Kathryn Hughes - George Eliot - The Last Victorian

If conventional marriage looked increasingly unappealing and unlikely, the problem still remained of how Mary Ann was to live once her father died. Isaac’s continuing grumblings about the ‘selfishness’ of her single state suggested that he was never going to want her at Griff. The Clarkes could not support themselves, let alone an extra mouth. The last time the subject had come up, during the holy war, governessing in Leamington had emerged as a grim possibility. Fortunately, since then new and more appealing options had presented themselves. In April 1845 Mary Ann met Harriet Martineau, whose sister-in-law was a cousin of Cara’s. 6 Martineau belonged to a tiny band of early-Victorian women who supported themselves through high-quality journalism and authorship. Born into the thriving nexus of Norwich Unitarianism she had received a good education by the standards of the day. Too deaf to follow her sisters into governessing when the family business failed, she started in print by writing the hugely successful Tales of Political Economy , moral fables that explained the virtues of free trade in simple terms, which the uncertainly literate would understand. From there she was to expand her range to include, by the time of her death in 1876, autobiography, fiction and an embarrassingly emphatic endorsement of mesmerism (hypnosis) as a cure for all kinds of ills. Although as a jobbing journalist Martineau’s work appeared all over the place, she was most closely linked with the Westminster Review , the periodical founded by James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in 1824 to espouse the hard, happiness-driven philosophy of utilitarianism.

In some ways Martineau was not an attractive role model for Mary Ann, being plain, gauche and gossipy. Her deafness required her to carry a large ear trumpet which she used to control and inhibit others. If she grew bored with a conversation, she withdrew the trumpet and started to shout over the top of the unfortunate speaker. Hans Christian Andersen, who once met her at a garden party in London, was so exhausted by the experience that he had to go and lie down afterwards. Her old-maidish respectability ran alongside a prurient interest in other people’s doings, creating a nasty tendency to bad-mouth. Years later, at the height of the scandal over Mary Ann’s elopement with Lewes, Martineau whipped herself up into a frenzy of disapproval. She even started a strange, self-aggrandising rumour that Mary Ann had written her an insulting letter prior to leaving for the Continent. 7 That Mary Ann did not expose Martineau as a meddling fantasist in 1854 and continued to express admiration and even affection for her until her death twenty years later says a great deal about the debt she believed she owed her. More than any other woman in early-Victorian Britain, Martineau’s example pointed the way out of dependent provincial spinsterhood.

It was with Martineau’s example in mind that Mary Ann started to write articles for the Coventry Herald in October 1846. Charles Bray had bought the radical paper during the previous summer as a platform in his continuing battle with the city’s ruling Tories. Mary Ann’s laboured and lame pieces did not contribute much to the struggle. The most interesting thing about the series of loose, rambling essays entitled ‘Poetry and Prose from the Notebook of An Eccentric’ 8 which appeared from December is her use of the form to which she was to return only at the very end of her life. Like Impressions of Theophrastus Such , published in 1879, ‘Poetry and Prose’ purports to be the jottings of a middle-aged man and, in this first attempt, comes over as implausible and dull. The reviews she wrote for the paper were much more successful, building on real interests and knowledge. The first, which appeared in October 1846, was a cogent commentary on three books by the French historians Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet. 9

Mary Ann’s journalism, and the reading which informed the best of it, had to be fitted around her increasingly heavy duties as a sick-nurse. Just as her mother had used her ill-health to send Mary Ann away from the family home, her father now used his frailty to bind her to it. Evans still loathed the Brays for their hijacking of his clever, respectable little girl into unorthodoxy. Jealous and resentful of Mary Ann’s continued attachment to Rosehill, he tried everything in his power to turn her attention back towards him. The most spectacular skirmish came in October 1845, when Mary Ann was due to accompany the Brays and Sara Hennell to Scotland. This promised to be a particularly exciting trip, since the plan was to tour Scott country, exploring the landscape long branded into her imagination from repeated readings of the Waverley novels. But from the start Robert was determined that she should not go. He put forward the desperate argument that Chrissey’s and Edward’s arrival at Bird Grove, following their final bankruptcy, required her presence. In the end Charles Bray intervened, stressing how much Mary Ann needed a change of scene to lift her health and spirits. 10 Reluctantly, Evans agreed, but on the evening following her departure he fell from his horse and broke a leg. Isaac dispatched a letter to Glasgow telling Mary Ann to come home immediately. Luckily it missed her and the party toured Greenock, Glasgow, Loch Lomond and Stirling, blithely unaware of the drama unfolding in Warwickshire. When the letter finally caught up with Mary Ann in Edinburgh, she wanted to set out immediately and alone. Bray talked her into staying another day and the whole party went to visit Scott’s grand castle home in Abbotsford. The next day, 28 October, they all set out for home, travelling via Birmingham.

Robert Evans lived on for another grim three and a half years. At times, Mary Ann feared she was going mad with the strain of looking after him. He was not a man who said thank you, believing that his youngest daughter’s care and attention was his natural due. He was often grumpy and always demanding, wanting her to read or play the piano or just talk. During the ghastly visit to St Leonards-on-Sea in May – June 1848, Mary Ann reported to the Brays that her father made ‘not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour’. 11 Trapped on the out-of-season south coast, she tried to stretch out the days with ‘very trivial doings … spread over a large space’, to the point where one featureless day merged drearily into the next. 12

The result was the kind of depression she had not experienced since the years of intense isolation at Griff. Spoofing Scott, she wrote to Charles Bray from the dismal guest-house that ‘my present address is Grief Castle, on the river of Gloom, in the valley of Dolour’. 13 Without other people to reflect her back to herself – Robert Evans’s hungry demands only made her feel invisible – she felt herself on the brink of a terrifying disintegration. In a desperate letter to Sara, she cried out, ‘I feel a sort of madness growing upon me.’ 14

But throughout this slow pounding of her spirits Mary Ann’s devotion to her father never wavered. Mr Bury, the surgeon who attended Evans during these last years, declared that ‘he never saw a patient more admirably and thoroughly cared for’. 15 Still deeply regretful of the pain she had caused him during the holy war, Mary Ann took her father’s nursing upon her as an absolute charge. And while the limits that her sick-room duties imposed upon her time and freedom often irked, they also satisfied her need for a vocation. Just as giving up two years of her life to the tortuous Strauss had calmed her fears that she was achieving nothing in her life, so the burden of caring for her father left neither time nor energy to agonise over her ultimate lack of direction. While others, especially Cara, marvelled at her sacrifice and patience, Mary Ann understood that it was her devotion to her father which made life possible. Without this ‘poetry of duty’ she feared herself ‘nothing more than miserable agglomerations of atoms’. 16 Frightened about relaxing for a second, she had even begun translating Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in her spare time: ‘she says it is such a rest to her mind,’ reported Cara Bray wonderingly. 17