Nom de Plume (8 page)

Charles and Cara Bray had introduced Marian to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who commented on her “calm and serious soul.” Her provincial world had expanded considerably. And with the support of Charles, she began writing book reviews (anonymously) for the newspaper he owned. She was still about a decade away from publishing her first novel. But one friend was wise enough to observe of Marian at thirty-two that “[l]arge 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.” She was right.

Charles also took a great interest in Marian's head—or, to be more specific, her skull. As a keen believer in phrenology, Bray introduced Marian to one of its leading proponents in London. “Miss Evans' head is a very large one,” the expert astutely concluded. He added in his assessment that “the Intellect greatly predominates” (true), and that “in the Feelings, the Animal and Moral regions are about equal; the moral being quite sufficient to keep the animal in order.” That sounded about right, too. Most promising of all, he said, “She was not fitted to stand alone.”

Companionship would come later. For now, Marian was writing and editing for London's
Westminster Review.
However, there was one small snag in her newfound work. As Eliot's biographer Brenda Maddox has noted in her lively account, “A female editor was as unheard of as a female surgeon; to be known to have one would have done no service to the review.” While, in her own way, Marian was becoming entrenched in London's intellectual circles (the rare woman to have done so), she had to keep quiet about it. She was there, she was known socially, but her name could not be attached to the work she produced. Still, for the first time in her life, she experienced a real sense of popularity and demand for her presence. Young women she encountered, dazzled by her supple mind, developed crushes on her.

Considering her privileged position, Marian was more than happy to comply with the discretion demanded of her, and was even helpful in suggesting how to manage the situation. She told her boss that it might be best if “you are regarded as the responsible person, but that you employ an Editor in whose literary and general ability you confide.”

This rush of good fortune was cold comfort, however. She still lacked a husband, and she wanted one. But meeting a man named George Lewes would prove transformative. She could never legally marry him, but their relationship would become the most significant of her life. He was a prolific author, two years older than she, and they'd gotten to know each other better through a friend. She didn't know much about Lewes's personal life, but her first impression of him was that he talked too much. Soon she admitted, “He has quite won my liking, in spite of myself.” She found out that he was unhappily married, the father of four sons, and that he had a well-earned reputation for promiscuity. It was public knowledge that his wife, Agnes, had been having an affair with a friend of his, too. Lewes was even “uglier” than Marian, with a pockmarked face, an unkempt mustache, and unfashionable clothing, all of which she found off-putting. Even his friends called him “Ape” and declared him the ugliest man in London. (Charlotte Brontë, however, once remarked that she saw something of her sister Emily in him.) Henry James found him “personally repulsive.”

Lewes was cosmopolitan and Evans was provincial; his family, with its background in theater, was as flamboyant as hers was listless and austere. But by March 1853, she was already telling a friend that she found Lewes “genial and amusing,” and that he had “won my liking, in spite of myself.”

Within a year, they were living together—and she started calling herself Marian Evans Lewes. Though he was still married to Agnes, Evans was able to confide to a friend, “I begin this year more happily than I have done most years of my life.” Divorce was out of the question for Lewes, but both he and Marian, despite their trepidation about whisperings of their supposed immorality, charged forward in their relationship—living together “in sin” and hoping that her reputation in particular would not suffer irrevocably. They were prepared to lose friends to preserve their love, and did. “I have counted the cost of the step I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation of all my friends,” she wrote. “I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself.”

Both she and Lewes had already experienced their own forms of social persecution and were familiar with its toll. Yet they lost family, too: Marian had waited a few years to reveal her relationship to her siblings, and when she did, her brother Isaac (whom she adored) cut her off and encouraged his sisters to ostracize her. Defiant, she referred to Lewes as “my husband.”

“We are leading no life of self-indulgence,” she wrote, “except indeed that, being happy in each other, we find everything easy.” Further, she insisted that she wasn't prepared to settle into someone else's notion of a virtuous life. She could be only herself. “Women who are satisfied with light and easily broken ties do
not
act as I have done,” she wrote. “They obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.” She paid the penalty without complaint or regret.

It is fair to say that without this passionate, supportive partnership, which would last until Lewes's death in 1878, George Eliot would not have been born. Lewes offered Evans a kind of love she had never known, unquestioning and absolute. (Despite rumors of his infidelity, there is no known evidence.) He wasn't an entirely enlightened man—after all, he had once claimed condescendingly that even the best women writers were “second only to the first-rate men of their day”—but he did heartily encourage her to write a novel. Journalistic work provided money but little satisfaction. “It is worth while for you to try the experiment,” he urged her—and finally, in 1856, she confided in her journal: “I am anxious to begin my fiction writing.”

She embarked on this phase of her writing career by sending stories to John Blackwood, editor of
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
; the first was published in January 1857 under the name “George Eliot.” She didn't send the pieces directly to Blackwood—she submitted them via Lewes, who was already a regular contributor to the journal, as an added buffer. A month later, she wrote to Blackwood's brother and colleague, William: “Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a
nom de plume
secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.”

Eliot was, of course, not the first woman to adopt a male pseudonym: the Brontës had done it, and so had the French writer George Sand, who was much admired by Eliot. But she felt that her controversial subject matter—depicting the lives of clergymen in her own native county of Warwickshire, and invoking autobiographical ideas about religion, faith, and unrequited love—demanded secrecy. Not only that, but her social position was shaky enough because of her unconventional living situation. She was already infamous.

It turned out to be a good thing that she'd kept her identity hidden, as Blackwood wrote to Lewes (in a letter whose subtext was none too subtle): “I am glad to hear that your friend is, as I supposed, a clergyman. Such a subject is best in clerical hands.”

