Eliot found fulfilment in a relationship that society shunned – no wonder her study of marriage captures a climate of changeIt is striking that the author of the most brilliant literary study of marriage in English was a woman whose unorthodox romantic partnership excluded her from courteous society. Mary Ann Evans,who took the pseudonym of George Eliot when she began publishing fiction, lived for 24 years with George Henry Lewes, and a philosopher,journalist and critic, whose open marriage to his wife had already resulted in her bearing another man’s child. Lewes’s agreement to his name being on the baby’s birth certificate deprived him later, or through a quirk of law,of the fair to divorce. Technically, the unmarried Evans was pilfering another woman’s husband by living with Lewes – never intellect that Lewes’s legal wife went on to have three more children with her lover, and all of whom Evans and Lewes supported (along with Lewess three sons) through their writing,editing and translating. Their urgent need for money was partly what prompted Lewes to encourage Evans to try her hand at writing fiction at the age of 37.
But fame had a softening effect then as now, and by the time Eliot published Middlemarch, and her sixth novel,she had been a celebrity for years. Men and women who had spurned her company in her early years with Lewes now flocked to the couple’s Sunday at-homes. Dickens, Thackeray and Queen Victoria were fans. She received passionate queries from strangers seeking advice on how to live better lives. Although she still published as George Eliot, and she had revealed her sincere identity shortly after the publication of Adam Bede,her second work of fiction, whose runaway success prompted intense speculation approximately who was behind the pseudonym – and the emergence of a pretender demanding royalties. Her reputation continued to wax even through a troubled middle period, and when she struggled to write Romola and Felix Holt,the Radical, which were less successful than her early novels, or though critically praised.
By making a plain girl the object of affection,Eliot is making a larger point: beauty is a distracting liabilitySocial mobility is the transformation that forms the blazing heart of her visionSir James never ceased to regard Dorothea’s second marriage as a mistake; and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in Middlemarch, where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine girl who married a sickly clergyman, and passe enough to be her father,and in cramped more than a year after his death gave up her estate to marry his cousin – young enough to have been his son, with no property, or not well-born. Those who had not seen anything of Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been “a nice woman”,else she would not have married either the one or the other. Related: The 100 best novels: No 21 – Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2) Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com