wrote a note, one page of which contained thirty I’s. I dare not count mine lest they should equal hers in number.’58 However, after a tentative start in which Mary Ann struggled to find a voice to speak to the Sara whom she held in her mind’s eye, the correspondence started to flow. Within a year, Mary Ann was addressing Sara as ‘Liebe Gemahlinn’, ‘Cara Sposa’ and ‘Beloved Achates’ – all terms which claimed her as something more than a friend.

Eliot’s early biographers, from her husband John Cross right down to Gordon Haight in the 1960s, felt uncomfortable with the language of sexual affection the two women used to one another. Cross simply left out the offending passages, while Haight anxiously explained them away in terms of contemporary conventions of female friendship. In fact, the language in the letters exceeds that used by even the closest women friends during the period. ‘This letter is only to tell you how sweet the genuine words of love in your letter to Cara have been to my soul. That you should really wish for me is a thought which I keep by me as a little cud to chew now and then,’ writes Mary Ann on 15 November 1847.59 Eighteen months later Mary Ann is teasing Sara with the idea that she may have been unfaithful. ‘I have given you a sad excuse for flirtation, but I have not been beyond seas long enough to make it lawful for you to take a new husband – therefore I come back to you with all a husband’s privileges and command you to love me … I sometimes talk to you in my soul as lovingly as Solomon’s Song.’60

By the autumn of 1842 it was already a joke in the Bray – Hennell circle that Mary Ann fell in love with everyone she met. At twenty-three she was still searching for that intense maternal love which her own mother had been unable to provide at the crucial stage in her development. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, neither Watts nor Brabant had been in a position to give her the kind of replacement mothering she craved. Both had backed off with differing degrees of grace. Sara Hennell, however, was in an altogether different position. Single and living with her mother, she was emotionally free to enter into an intense and absorbing relationship. Seven years older to the week than Mary Ann, she was young enough to seem a contemporary in the way that Maria Lewis never had, yet sufficiently mature to take on the role of mentor and nurturer.

The erotic language which Mary Ann used is a signal of the insecurity she felt about just how much Sara really loved her. By playing with ideas of possession, fidelity, flirtation and jealousy, she was both expressing and containing her fear that Sara might abandon her, just as Isaac Evans, Francis Watts, Robert Brabant and Robert Evans had all done. Yet by the time she was using analogies to Solomon’s Song in 1849 – the most explicitly erotic section of the Old Testament – she was already less dependent on the relationship. This echoed the pattern with Maria Lewis: it was at the point when Mary Ann wanted to leave the friendship that her declarations of love became most extravagant.

The reasons for the drift apart were familiar too. If Mary Ann was the one who used the language of love, it was Sara whose feelings stood the test of time. Unattached to any man except her brother, Sara’s devotion to Mary Ann did not wax and wane every time an interesting diversion appeared. Mary Ann, by contrast, used her relationship with Sara as a small child would her mother – as a secure emotional base from which to explore the world. Five years into the friendship the discrepancy in the amount the women needed one another started to show. Just like Maria Lewis, Sara expressed her insecurity about the strength of Mary Ann’s attachment in governessy comments about the inappropriateness of her behaviour with the opposite sex. ‘Poor little Miss Hennell’, reported Edith Simcox in 1885, ‘apparently always disapproved of Marian for depending so much on the arm of man.’61

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 young lady has a calm, serious soul.’73

Hodgson 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.