George Eliot: The Last Victorian

Whether Mary Ann actually had a physical relationship with Charles Bray remains frustratingly unclear. The fact that all her letters to him prior to 1848 have disappeared suggests that they were at least emotionally intimate and that someone wanted the evidence destroyed. But even if they were lovers, it was more than a sexual affair that was responsible for the blossoming of Mary Ann’s personality during these Rosehill years. The loving acceptance of Cara Bray and the intellectual companionship of Sara Hennell gave her a sense of being wanted – the first she had experienced since those early days with Isaac. Her young neighbour, Mary Sibree, recalled that ‘Mr and Mrs Bray and Miss Hennell, with their friends, were her world, and on my saying to her once, as we closed the garden door [at Rosehill] together, that we seemed to be entering a Paradise, she said, “I do indeed feel that I shut the world out when I shut that door.”’ 10

This new happiness permeated every part of Mary Ann’s being. Now she played the piano and sang in front of other people without bursting into tears. Instead of refusing to read novels, she argued for them on the grounds that ‘they perform an office for the mind which nothing else can’.11 She relaxed sufficiently about her appearance to allow Cara to paint her portrait – a sweet, flattering water-colour which fooled no one and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.12 She accompanied the Brays on holidays to other parts of the country and became a favourite with the friends and family they visited on the way.

With Mary Ann soaking up every new subject which the Brays pushed her way, it was inevitable that she should become interested in phrenology. The practice of bump-reading might seem like so much mumbo-jumbo now, but during the mid-nineteenth century it held considerable appeal for those who were trying to make connections between man’s physical constitution and his psychological processes. During a trip to London in July 1844 Charles Bray persuaded Mary Ann to have a cast made of her head – luckily it was no longer necessary to have one’s hair shaved off – and set about analysing its shape. Writing at the end of his life, and after hers, Bray naturally relied on post hoc knowledge to give his findings extra bite. In the following extract from his autobiography he creeps from phrenological ‘fact’ to interpretations of Mary Ann’s subsequent behaviour.

In the Feelings, the Animal and Moral regions are about equal; the moral being quite sufficient to keep the animal in order and in due subservience, but would not be spontaneously active. The social feelings were very active, particularly the adhesiveness. She was of a most affectionate disposition, always requiring some one to lean upon, preferring what has hitherto been considered the stronger sex to the other and more impressible. She was not fitted to stand alone.13

As Mary Ann’s willingness to contemplate phrenology suggests, her intellectual relationship with others softened during this period. During the high drama of the holy war, the competitive Evangelical had given way to the combative free-thinker. Now, during the 1840s, Mary Ann began the long journey towards empathy and tolerance which was to mark the mature narrative voice of George Eliot. A passage from Bray’s autobiography describes her at the very beginning of this bumpy process.

I consider her the most delightful companion I have ever known; she knew everything. She had little self-assertion; her aim was always to show her friends off to the best advantage – not herself. She would polish up their witticisms, and give them the full credit of them. But there were two sides; hers was the temperament of genius which has always its sunny and shady side. She was frequently very depressed – and often very provoking, as much so as she could be agreeable – and we had violent quarrels; but the next day, or whenever we met, they were quite forgotten, and no allusions made to them.14

Increasingly Mary Ann was able to move beyond these violent reactions and come to rest in a position of disciplined tolerance towards others. This was particularly true in matters of faith. In the immediate aftermath of the holy war Mrs Sibree had been doubtful about letting Mary Sibree take German lessons from Mary Ann in case the older girl should unsettle her daughter’s religious beliefs. Mr Sibree, however, did not ‘see any danger’ and the lessons began on Saturday afternoons. During these Mary Ann was always careful to steer clear of theological discussion, to the disappointment of Mary who tried to provoke the infamous Miss Evans into saying something controversial. Every time Mary tried to steer the conversation round to a dangerous topic, Mary Ann countered with a gentle reminder of ‘the positive immorality of frittering … [time] away in ill-natured or in poor profitless talk’. On one occasion the sixteen-year-old girl announced provocatively ‘how sure I was that there could be no true morality without evangelical belief. “Oh, it is so, is it?” she [Mary Ann] said, with the kindest smile, and nothing further passed.’15

