My Life in Middlemarch (15 page)

Beyond the pages of the periodicals, too, she could be acid and spiky, defensive in anticipation of attack. “Treating people ill is an infallible sign of special love with me,” she wrote to a friend. New acquaintances were not sure what to make of her. “I don’t know whether you will like Miss Evans,” Bessie Rayner Parkes, who became Eliot’s good friend, wrote to Barbara Bodichon, who
became an even better one. “At least I know you will
like
her for her large unprejudiced mind, her complete superiority to most women. But whether you or I should ever
love
her, as a friend, I don’t know at all. There is as yet no high moral purpose in the impression she makes, and it is that alone which commands love. I think she will alter. Large angels take a long time unfolding their wings, but when they do, soar out of sight. Miss Evans either has no wings, or, which I think is the case, they are coming, budding.”

I
WALKED
along the Strand one day in early autumn. Number 142 is no longer standing: the site is now home to Strand Bridge House, an unlovely office building that houses the United Nations Refugee Agency and the Centre of Flexible Learning in Dentistry. (Eliot could have used that—she was plagued by toothache throughout her life.) Next door was a down-at-heel hotel and a pungent Indian restaurant celebrating the last days of the Raj. The establishments Eliot knew had been replaced by contemporary ones: a shoe repair store and a travel agent and a hairdresser and a Pizza Hut. A few steps away lay Somerset House, the site of a royal palace from the reign of Elizabeth I until that of George III—the last vestige of the era when the Strand was lined with riverfront mansions. The Baroque church of St. Mary-le-Strand stood islanded by traffic lanes thronging with helmeted cyclists and lurching double-decker buses.

From the Strand it was a short walk to the National Portrait Gallery, my destination for the morning. There, I hoped to come face-to-face with George Eliot—or at least with several pictures of her. When she moved to 142 Strand there was no National
Portrait Gallery, but its establishment was under discussion. Its founder, Philip Henry Stanhope, described the projected museum in the House of Lords in 1856 as one devoted to images of “those persons who are most honorably commemorated in British history as warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature, or in science.” It finally opened in 1859, on Great George Street, in Westminster, which is where Eliot visited it in the 1860s.

Now it has a permanent home on St. Martin’s Place, and I walked there along Duncannon Street, which runs through what once was the graveyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, to the corner of Trafalgar Square. I have photographs of myself taken on the square as a three-year-old in a blue sundress, warily perched on the rim of a fountain. Fifteen years later, when I would come up to London from my hometown, I would walk this way from Waterloo Station—in those days there were homeless people living under the arches, where now there are fancy wine bars—across a footbridge over the Thames, past Charing Cross. Sometimes I’d go to the National Gallery, which flanks the northern side of the square, and in an effort at self-education I would stand before works by Titian or Caravaggio and try with only modest success to make sense of them. (Dorothea does the same thing when she and Casaubon go to Rome on their honeymoon. “I am seeing so much all at once, and not understanding half of it,” she tells Ladislaw, who happens to be in Rome at the same time. “That always makes one feel stupid. It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not to be able to feel that it is fine—something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.”)

Sometimes I would go beyond Trafalgar Square to Soho, to
a restaurant with checkered tablecloths and wine-bottle candlesticks, which struck me as inordinately sophisticated. There, a boyfriend introduced me to spaghetti vongole, well beyond the culinary range of my provincial town. That boyfriend was five or six years older than me, which seemed a lot at the time. He had a dramatic mane of hair, black with a blond streak, and wore thrift store suits over satin pajama shirts. He was part of my education, too. He introduced me to the works of Oscar Wilde and Leonard Cohen; he took me to thrift stores, which I scoured for vintage silk dresses and velvet coats, musty remnants saved for fifty years by someone lately departed. We sometimes went to the Tate, on Millbank, where we would stand before the purple and gray Rothkos or gaze at works by Turner, who painted the Battle of Trafalgar when it was still recent news.

