BIOGRAPHY: George Eliot: Novelist, Lover, Wife,By Brenda Maddox, Harper Press, 242pp, £14.99.
'IMAGINE ME PLAYING tennis by the hour," George Eliot writes to a friend in June 1877. Her neighbour, Johnny Cross, known affectionately as "Nephew", had just installed an "apparatus for lawn tennis" in the garden of her new house in Surrey where she lived with George Henry Lewes. "The Heights" had cost a fortune. George Eliot had a fortune, though: Middlemarch, the second last of her eight fictional works and her justly celebrated masterpiece, netted the equivalent of £570,000 in just two years. Writing to her publisher, John Blackwood, she exclaims with understandable delight: "The sale of Middlemarchis wonderful out of all whooping."
Lewes died in 1879 and in 1880 George Eliot married for the first time. Her husband was Johnny Cross. He was 40. She was 60. On honeymoon in Venice, Cross jumped from their balcony into a canal in what was presented in local police reports as a suicide attempt. The incident remains a mystery. Six months later, George Eliot was dead from heart failure. No mystery there. The last words of this agnostic realist were scientifically accurate and appropriately prosaic: “Tell them I have great pain on the left side.”
Lewes and Marian Evans (though born Mary Anne, she spelled her original name variously and was most commonly known as Marian) had lived together for 25 years causing a sensation by "running away" to Germany in 1854. From there, Evans embarked on her career as a freelance journalist until the success of her "experiments" in fiction meant that she could become a full-time novelist and poet. (The pen name "George Eliot" was not conceived until the publication of Adam Bede, in 1859).
Married and the father of three boys, Lewes was separated from his wife, Agnes Jervis, before he met Evans but never divorced. His sons often lived with Evans and called her “Mother”. The domestic ordinariness and happiness of her new family relationships, the public scandal of her “situation” and her increasing celebrity were never reconciled: “Mrs Lewes” as Evans called herself, remained a social outcast all her life, while “George Eliot” was revered as a genius.
Brenda Maddox romps through these details of an atypical life in this short, swift biography of the Warwickshire-born Marian Evans, the latest instalment of the Eminent Lives series that includes Bill Bryson on Shakespeare and controversial Ronald Reagan biographer Edmund Morris on Beethoven.
The series, following Lytton Strachey’s original line, twins well-known, outspoken writers with canonical figures so that the unusual alchemy might separate the “redundant” details of the life and work, accrued over decades of worthy but dryish scholarship, from the most “significant” points to make the life story more palatable for the general reader.
The image of a whooping Evans chasing around her garden after a tennis ball served by her soon-to-be toy-boy husband while her lover, Lewes, looks on should be enough in itself to revise set impressions of the novelist as an all too indigestible Eminent Victorian in the minds of the generations of Leaving Cert students force-fed Silas Marner.
The subtitle of this biography, " Novelist, Lover, Wife", misleads, however. We are given gossip galore about George Eliot the lover, but there is very little about the novelist apart from the argument that George Eliot needed not only a room of her own but one with a man in it to succeed.We learn of those who might have "taken" her virginity (including the radical publisher John Chapman and Coventry ribbon manufacturer Charles Bray) and those who admired her for her intellect only (her unrequited love, sociologist Herbert Spencer, who made it clear that he was not physically attracted to her, and her husband, Johnny Cross whom were told mighthave been gay).
This ambitious, independent woman had a working knowledge of seven languages, produced a well-received and influential translation of David Strauss's controversial Life of Jesus, and was the first-ever woman editor of a leading intellectual periodical, the , albeit anonymously, by the time she was 35. Maddox takes the line that a "brilliant, depressive autodidact" was "transformed by Lewes's love into one of the greatest novelists of English literature".
George Eliot’s achievements and her art are everywhere rendered secondary to accounts of her men, her almost annual European trips, her health (fragile, but robust enough for travelling), her earning power and her looks. These last two are related according to Maddox: “Her face was her fortune,” the biography begins – her parents took one look at their new baby and “at a glance” knew that she would have to make her own way in the world because no man would have her. Maddox’s attention to George Eliot’s features is maintained to the point of near obsession: a trip to the dentist to remove two teeth has Maddox conclude that “the gaps in her smile can only have accentuated her odd appearance”. Henry James’s cruel remarks that she was “deliciously hideous” are reported twice.
Heroines who are beautiful and the subject of complicated marriages that provide searing insights into social and personal relationships between men and women are central to all George Eliot’s novels. However, no sustained connections are made between what George Eliot writes about and what Maddox deems “significant” material in this mostly unreflective biography that charges along through the chronology of the life at the expense of explication and any sense of the wider context.
The mid-19th century becomes a simplistic alien planet, a “society so long ago”, peopled by hypochondriacs obsessed with their ailments and dim readers who did not immediately “get” that Daniel Deronda was a Jew by birth or that Romola was a novel about “a man with two wives”.
The novels come across as weirdly convoluted tales of murder, secret cross-class affairs, bigamy, mistaken identity, lost wills and suicide because of Maddox’s too-compact approach.
The plots are indeed wonderfully melodramatic, but one of George Eliot's lasting achievements is that as stories, the lives of her characters, unfolded patiently, are also explicable, even ordinary, always eliciting some compassion because of the novelists careful attention to context. Good biographies do the same as Marian Evans reports of her reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë,which for all its failings, "we thought admirable – cried over it – and felt the better for it".
Maddox has made her impressive mark as a biographer by redirecting attention to interesting, formidable women who were overshadowed by famous men (Nora Barnacle, George Yeats, Rosalind Franklin).
All the more bizarre, then, that this life of George Eliot, a very famous woman, widely acknowledged as one of the most significant European novelists of the 19th century, takes as its keynote a skewed line that neglects the work and all but erases Marian Evans’s own dry, self-deprecating humour, everywhere apparent in the fiction and the letters.
Fionnuala Dillane is a lecturer in Victorian literature at the school of English, drama and film at UCD