Mary Ann’s deflective comments concealed the kernel of her argument with organised religion. In a letter of 3 August 1842 she told the Revd Francis Watts, one of the men who had tried to argue her out of infidelity, that feeling obliged to serve humanity out of a sense of duty and fear of punishment worked against ‘that choice of the good for its own sake, that answers my ideal’.16 Now that she was no longer burdened with having to save her soul through conspicuous good works, Mary Ann was able to concentrate on what really needed to be done. Finding that she was unsuited to some kinds of philanthropy – an attempt to help Cara at the infants’ school had not been a success – she thought carefully about how she could be most useful. Often this turned out to be as inglorious as making a direct financial contribution. When one of the Sibrees’ servants became burdened with the responsibility for newly orphaned nephews and nieces, she offered to pay for the care and education of ‘a chubby-faced little girl four or five years of age’.17 Again, she contributed two guineas to the Industrial Home for young women for which Mrs Sibree was collecting funds. ‘I tell of this’, says Mary Sibree, writing after Mary Ann’s death, ‘as one among many indications of Miss Evans’s ever-growing zeal to serve humanity in a broader way, motivated as she felt by a higher aim than what she termed “desire to save one’s soul by making up coarse flannel for the poor”.’18

Other people sensed this expansion in Mary Ann’s inner life and responded accordingly. No longer a chilly saint to be revered and avoided, she was approached by friends and servants who now came to her with their problems, ‘to an extent’, remembered Mary Sibree, ‘that quite oppressed her’.19 It was a phenomenon which was to last the rest of her life. Seven years later, when she was staying alone in a Geneva pension, she found herself a magnet for every lonely or anxious guest who needed someone to talk to. Twenty years on she was regularly besieged in letter and in person by men and women from around the world who were convinced that she, and she alone, could understand their story.

Thanks to growing family pressure, Mary Sibree had little contact with Mary Ann over the next few decades. But in 1873, as Mrs John Cash, wife of a prosperous manufacturer and the new mistress of Rosehill, she visited the woman who was now known as Marian Lewes in London. ‘It touched me deeply to find how much she had retained of her kind interest in all that concerned me and mine, and I remarked on this to Mr Lewes, who came to the door with my daughter and myself at parting. “Wonderful sympathy,” I said. “Is it not?” said he; and when I added, inquiringly, “The power lies there?” “Unquestionably it does,” was his answer.’20

Mary Ann spent her first day home after the holy war at Rosehill reading letters which Charles Hennell had written to his sister Cara while working on An Inquiry. It was not just intellectual curiosity that made the experience so delightful. The fact that Hennell had responded to his sister’s religious doubts by devoting two years of his hard-pressed time to produce this magnificent piece of work resonated deep within Mary Ann. Her own brother Isaac had met his sister’s crisis of conscience with coldness, calculation and a complete lack of understanding. Charles Hennell, by contrast, seemed to have all the qualities desirable in an ideal brother – lover.

So it was painful to learn that he was already in love with someone else. Elizabeth Rebecca Brabant was the talented daughter of an intellectually minded doctor whose patients had included Thomas Moore and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, she got her nickname – ‘Rufa’ – from some verses the latter had written about her striking red hair. Dr Robert Brabant had taught himself German in order to study the work of eminent theologians such as David Friedrich Strauss, who had done so much to reveal the man-made origins of the Bible. In 1839 Dr Brabant was an inevitable early reader of Charles Hennell’s An Inquiry, which reached many of the same conclusions as Strauss. Delighted by the book, Brabant invited its author to his home in Devizes. Hennell, in turn, was enchanted by Rufa Brabant, to whom he quickly proposed. The good doctor, however, opposed the match when he examined the young man and found him to be consumptive. It is hard, now, to conceive the terror that tuberculosis generated a hundred and fifty years ago: the nearest analogy might be to finding that one has a slow-growing malignant tumour. The young couple agreed not to see each other but, by way of continuing their relationship, Rufa undertook to translate Strauss’s most important book, Das Leben Jesu (1835–6), for her suitor. Remarkably, Hennell, who did not know German, had written An Inquiry without detailed knowledge of its contents.

