Book review: George Eliot: Novelist, Lover, Wife

Published on Thursday 11 June 2009 15:03

by Brenda Maddox Harper Press, 242pp, £14.99 Review by LESLEY McDOWELL

THE ECONOMY OF THE EMINENT Lives series of shorter biographies means a greater emphasis placed on what is important, and for acclaimed biographer Brenda Maddox, that is George Eliot's looks, her money, and her love affair with George Henry Lewes. The books? Oh yes, the books are in there, somewhere.

I'm being a little unfair. There isn't space to do justice to novels like Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss unless the biographer can somehow weave the life into the art throughout. Maddox resists that more avant-garde approach, though and keeps the very thing that made George Eliot wealthy and famous – her genius for writing – in the background, to focus instead on what made her most miserable: her unattractive face.

To Henry James, she was "magnificently ugly"; Harvard professor Charles Norton wrote, "one rarely sees a plainer woman: dull complexion, dull eye, heavy features". She was a "horse-faced bluestocking" who would deny the new art of photography, pretending to fans that no photographs had ever been taken of her. The unpleasant implication in all of this is that she had no business finding a man and being happy: women who looked like Eliot were meant to stay spinsters, unheard and unseen. Maddox certainly doesn't endorse this view, but neither does she over-celebrate what Eliot achieved in spite of her looks.

Born to a land agent near Coventry in 1819, and christened Mary Anne Evans, she was close to her father and rejected by her mother – Maddox implies this was because she wasn't pretty enough. She was also rejected by her beloved older brother later in life, when she disagreed with him about religion, and when she set up home with a married man.

What might surprise readers, though, is her early sexual life. Eliot fell in love with handsome, married men, at least two of whom she is suspected of having sexual relations with, before she met her first editor, John Chapman. He had bought the Westminster Review, asked her to write for him and moved her into his home. Both his wife and a mistress objected, though, and she was soon forced to leave.

It's remarkable to think that Eliot almost lived a life in the mid-nineteenth century that wasn't so far from professional young women now. She had her own digs, lived independently, worked for money by writing for Chapman (a legacy from her father meant she could rent nicer rooms). Through Chapman she met Herbert Spencer, to whom she proposed rather desperately. His rejection left her to be comforted by his friend, Lewes.

Lewes, like so many of the men Eliot fell for, was married to a woman who openly conducted an affair with his best friend, Thornton Hunt, by whom she had two children. Lewes accepted these children as his own, but his condoning of her adultery meant he was never free to marry. Nevertheless, Eliot defied all convention and moved in with him. She called herself Mrs Lewes as her friends, horrified by what she'd done, gradually slipped away from her circle.

They came running back though, with the success of the books. The great commercial and critical success Eliot's novels brought gave her more than carriages and fine houses. They gave her legitimacy, made her respectable, bringing her new acquaintances in the shape of Charles Dickens and Henry James. Undoubtedly, it was Lewes' encouragement and support that allowed her to write. He would also protect her from any unflattering reviews, which could plunge her into depression.

Both Lewes and Eliot were subject to constant ailments, some of which we would recognise today as psychosomatic. Both had great success with their books – it probably helped their relationship that Lewes didn't venture into fiction – and appear to have been very happy. When he died, suddenly, aged 61, she was inconsolable – until her "nephew", a friend more than 20 years younger called John Cross, became receptive to marriage. On their honeymoon in Venice, however, he threw himself out of the bedroom window, much to the delight of gossips back home.

Eliot's achievement wasn't that she succeeded in a world that preferred pretty girls, as Maddox seems to be arguing. Her achievement was that she succeeded in a world that preferred men. Maddox emphasises Eliot's need for a man, in spite of her early independence; emphasises her insecurity and low self- esteem. And yet, given the times she lived in, it would have been unusual for her not to want the protection and respectability that marriage offered. Eliot's life story circumvented the many tragic endings she gave her own heroines. I think she knew how lucky she was.