The Honeymoon (18 page)

He returned to London while she stayed in Coventry and continued rewriting his prospectus. The
Westminster
would carry on all the best traditions of its heyday, she wrote; it would be radical, but mindful that real change is
“the result only of a slow and peaceful development.”
Her own belief exactly.

The magazine would question Christian dogma, but be respectful of the importance of religion to morality. It would be against religious discrimination, in favor of free trade, judicial reform, and the vote for women.

The first week in June, she finished the prospectus and Chapman sent it off under his own name to potential investors.

But if she was going to be the real editor of the
Westminster Review
, she told Chapman, it had to be a secret. No woman had ever been editor of a literary journal, investors would never stand for it. And she wanted to be hidden from view. In fact, she couldn’t bear to be known. If there were mistakes, if the magazine failed, no one would know she was responsible. Why not simply tell investors, she suggested, that he had an editor whom he couldn’t yet name, but in whom he had absolute confidence?

It was agreed that they’d keep it a secret.

He wrote to say that he’d told Susanna and Elisabeth about their “solemn vow,” and that he couldn’t run his company without her. They’d relented, and agreed to let her return to the Strand to help him keep it going.

By the way, Chapman added, the writer George Henry Lewes had called to express his high opinion of her article on Greg’s
Creed of Christendom
. After it was turned down elsewhere, Chapman had sent it to Lewes, who had published it in the
Leader
, the radical weekly Lewes had cofounded with the journalist Thornton Hunt. She’d written it unsigned, but Chapman had revealed her name to Lewes.

M
arian Evans was now the secret editor of the
Westminster Review
. She moved back to London to the Strand and stayed away from Chapman as much as possible, up in her own room or in the office downstairs in the back of the house. They kept the door open to reassure Susanna and Elisabeth Tilley that all was proper. He never ventured upstairs to the third floor anymore.

So this would be her life. She’d be a working woman. There would be no man for her, and she would survive. She had her “job,” and was good at it and it satisfied her, and with her allowance from her father’s estate she could just manage. She didn’t need a man or a family. There were other women like this, women of talent — Harriet Martineau, for instance — who were in charge of their own lives, who didn’t need men to shape them. There was a life here for her in London, people around her who were brilliant and engaging, who could be her friends.

Perhaps she was capable of taking a lover without loving him, or thinking at least that she loved him. She thought of George Sand, who’d apparently made love to many men. Did Sand really love those men, did she really give herself to them completely? Or was she somehow removed from her own body, detaching herself from true and profound
intimacy, so that ultimately, it didn’t matter to her as deeply as it did to other women whom she was with? Marian realized that she could never do that, separate herself from her own body. The only way she could completely give herself was if the act was inextricably bound with her emotions. In the end, she didn’t understand women like Sand. They were incomprehensible.

One Friday evening after her return, at the Chapmans’ soiree, she looked up and saw a stooped, rumpled-looking young man standing uncomfortably over her, silently staring at her. He had a high, domed forehead and big sideburns. It was Herbert Spencer. He was a subeditor at the
Economist
, which had offices across the street from 142.

She tried to make conversation with him, but he answered only in monosyllables. She told him she’d read his book,
Social Statics
, which Chapman had just published. That brought a flicker of interest to his eyes. Spencer had a new theory, based on Linnaeus and Lamarck, called social evolution, that human beings were infinitely perfectible and would evolve progressively and that the state would eventually wither away.

He told her he was writing a new book on “the evolution of human psychology.” Suddenly he became voluble. “I’m positing the theory that people’s mental faculties, like their physical selves, evolve under the influence of the environment. And because of selection. Ultimately, I’m arguing, this will lead to the highest development of reason.”

She suggested he read Mill’s
System of Logic
, and also Comte, if he could read French. “I think you’ll find them useful,” she said. “Especially Comte. You’ve got quite a lot in common with him.”

He looked at her strangely, no doubt surprised that she, a woman, knew these books.

“Perhaps,” he said uncertainly. “My French is almost nonexistent.”

Meanwhile, she and Chapman were preparing frantically for the first issue of the new
Westminster Review
. She suggested to Chapman that Francis Newman write an article on the extension of the franchise, and William Rathbone Greg on “Relations Between Employer and Employed.” The Oxford professor Edward Forbes could do an essay on shellfish, and George Henry Lewes on the Baltic-German mystic, Julia von Krüdener, who had had such an effect on Tsar Alexander. Perhaps Carlyle could be persuaded to write on the hereditary peerage, she said. These were splendid ideas, Chapman thought.

One morning in early autumn, she stood in the pouring rain across the street from Carlyle’s house on Cheyne Walk while Chapman went inside to try to get the great man to contribute to the magazine. She couldn’t go in because they had to preserve the fiction that Chapman was the magazine’s editor. After a half hour Chapman emerged from the house. “He doesn’t seem very interested,” he said gloomily.