When Rufa arrived in Coventry to visit the Brays in October 1842 it was inevitable that Mary Ann would not like her. All the more so when Charles Hennell turned up the next day, presumably against Dr Brabant’s wishes. Rufa not only had the kind of hair which inspired poets, she read German theology in the original and enjoyed the love of a kind, clever man. However, during the next three weeks Mary Ann was able to draw on the emotional discipline which was eventually to become an integrated part of her personality. Writing to Sara Hennell on 3 November, she admits that her first impression of Rufa ‘was unfavourable and unjust, for in spite of what some caustic people may say, I fall not in love with everyone’. On further acquaintance, she is happy to report: ‘I admire your friend exceedingly; there is a tender seriousness about her that is very much to my taste, and thorough amiability and retiredness, all which qualities make her almost worthy of Mr Hennell.’21

There followed a tricky nine months during which events conspired to push Mary Ann and the officially unengaged Charles Hennell together. In March 1843 he turned up at Rosehill for a fortnight. In May he accompanied her and the Brays on a visit to Malvern. In July things came to a painful head when the same party, this time supplemented by Rufa, took a longer trip to Wales. During a ten-day stay in Tenby, Rufa badgered Mary Ann into attending a ball at the pavilion. Excruciatingly, no one asked her to dance. Doubtless Rufa was trying to be kind, but the news that she had resumed her engagement to Charles Hennell, this time with her father’s approval, only pointed up the differences between the two young women. Both were clever and serious. But one was pretty and well connected and the other was not. And it was Rufa, with her magnificent hair and a pedigree rooted in the intellectual middle classes, who had bagged Charles Hennell.

There was a consolation prize of sorts. Mary Ann was to be a bridesmaid at the wedding, which took place on 1 November in London. The service was conducted by the country’s leading Unitarian minister, William Johnson Fox, at the Finsbury Chapel. Escorted by Charles Bray, Mary Ann spent a week in London, staying with Sara Hennell, who lived with her mother in Hackney. When she had previously visited the city in 1838 with Isaac, it had been during the height of her Evangelical phase. The gloomy teenager who had glowered at the suggestion of a trip to the theatre had been replaced by a young woman eager to pack as many cultural experiences as possible into the time available. But despite the fun and bustle, Mary Ann was still feeling left out and left behind by the Brabant – Hennell marriage. This was her third time as a bridesmaid and it was hard to imagine that it would ever be her turn to enjoy the loving attention which other women seemed to claim by right. So in these dispiriting circumstances it was delightful to receive an invitation from Rufa’s father, asking her to accompany him home to Devizes for a holiday. She had first met the sixty-two-year-old Dr Brabant when he had joined the Brays’ party in Wales and, persuaded by the fact that Rufa had come into some money, had given permission for the young couple to marry. If she could not have Charles Hennell as a brother – lover, then perhaps she might claim Robert Brabant as a more congenial substitute for the still disapproving and distant Robert Evans.

Luckily, Dr Brabant was ripe for the role in which he had been cast. He begged Mary Ann to consider Devizes her home for as long as she was deprived of a permanent arrangement in Warwickshire. Even now, eighteen months after the holy war, Isaac and Robert Evans were still making noises about moving Mary Ann back to the country. To have a charming, educated older man telling her that she must consider his library as her particular domain must have been intoxicating. She responded eagerly to his attentions, rapturously boasting in a letter to Cara that her host had christened her ‘Deutera, which means second and sounds a little like daughter’.22 Her next letter, on 20 November, continues in the same breathless vein. ‘I am in a little heaven here, Dr. Brabant being its archangel … time would fail me to tell of all his charming qualities. We read, walk and talk together, and I am never weary of his company.’23 She wrote to her father asking him if she could extend her stay to 13 December.

Not everyone in the Devizes household shared Mary Ann’s view of paradise, especially Dr Brabant’s wife and her sister. The latter, Miss Susan Hughes, had alerted Mrs Brabant, who was blind, to the fact that Miss Evans was permanently entwined with the doctor. Mrs Brabant immediately wrote to Rufa to ask her to tear herself away from her new husband and come down to Devizes to see if she could calm her over-ardent friend. Rufa in turn told her sister-in-law Cara what was going on and begged her to caution Mary Ann by letter about her behaviour. Miss Hughes, meanwhile, took the most direct path by advising Mary Ann on the train times home, three weeks before her proposed departure.

