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Portrait of Mary Ann Evans, 1850.
Portrait of Mary Ann Evans - also known as George Eliot – 1850. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Portrait of Mary Ann Evans - also known as George Eliot – 1850. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Middlemarch: Jennifer Egan on how George Eliot’s unorthodox love life shaped her masterpiece

This article is more than 5 years old

Eliot found fulfilment in a relationship that society shunned – no wonder her study of marriage captures a climate of change

It is striking that the author of the most brilliant literary study of marriage in English was a woman whose unorthodox romantic partnership excluded her from polite society. Mary Ann Evans, who took the pseudonym of George Eliot when she began publishing fiction, lived for 24 years with George Henry Lewes, a philosopher, journalist and critic, whose open marriage to his wife had already resulted in her bearing another man’s child. Lewes’s agreement to his name being on the baby’s birth certificate deprived him later, through a quirk of law, of the right to divorce. Technically, the unmarried Evans was pilfering another woman’s husband by living with Lewes – never mind that Lewes’s legal wife went on to have three more children with her lover, all of whom Evans and Lewes supported (along with Lewes’s three sons) through their writing, editing and translating. Their urgent need for money was partly what prompted Lewes to encourage Evans to try her hand at writing fiction at the age of 37.

But fame had a softening effect then as now, and by the time Eliot published Middlemarch, her sixth novel, she had been a celebrity for years. Men and women who had spurned her company in her early years with Lewes now flocked to the couple’s Sunday at-homes. Dickens, Thackeray and Queen Victoria were fans. She received passionate queries from strangers seeking advice on how to live better lives. Although she still published as George Eliot, she had revealed her true identity shortly after the publication of Adam Bede, her second work of fiction, whose runaway success prompted intense speculation about who was behind the pseudonym – and the emergence of a pretender demanding royalties. Her reputation continued to wax even through a troubled middle period, when she struggled to write Romola and Felix Holt, the Radical, which were less successful than her early novels, though critically praised.

An early edition of Middlemarch. Photograph: Steven McCauley/PR

There were walls of disapproval that even Eliot’s fame could not breach. Her brother, Isaac Evans, paterfamilias since the death of their father many years before, severed contact when she began living with Lewes and insisted that their sisters do the same. But if Warwickshire, where Eliot was born in 1819 and spent the first 30 years of her life, did not welcome her back, it nonetheless provided her with the memories and textures of provincial life that her readers celebrated. She returned to the region creatively throughout her career, beginning with her first piece of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, and in Middlemarch, her masterpiece, named after a fictional Midlands town.

Her father, Robert Evans, was an estate manager –on whom Eliot based the virtuous Caleb Garth in Middlemarch. As a child, she availed herself of his employer’s splendid library and accompanied her father on his ramblings through the county. In this way, she encountered some part of the breathtaking sweep of social classes, modes of speech and walks of life that we find in Middlemarch, from the landowning Brooke family to the ribbon manufacturing Vincys to the horse-trading characters that Fred Vincy, son of the Middlemarch mayor, plays billiards with at the Green Dragon.

Middlemarch began as two books, each centred on a troubled marriage. The first mismatch is between Dorothea Brooke, the devout 17-year-old niece of Mr Brooke, and Edward Casaubon, a severe, cerebral scholar nearly 30 years her senior who has devoted his life to writing The Key to All Mythologies, a multi-volume religious work. The catastrophic future of this union is obvious to everyone but the two principals. While Eliot invites the reader to smile and even laugh with her at the delusions and foibles of her characters (Middlemarch is a very funny book), she never mocks them. Explaining Dorothea’s attraction to Casaubon, she writes: “The radiance of her transfigured girlhood fell on the first object that came within its level.”

Dorothea’s religious passion is, Eliot suggests, erotic passion – something Casaubon utterly lacks. Even his life’s work is a hollow distraction. “What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.” It would have been easy to play Casaubon for villainy or laughs, but Eliot makes him tragically aware of his deficiencies. By the time of their honeymoon in Rome, both are already awash in disappointment. There, Dorothea chances on her husband’s young cousin, Will Ladislaw, and Casaubon soon grows jealous of the attraction he senses between them. His resulting suspicions and cruel treatment of Dorothea are agony to witness – the more so because his own misery is so manifest. Eliot writes: “He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”

Walls of disapproval … Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw and Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea in the 1993 television version. Photograph: Minke Spiro/REX

The second marriage is between Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor, and Rosamond Vincy, the mayor’s spoiled, obstinately frivolous daughter. Illusions and projection are in play here, too; Rosamond covets Lydgate’s aristocratic family connections, while he is smitten by her coquettish beauty. Having intended to avoid marriage until his career was fully under way, he falls prey to social pressure; the perception that he and Rosamond are already attached catalyses their engagement. Notwithstanding the freer sexual mores among married couples in certain bohemian circles, Victorian betrothals were generally quickly settled and brutally permanent. That paradox is a focus of Middlemarch; since women had virtually no rights of their own, their fate and status hinged entirely on their hastily chosen husbands. A painful example is that of Harriet Bulstrode, whose husband, a wealthy, moralising banker, is publicly unmasked as a hypocrite. Harriet’s worldly position goes from enviable to wretched overnight, yet she stands by him. “With one leap of her heart she was at his side in mournful but unreproaching fellowship with shame and isolation.”

