‘I have… found someone to take care of me in the world,’ Marian Evans wrote to her brother in 1857, three years after setting up house with George Henry Lewes. Professing herself ‘well acquainted with his mind and character’, she requested that the modest income from her father’s legacy should in future be paid into her husband’s bank account. A reply from the family solicitor forced her to acknowledge that ‘our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond’. The funds were paid accordingly, but all contact was severed.
Very soon, money from Evans’s novels – written under the pseudonym of George Eliot – also began pouring into Lewes’s bank account. This was helpful, as he remained responsible for Agnes Jervis, the woman he’d married in 1841 and couldn’t divorce, since he had condoned her adultery. Eliot was actually entitled to hold on to her money, precisely because she wasn’t married. But as the couple’s letters were buried with her, we can only guess why she didn’t. She said: ‘My writings are public property: it is only myself… that I hold private.’ However, the letters to the brother and the solicitor do survive – in Lewes’s hand.
Clare Carlisle teaches philosophy at King’s College, London. Her previous books include studies of Spinoza, and Kierkegaard – who wrote the admirably succinct: ‘Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it.’ Eliot’s philosophy of marriage emerges as more diffuse, if equally inconclusive. Carlisle shows her learning more from Spinoza, whose Ethics she translated during her first months with Lewes. Spinoza argued that if two people sharing ‘the same nature’ lived together, they would become ‘a double individual, more powerful than the single’. Eliot often referred to this doubleness in describing her bond with Lewes – which cost her dearly in terms of other relationships. During their years together she rarely visited the homes of others, and only invited to her own those who signalled their desire to come. It is hardly surprising that marriage figures so prominently in the novels she began to write at Lewes’s suggestion: it was the only relationship she really inhabited after 1854.
The two shared a ferocious work ethic, but did they share the same nature? Not in any obvious sense. Carlisle describes Eliot as being ‘melancholy and earnest’, and Lewes as ‘cheerful and brazen’. Years into the marriage, when Eliot was asked about the origin of Edward Casaubon’s character in Middlemarch, she gently indicated herself. That admission – much less well-known than Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ – gives ballast to Carlisle’s suggestion that Eliot borrowed from Lewes for the character of Dorothea’s pragmatic younger sister. It is lovely to think of the author pouring herself into the depiction of a vain and desiccated clergyman, and drawing on her partner (who was described by George Meredith as a ‘mercurial little showman’) for the matronly and commonsensical Celia. Autofiction begins to look like thin gruel in comparison.
The unexpected success of the relationship between the woman later described by Henry James as ‘a horse-faced bluestocking’ and the man Jane Carlyle christened ‘the Ape’ is testament to the talent of one and the good character of the other. That is the version that both Eliot and Lewes curated in her lifetime, and from which few have dissented. They stand out as much the happiest couple of the five Victorian marriages Phyllis Rosedepicts in her Parallel Lives (1983) – a key text of second-wave feminism at its most inclusive and forgiving.
Earlier critics have sometimes taken Eliot to task for her reluctance to stand up for herself, or champion women’s suffrage, and for grabbing, within two years of Lewes’s death, and only seven months before her own, at married respectability with Johnny Cross, a wooden banker 20 years her junior. Modern readings suggest that Lewes’s takeover of Eliot’s life (monitoring her correspondence, managing her money and shielding her from the society he himself continued to enjoy) could be construed as coercive and controlling as well as nurturing and protective. Carlisle alludes to, but does not endorse, this interpretation. Her style is exploratory, and she immerses herself in the novels, offering close readings of one wretched union after another. She spends less time on the couple’s life at the Priory, the regency villa in St John’s Wood to which the Leweses moved in 1863. This marked the beginning of 15 years of quasi-respectability, when the world came to visit on Sunday afternoons – usually without the wife.
When asked about the origin of Edward Casaubon, Eliot gently indicated herself
Spinoza’s philosophy, Carlisle explains, also shows ‘why a partnership might diminish a couple’s power, rather than enhance it. Our porous boundaries and susceptibility to influence can be both a blessing and curse’. By the time we get to Middlemarch, Eliot has moved on to Hegel, and writes a novel which ‘confirms that desire and destruction are thoroughly entwined’. We may doubt whether we need Hegel to throw light on Middlemarch, but perhaps Carlisle’s implication, not quite spelt out, is that we might better understand Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage by way of the characters Tertius Lydgate and Rosmond Vincy.
It is one of the many miracles of Eliot’s novels that her immense learning did not get in the way of her depictions of life. The exception to this is usually agreed to be Romola. Contemporary critics admired her portrait of late-15th-century Florence, but readers, then and now, have baulked at it. Carlisle shows an academic’s appetite for the dense and difficult by not acknowledging Romola to be either, and instead concentrates on the circumstances of its composition.
Lewes had sold the novel to a new publisher for a vast sum, to appear in parts. Eliot was uneasy about the arrangement. ‘Decisions have been made,’ she wrote in her journal, and on one occasion, when Lewes was out of the room, she apologised to John Blackwood, the publisher she had left, and to whom she subsequently returned. Carlisle connects this rare glimpse of disharmony in the Lewes ménage to an analysis of Romola’s own anguished swings between the duties of resistance to tyranny and obedience to her tyrant husband.
While Eliot guarded her privacy, her novels explored themes of sacrifice, deceit and restraint. Her heroines are studies in the impossibility of having it all – Dinah Morris abandons her startling gift for preaching early in her marriage to Adam Bede; Maggie Tulliver gives up her lover for her brother, and dies anyway; Dorothea renounces ambition; Romola learns there is no compensation for a failed marriage, and Gwendolyn Harleth, who is made for love, learns to live without it. Or did Eliot’s sense that ‘worship [of Lewes] is my best life’ enliven her imagination of marriages in which the parties so quickly fell out of love and confidence into knowledge and disillusion?
Carlisle’s account of Eliot’s life with Lewes left me hungry for more. What part, for instance, was played by the dog, mentioned once, name of Pug? Did they both dote on it, or was it a bone of contention? Ditto servants: how long did they last, what were they like, and who managed them? Eliot, whose novels Carlisle describes as surging with the successful ‘effort to connect thought and feeling’, once wrote of Herbert Spencer that his theories were undermined by ‘an inadequate endowment of emotion… there is a vast amount of human experience to which he is as good as dead’.
I feel something similar about the lacunae in this generally absorbing book. What even is a philosophy of marriage that doesn’t acknowledge the domestics?
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