Mary Ann was too enraptured to take the hint. She insisted on extending her stay and when Cara wrote warning her to beware of Dr Brabant, she snapped back, ‘He really is a finer character than you think.’24 The time had come for Mrs Brabant, whom Mary Ann had previously described as ‘perfectly polite’, to put her foot down. She demanded that Mary Ann depart immediately, a fortnight early, and swore that if she were ever to return then she, Mrs Brabant, would leave at once. It would be nice to report that the ‘archangel’ intervened and stood up for his ‘Deutera’. In fact, according to John Chapman paraphrasing Rufa in 1851, Dr Brabant ‘acted ungenerously and worse, towards Miss E. for though he was the chief cause of all that passed, he acted towards her as though … the fault lay with her alone’.25

The roots of the Devizes crisis went deeper than the emotional topsoil turned over by the wedding. Mary Ann was probably not the first, and certainly would not be the last, young woman towards whom Brabant was over-familiar. In 1885 her cattiest literary rival, Eliza Lynn, told Herbert Spencer that she too had received advances from Dr Brabant during a visit to Devizes in 1847. Never missing an opportunity to snipe, Lynn expressed amazement that Miss Evans could bear to encourage Dr Brabant, who she declared was ‘more antipathetic than any man I have ever known … his love-making purely disgusting’.26

Nor was this the first time that Mary Ann had let an intellectual rapport with an older man overstep the mark. The Revd Francis Watts, a friend of the Sibrees, had been one of the subtle thinkers enlisted to persuade Mary Ann back into the fold during the holy war. Although unsuccessful, he admitted to Mrs Sibree that Miss Evans had ‘awakened deep interest in his own mind, as much by the earnestness which characterised her inquiries as by her exceptional attainments’.27 Mary Ann was equally taken with the Revd Watts. In a pattern which was to be repeated several times over the next decade, she used her intellect to keep a clever, unavailable man interested in her. While still in exile at Griff she had written to Watts suggesting that he oversee her translation of Vinet’s Mémoire en faveur de la Liberté des Cultes. With its proposition that man’s capacity for goodness is not dependent on his belief in an afterlife, Vinet’s book lay at the heart of her new beliefs. Enclosing a sample of her translation, she courted Watts in language which set abject humility alongside flirtatious presumption: ‘I venture to send you an échantillon that you may judge whether I should be in danger of wofully travestying Vinet’s style, and if you approve of my project I shall be delighted if you will become foster-father to the work, and arrange for its publication.’28

A second letter, nearly three months later, makes it clear that it is Watts’s interest in her, rather than hers in Vinet, which makes the project meaningful to her. ‘I shall proceed con amore now that you encourage me to hope for the publication of the memoir. I confess my spirits were flagging at the idea of translating four hundred pages to no purpose.’ And then in a curiously oblique manner she continues: ‘A friend has given some admonitions that led me to fear I have misrepresented myself by my manner … It gives me much pain to think that you should have received such an impression, and I entreat you to believe that the remembrance of you, your words and looks calls up, I will not say humble, but self-depreciating reflections and lively gratitude.’29

Watts must have been sufficiently reassured by Mary Ann’s acknowledgement of her over-familiarity to continue his involvement in the project throughout the autumn of 1842. However, a letter received in December sounded warning bells again. Writing to acknowledge the receipt of some books he had lent her, Mary Ann gushed, ‘I beg you to understand that I consider myself your translator and the publication as yours, and that my compensation will be any good that may be effected by the work, and the pleasure of being linked to your remembrance.’30

Now Watts had no choice but to acknowledge that Mary Ann’s interest in Vinet arose out of her deep feelings for him. Panicked by the implications, he withdrew from the project and the correspondence, claiming busyness and possibly family illness as an excuse. The next thing we hear is that Mary Ann is returning his books and has given up on Vinet with the strange explanation that she has started translating ‘a part of Spinoza’s works for a friend’.31 In fact, the friend was Cara and, far from begging Mary Ann to start work on it, Cara had wanted to do it herself, telling her sister Sara: ‘I grieved to let Mary Ann carry it off, for I am sure I could understand his [Spinoza’s] Latin better than her English; but it would disappoint her.’32