They searched the shops for books to review in the magazine. At William Jeff’s Bookshop in the Burlington Arcade looking for foreign works, they ran into George Henry Lewes, who’d published her Greg essay. Chapman introduced her. Lewes was a jack-of-all-trades, a journalist, critic, novelist, and playwright. He’d also written a
Biographical History of Philosophy
, intended for a popular audience, which had done very well. He was a little man with a big head; his wiry black hair stuck out all around
a pockmarked face, and his bushy eyebrows nearly met across his forehead.

Lewes had given Spencer’s
Social Statics
a very good review in his magazine, the
Leader
. “We are eternally grateful,” Chapman said to him.

“One must always review one’s friends’ books well!” Lewes said, laughing. Marian thought he looked like a miniature Mirabeau. “And,” he said to her, “thank you for your excellent review of the Greg for the
Leader
.”

She thanked him and turned back to searching through the books on the table.

As they left, Chapman muttered under his breath, “Carlyle calls him the Ape. He’s so shaggy and he never sits still.”

“That’s cruel,” she said.

“And despite it all, he’s rather a rake,” Chapman said. “He and his wife have an arrangement, I believe.” She thought no more of it.

At the next Friday soiree at the Strand, to her surprise, Herbert Spencer came up to her again. “I read the Mill. It was useful,” he said, as if reluctantly granting her something. “I managed to get through some of your Comte. But I didn’t think much of him.”

“Oh dear, why? He’s not
my
Comte, anyway.”

“Too limited. He says we can only accept as evidence that which we can see in front of our eyes. How can you have any philosophy with that?”

“He isn’t saying you can’t intuit things. He’s just reinforcing the validity of human perception.”

“I suppose I sympathize with him there. I’m with him on natural law, but there are some things that are simply unknowable.”

At ensuing gatherings, Spencer continued to seek her out. He’d stand there tongue-tied, but the moment she asked about his work, he became talkative and monopolized her attention. He had a strange, unconventional mind, unlike any she’d ever encountered. He was unmarried and her own age. He seemed to appreciate her intellect, but also to be drawn to her as a woman. Sometimes, at the Friday evenings, when she played the piano, she could get him to sing along with her. He would jolly up, as if relieved that someone had shown him how to be normal. She saw in him then the possibility of happiness and laughter.

On another Friday evening, she noticed a tall, full-bodied woman with full long golden hair and a proud carriage. The woman was with Bessie Parkes, whose father Joseph Parkes had funded Marian’s Strauss translation. Bessie introduced Marian to her. The tall, golden-haired woman’s name was Barbara Leigh Smith.

Marian had heard of the Smiths. They were a “tabooed” family, immensely rich merchant princes who’d made a fortune in the whiskey business, among other enterprises. Barbara’s father, Ben Smith, had stood for Parliament and supported liberal causes. Her mother was Anne Longden, a milliner whom Ben had fallen in love with and impregnated five times. But he’d never married her. Perhaps he was against the marriage laws, perhaps the difference in social status mattered to him. Nonetheless he was devoted to her and his children. She had died when Barbara was seven, leaving Ben heartbroken. He lavished everything on
his offspring. When Barbara was twenty-one he’d settled a generous allowance on her so she could be an independent woman and study art. Still, all the Smith children bore the stigma of illegitimacy.

Barbara and Bessie told her they had begun to devote all their efforts to the cause of women, the fact that women couldn’t vote, their poor access to education, and the property laws — once women married their property belonged to their husbands. Among other things, the two of them told her, they were protesting long skirts and stays, which imprisoned women’s bodies. They themselves had abandoned corsets altogether, they said.

They’d even composed a ditty about it, they said, which they proceeded to sing for her there and then at the party, arms linked, kicking up their legs.
“Oh! Isn’t it jolly,”
they sang,

The people at the party turned to look at them and laughed. She laughed too, though it was a bit much for her. She was embarrassed by their breaking into song in the middle of the party and talking about exposing their legs. If anything, she wanted to hide her body. She was afraid of showing herself, of being known.

She knew the condition of women was wrong, but Barbara and Bessie’s pronouncements were so shrill and
absolute. Both of them came from rich, radical, freethinking families that gave them the confidence to rebel and declare themselves, she thought. She found herself getting into a heated discussion with them about women’s education. “If you open up education to women,” Marian said, “they’ll disdain their traditional work of taking care of children and their families.”

“But
you’re
educated,” Barbara said. “How can you deny the same thing to other women?”

“I had to earn a living, I had to educate myself. I have no husband.” And it was true.

She didn’t say this to them then — but the mere idea that women might disdain their roles as mothers, that children could be deprived of mothering, pained her. All her life she’d longed for a mother who would love her, comfort her, allay her sorrows. How could she wish to do away with a mother’s watchful protection, a mother’s unconditional love? She knew all too well the pain of its absence.

“I can tell we’ve got some educating to do here,” Barbara said to Bessie.

Marian smiled. “We’ll see,” she said.

From then on, the two young women attached themselves to her. They invited her to their parties and to their parents’ grand houses, where, dressed in her one party dress, of black velvet, she met more of London’s important writers and radical elites.