The happiest marriages in the book are those into which both parties have entered open-eyed and without illusions: the rector Cadwallader and his bubbly wife, both of whom joke about the riches she forfeited to marry him, and childhood sweethearts Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, Caleb’s daughter, a “small plump brownish person of firm but quiet carriage, who looks about her, but does not suppose that anybody is looking at her”. Plain, sensible Mary Garth is sought after from two directions; the appealing vicar Farebrother is also in love with her. One suspects that making a plain girl the object of a surfeit of affection was satisfying to Eliot, whose own lack of physical beauty was a central factor of her early life.

Her family feared that her homeliness would prevent her marrying, and more than one man cited her looks as a reason for rejecting her. But Eliot is also making a larger point: beauty is a distracting liability. Of Lydgate, she writes: “Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.” But Lydgate’s superficiality wins him a terrible marriage to Rosamond, whose beauty, Eliot suggests, has stunted her interior growth. “She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.” Defined by her beauty, Rosamond has been expected all her life to make a good match – and nothing more. In the words of her father: “What have you such an education for, if you are to go and marry a poor man?”

Eliot’s wariness of beauty was borne out by her own experience. Although Lewes was a womaniser in his youth, he was renowned for being “the ugliest man in London”, and nicknamed “ape”. Yet these two physically imperfect people formed a rich, monogamous, sexually satisfying union, according to Kathryn Hughes’s excellent biography of Eliot. Their partnership was progressive even by today’s standards; they opted not to have children and used birth control to ensure this, and as Eliot’s fiction became their chief source of income, Lewes devoted himself tirelessly to nurturing her creative powers. Far from resenting her fame, he cultivated it, nicknaming her “Madonna”, guarding access to her, and protecting her from news that might upset her productivity. Yet they regarded themselves as a traditional married couple; Eliot took Lewes’s surname and sharply corrected those who failed to employ it.

Eliot’s reluctance to serve as an avatar of female independence was a source of bafflement and even frustration to other people, both during her lifetime and after her death. Yet in no way is her vision conservative. Middlemarch, set in the time of her childhood, brims with awareness of impending political, social and technological change. Its politics involve the Reform Act, which was passed in 1832 and gave the merchant class greater representation in parliament. One of Eliot’s great writing strengths is her ability to spring from the intimate corners of people’s minds into big, symphonic scenes where diverse social classes collide. In one of the most memorable (especially to anyone with a fear of public speaking), Dorothea’s uncle Mr Brooke, who is seeking a seat in parliament, becomes tongue‑tied during a disastrous speech before an audience of mocking and contemptuous electors.

Also present in the novel are agents canvassing people in the Midlands to make way for the rail network that remade Britain during Eliot’s lifetime. While the book gives full voice to provincial suspicions that the landscape will be torn apart to profit the urban rich, Eliot sides with progress – as described by Caleb Garth, the novel’s voice of reason. “Somebody told you the railroad was a bad thing. That was a lie. It may do a bit of harm here and there, to this and that; and so does the sun in heaven. But the railway’s a good thing.”

If Middlemarch articulates Eliot’s faith in a world of greater physical mobility, social mobility is the transformation that forms the blazing heart of her vision. Will Ladislaw, whose foreign blood makes him an object of suspicion, excels as a newspaper editor and becomes a successful politician. He marries the widowed Dorothea, who forfeits rank and inheritance to become his wife. In describing their happiness, Eliot is asserting the primacy of love over status, merit over fortune. But Middlemarch goes farther than rejecting social class as an arbiter of worth – it suggests that the vitality required to thrive in a changing world is not to be found in the aristocracy. This view is directly at odds with tradition, and Dorothea breaks with her past: she and Will leave the Midlands for London, to be remembered ambiguously:

Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea’s second marriage as a mistake; and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in Middlemarch, where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine girl who married a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her father, and in little more than a year after his death gave up her estate to marry his cousin – young enough to have been his son, with no property, and not well-born. Those who had not seen anything of Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been “a nice woman”, else she would not have married either the one or the other.

Who would know better than Eliot that connubial happiness in the capital can sometimes cost a woman her reputation back in the Midlands?

The novel was published in eight instalments in 1871 and 1872, and in 1874 appeared in a single volume whose phenomenal success made Eliot rich. She and Lewes bought their first home and a custom-made carriage. But his health, always volatile, took a malignant turn, and he died at 61 in the autumn of 1876. Eliot applied herself to finishing his masterwork, Problems of Life and Mind, and developed a relationship with her business manager, John Cross, recently bereaved by the loss of his mother.

Cross and Eliot married in 1880, eliciting a note of congratulation from Isaac Evans, Eliot’s brother, after a silence of 26 years. Eliot’s legitimate marriage was in some respects more unconventional than her illegitimate one; Cross, 40 years old to Eliot’s 60 and a bachelor until their wedding, leapt from a window of their Venice hotel during their honeymoon. He landed in a canal and was rescued. While it is unclear exactly what took place between them in that hotel room, one can’t help thinking of Dorothea and Casaubon on their doomed Roman honeymoon. “Marriage is so unlike everything else,” Dorothea says to Rosamond late in Middlemarch. “There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.”

Cross and Eliot returned to England and set up house together, but within a few weeks, she was suffering from an old kidney ailment. She died seven months after her wedding, and was buried beside George Henry Lewes

Middlemarch by George Eliot with an introduction by Jennifer Egan is published by Macmillan Collector’s Library on 3 May at £12.99.

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