In truth, Mary Ann had embarked on Spinoza as a face-saving device, a way of rejecting Watts as surely as he had rejected her. It was a tactic she was to use in the even more embarrassing case of Dr Brabant, at whose suggestion the Spinoza translation was being done. Her last letter written from Devizes on 30 November 1843, a couple of days before her departure, gives the impression to Cara, who knew otherwise, that she is leaving on her own terms. She talks of her ‘grief at parting with my precious friends’, but makes no specific reference to the man who had previously been the epicentre of her correspondence.33

From the moment she returned to Coventry Mary Ann adopted an attitude of studied condescension about Dr Brabant, referring to him in public as if he were a ridiculous pest. Yet she could never quite bear to bring the relationship to a decisive close. Following the Devizes débâcle the archangel and his Deutera did not communicate for three years. However, when in 1846 Mary Ann finished the translation of Strauss, which she had taken over from Rufa, she could not resist sending Brabant a bound copy. Perhaps she wanted to show him that his second daughter could manage a piece of work which exceeded anything his first might have managed. The appearance of Miss Evans’s parcel ruffled a few feathers in Devizes, and Sara Hennell was immediately asked to find out exactly what was going on. Mary Ann responded to her enquiry with defensive loftiness: ‘Pray convince her [Rufa] and every one concerned … that I am too inflatedly conceited to think it worth my while to run after Dr. Brabant or his correspondence.’ It is true, she admits, that she has initiated contact with him, but ‘as a favour conferred by me rather than received’. And in case this should seem too obviously at odds with known history, she qualifies this with, ‘If I ever offered incense to him it was because there was no other deity at hand and because I wanted some kind of worship pour passer le temps.’34

Over the next few years Mary Ann kept up this slighting tone towards the doctor. In February 1847 when she wanted to return his copy of Spinoza to him – the one she had started translating instead of Vinet – she imagined hurling it towards Devizes so that it would leave ‘its mark somewhere above Dr. B’s ear’.35

Brabant, by contrast, was unencumbered by embarrassed feelings and continued to display jaunty self-possession in his dealings with Mary Ann. In August of that year Sara reported that Mary Ann had received ‘a most affectionate invitation from Dr. B. a few days ago to go to Germany with him!’36 Although there would have been others in the party, Mary Ann refused. Starting up a correspondence with the archangel was one thing, reliving the embarrassment of the Devizes episode quite another.

Still, the good doctor refused to disappear completely. Whenever he was in town he stayed at 142 The Strand, the Chapmans’ boarding-house where Mary Ann lodged during the early 1850s. On one such occasion when their paths crossed Mary Ann informed Cara that the ‘house is only just exorcised of Dr. Brabant’, as if he were a nasty smell.37 Yet the very next day she wrote appreciatively of the doctor’s visit to Charles Bray, mentioning that he had taken her ‘very politely’ on an excursion to Crystal Palace, as well as the theatre.38

Brabant’s most celebrated reappearance in Mary Ann’s life was in the shape of Edward Casaubon, the pedantic, ineffectual scholar of Middlemarch. For all Brabant’s bustling endeavour, he never actually managed to sustain any piece of intellectual work. According to Eliza Lynn, Brabant ‘used up his literary energies in thought and desire to do rather than in actual doing, and [his] fastidiousness made his work something like Penelope’s web. Ever writing and rewriting, correcting and destroying, he never got farther than the introductory chapter of a book which he intended to be epoch-making, and the final destroyer of superstition and theological dogma.’39

Mary Ann saw for herself just how ineffectual Brabant really was when, at the beginning of 1844, she took over Rufa’s translation of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu. The new Mrs Hennell had found the work too onerous to combine with married life and suggested to her sister-in-law Sara that Mary Ann might like to step in. This was a delicate situation. Having watched Rufa carry off Charles Hennell, was Mary Ann being offered her cast-off translation as some kind of compensation? If this suspicion did go through her mind, Cara and Sara surely pressed her to set it to one side. They were both aware of how desperately she needed a substantial piece of work to stretch and exhaust a mind prone to pull itself to pieces. Mary Ann’s previous attempts at sustained intellectual work – the ecclesiastical chart, the translation of Vinet – had faltered through her own failure to get started. At the end of her life she told John Cross of her ‘absolute despair’ at this point of achieving anything.40 The big attraction of the Strauss was that the translation was already commissioned – by the Radical MP Joseph Parkes – so there would be an external authority driving her to complete the project.