In 1858,
Scenes of Clerical Life
, which contained the stories serialized in
Blackwood's
magazine, was published in two volumes, under the name George Eliot. She was now a real author, and asked her publisher to send review copies to contemporaries she admired, including Dickens, Ruskin, and Tennyson.

The first part of her new pen name was inspired by her devoted partner (and was also the name of her uncle); the surname “Eliot” was chosen simply because she thought it was a “good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” “Under what name could she have published her fiction?” wrote a critic in 1999, referring to her various names. “It is clear that neither ‘Evans' nor ‘Lewes' would have done. Her invented title became the only fixed point in a shifting world of reference.”

When John Blackwood showed up at Lewes's flat one day, hoping to meet the esteemed Mr. Eliot in person, the couple broke the news to him in a rather playful way. “Do you wish to see him?” Lewes asked. He and Marian left the room, then walked right back in—and Blackwood was introduced to the man (woman) himself.

He was more than gracious about it, and happy to keep their secret safe. In 1859, with the publication of
Adam Bede
(a masterful depiction of rural domestic life, whose title character was based on her father), Marian kept her gender and name private—though not for long. For one thing, too much of the story was recognizable, with identifiable characters; her brother Isaac read it and said that no one but his sister could possibly be the author. But the greater issue, as had been true for Charlotte Brontë with
Jane Eyre
, was the book's success: Queen Victoria was a fan. Dickens raved, “I cannot praise it enough,” even though
Adam Bede
had outsold
A Tale of Two Cities.
Alexandre Dumas called it “the masterpiece of the century.” And the
Times
declared that the mysterious author ranked “at once among masters of the art.” Critics loved
Adam Bede
, and so did the public—a rare feat. The novel was a huge best seller. People wanted to know who George Eliot was, and false “authors” came forward to claim the glory. One man from Warwickshire insisted that he had written
Adam Bede
and
Scenes of Clerical Life
, and that he'd been cheated out of royalty payments.

Marian's efforts to hide her identity were increasingly in vain. It did not escape the notice of the Leweses' friends that their purchase of a large house, filled with new furniture and staffed by servants, happened to coincide with the launch of George Eliot. One friend wrote to Marian saying that she would “go to the stake” if Marian was not George Eliot. She received a warm, open, but stern reply from the author: “Keep the secret solemnly till I give you leave to tell it, and give way to no impulses of triumphant affection.” Lewes added to the letter that “you mustn't call her Marian Evans again; that individual is extinct, rolled up, quashed, absorbed in the Lewesian magnificence!” From those who did realize the truth, the author pleaded for discretion. “Talking about my books,” she explained, “has the same malign effect on me as talking of my feelings or my religion.”

When
The Mill on the Floss
came out in 1860, she was by then one of the most acclaimed authors of her day, and it became well known that George Eliot was a woman living with a married man. (Why she clung to her pseudonym even after her true identity was revealed is unclear.) People loved her books but judged her as immoral for her unorthodox relationship. Lewes's wife was cast as the victim in this drama, and Marian Evans as the predator. Never mind that Agnes had given birth to not one but another four sons outside her marriage. Although Lewes had forgiven her, he had ceased to think of her as his wife. He went on with his life in a discreet and dignified manner—and did not embarrass Agnes as she had embarrassed him. He continued to support his family financially, yet his loyalty to Marian was unwavering. And she did not live with him until she knew that he would never again live under the same roof with Agnes.

In response to the flurry of scandal, “George Eliot” took full ownership of her new self, replying to letters addressed to “Miss Evans” with a chilly correction, informing one friend, “I request that any one who has a regard for me will cease to speak of me by my maiden name.” Marian Evans represented a lonely, ugly country girl whom the author no longer knew and now deemed “extinct.” George Eliot, her “real” self, was famous and influential (however immoral). She produced
Silas Marner
in 1861, and
Romola
two years later. Set in Renaissance Florence,
Romola
was a poorly received departure from her earlier works. She was not dissuaded by disappointment, and kept writing:
Felix Holt the Radical
came out in 1866—and four years later came her masterpiece,
Middlemarch.
(Emily Dickinson wrote to a cousin: “What do I think of
Middlemarch
? What do I think of glory?”)

By 1876, when Eliot published
Daniel Deronda
, another breathtaking accomplishment (notable for its sympathetic portrait of Jews), she was forgiven. She was the pride of her country and was proclaimed the greatest living English novelist. Her work, finally, spoke for itself, and a judgmental public had listened and fallen silent. She was adored and admired, a literary giant—and a very wealthy woman. Whereas she and Lewes had once been exiles in London society, now they were celebrated, visited by Emerson, Turgenev, and other eminent intellectuals. A handsome American banker, John Cross, whom they affectionately called “dear nephew,” managed their business affairs. All was well.

But on November 30, 1878, Lewes was dead by evening. Eliot had reported months earlier to a friend that Lewes was “racked with cramps from suppressed gout and feeling his inward economy all wrong.” The sixty-one-year-old had succumbed to cancer, though he had never received the diagnosis.

They'd been together for more than two decades, and although Eliot was melancholic by nature, these had been the best years of her life. In a sense, Lewes had made everything possible. And when Eliot had received a manuscript of
Adam Bede
, bound in red leather, from her publisher, she had inscribed it to Lewes: “To my dear husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this M.S. of a work which would never have been written but for the happiness which his love has conferred on my life. Marian Lewes, March 23, 1859.”