In 1851, the year in which Turner died and George Eliot arrived in London, Trafalgar Square was newly laid out, and the National Gallery building was only thirteen years old. What seemed to me as if it had always been there was modern and new to Eliot: the energy and industry of her age, rendered in marble and stone. Much of the National Portrait Gallery’s first floor is devoted to portraits of Victorian eminences and as I wandered the galleries I encountered many of Eliot’s friends and acquaintances. There was a bronze bust of Florence Nightingale, Eliot’s exact contemporary. Nightingale called on Eliot not long after she had arrived at 142 Strand; in later years, the novelist owned a ceramic bust of the nursing reformer, which is now on display at the museum in Coventry. There was a marble bust of Herbert Spencer as he was in his sixties, with a bald head and magnificent muttonchop
whiskers—both of which he already had when Eliot first knew him in the 1850s, though then the head was slightly less bald and the whiskers slightly less pronounced.

In a gallery devoted to the arts in the early Victorian era there was a portrait of a sprightly-looking Charles Dickens, painted in 1839 when he was only twenty-seven and already the creator of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. Nearby was the remarkable triple portrait of the Brontë sisters, made by their brother, Branwell, that had been thought lost until the second wife of Charlotte’s husband discovered it folded up on top of a cupboard. On the wall opposite the Brontës and Dickens was a glass case, and inside it was a small portrait in oils of George Eliot. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I might easily have missed it.

François D’Albert Durade, an artist in whose Geneva home Eliot lodged in 1849 on the European trip she took after her father’s death, made this painting, which is the only image that gives us an idea of how she must have looked when she lived at 142 Strand. Her thick, heavy hair is light brown, almost blonde, and is fastened in a simple bun. Her pale gray-blue eyes are large and limpid; her nose is long, her chin slightly dimpled. Her cheeks are very ruddy, and she’s smiling faintly. She wears a blouse of delicate lace under a simple black dress that laces up the front. She’s personable but not pretty, especially not in comparison with Jenny Lind, the opera singer known as the Swedish Nightingale, whose russet hair and creamy shoulders are displayed in a portrait on another wall. Nor does she have the dramatic intensity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose portrait by Michele Gordigiani hangs nearby. Eliot’s is not a great portrait by any means, and when the artist’s son first sought to sell it to the museum, in
1905, there wasn’t much urgency among the trustees to acquire it. (Alphonse D’Albert Durade first sought two hundred pounds for the work; he ended up accepting forty.) The painting looks like something one might find in a good antique shop, or hanging in a home as the only remembrance of a great-great-great-aunt. Eliot looks intelligent and modest and slightly straitlaced: the kind of woman whom you might happily hire to teach your children German and Latin, but from whom you wouldn’t necessarily expect an intimate acquaintance with, or understanding of, the most intense human passions.

The portrait is generally held to be flattering. Eliot’s plainness has been a subject of fascination to her biographers for generations. “It must be a terrible sorrow to be young and unattractive: to look into the mirror and see a sallow unhealthy face, with a yellowish skin, straight nose and mouse-coloured hair,” wrote Anne Fremantle, an early biographer, in 1933, while Brenda Maddox, a twenty-first-century biographer, begins her own portrait of Eliot with a paradoxical reversal that takes her plainness to be the spur to her achievement: “Her face was her fortune.” For visitors who paid Eliot court at the Priory in her later years, coming up with a novel way to characterize her looks seems to have been an almost obligatory exercise. The prize has gone by popular acclaim to Henry James, who called on her in 1869. “She is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous,” James, who at the time was twenty-six and handsome, wrote in a letter to his father. “She has a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth and a chin and jaw-bone
qui n’en finissent pas.
” One wishes that Eliot had sat for a portrait as revealing as that which John Singer Sargent painted of James, in 1913, which shows the
author, then seventy years old, corpulent and superior in all his penetrating, intelligent authority. (It hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, too.) She did, in 1860, sit for Samuel Lawrence, a noted portraitist of the time. For years Lawrence’s drawing hung in Blackwood’s office, but near the beginning of the last century it was moved and went astray; perhaps it will show up one day on top of a cupboard in Edinburgh. A sketch that survives in the collection of Girton College, Cambridge, is tantalizing and suggestive: in it Eliot looks dark-eyed and somber, like a mournful Madonna.

Henry James happened to call on Eliot the day that Thornton Lewes had returned from Natal, a moment at which she can be excused for not looking her best, but as well as delivering a tour de force of disparagement, James described something else about Eliot’s looks. A first impression of her hideousness, he said, soon gave way to something else entirely. “Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her,” he continued. “Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.”

Others noticed the same effect, including Sara Jane Lippincott, an American author who met her at Chapman’s in June 1852, not long after Eliot had arrived in London. Lippincott listened as Eliot, Chapman, and others—they may well have included Spencer—discussed science and ethics. “Miss Evans certainly impressed me at first as exceedingly plain, with her aggressive jaw and her evasive blue eyes,” she wrote. “Neither nose, nor mouth, nor chin were to my liking; but, as she grew interested and earnest in conversation, a great light flashed over or out of her face, till
it seemed transfigured, while the sweetness of her rare smile was something quite indescribable.” Ivan Turgenev, a friend of Eliot’s, said that she made him understand that it was possible to fall in love with a woman who was not pretty.

I can’t pretend to be above caring about Eliot’s physical features; so much attention has been paid to the subject that one longs to know what she looked like, if only to find the words to repudiate Henry James. I feel defensive on her behalf: plain women, after all, have always found partners to love and to be loved by, else there would be far more solitary people in the world. They have even, on occasion, been sought out. George Eliot turned down a marriage proposal when in her midtwenties, from a young man who was an artist and a restorer of paintings. She was introduced to him while she was still living in Coventry, and after just three days’ acquaintance he proposed, via her brother-in-law, Henry Houghton, Fanny’s husband. The young man told Houghton that he found Miss Evans the most fascinating person he had ever met, and that he hoped it was not too bold of him to seek to marry a woman of such superior intelligence. After the proposal Eliot came to see the Brays, Cara reported in a letter, “so brimful of happiness;—though she said she had not fallen in love with him yet, but admired his character so much that she was sure she should.” Within a few days, however, Eliot’s impressions of the young man had changed, and she wrote to him to break it off. In Cara’s paraphrase, “She made up her mind that she could never love or respect him enough to marry him and that it would involve too great a sacrifice of her mind and pursuits.”

She chose her as-yet-unformed career over marriage—and whether or not she thought she might have another chance of
marrying, she knew that anyone she did go on to marry would, like the portrait painter, have to appreciate her for her mind and pursuits, rather than for more conventional feminine attributes. Eliot met few of the expectations of women in her age, or in our own for that matter. The public continued to refer to her as “George Eliot” long after her true identity was revealed, as if she were a hybrid creature, neither properly female nor male. She wasn’t mannish—when describing her, her contemporaries insisted on emphasizing her femininity—but she wasn’t an ordinary woman, either. Bessie Rayner Parkes, whose father, Joseph Parkes, a lawyer and politician, was sufficiently impressed by Eliot in the early 1850s that he often invited her to dinners, described how she appeared in those early years in London. “She used to wear black velvet, then seldom adopted by unmarried ladies,” wrote Parkes, who recalled that her father would escort Eliot down the great staircase of their house on Savile Row, “the only lady, except my mother, among the group of remarkable men, politicians, and authors of the first literary rank. She would talk and laugh softly, and look up into my father’s face respectfully, while the light of the great hall-lamp shone on the waving masses of her hair, and the black velvet fell in folds about her feet.” It’s an evocative description of Eliot as a distinguished young woman holding her own among distinguished older men, an equal to the company, in full possession of herself.

The National Portrait Gallery’s Public Study Room is in an annex behind the museum, and when I went there, a selection of its holdings had been brought out at my request. I settled down at a large table with a magnifying glass in hand and began my necessarily compromised attempt to set eyes on Eliot. One image showed her much as she must have looked when she met the picture
restorer—a small watercolor painted by Cara Bray in 1842, when Eliot was twenty-two. She had fair curls, a long nose, a firm mouth, and intelligent eyes. “I am glad to hear that you approved dear Mrs. Bray’s picture,” an ironical Eliot wrote to Sara Hennell. “I should think it is like, only that her benevolence extends to the hiding of faults in my visage as well as my character.”