She was still reading biblical commentary, but she was also learning Italian and German, reading Wordsworth and Goethe. Her reading stretched to include the Romantic poets, including Shelley and Byron, whose lives certainly did not conform to the strictures of her faith.
Soon she was reading widely in the sciences, including John Pringle Nichol’s The Phenomena and Order of the Solar System and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, a book that paved the way for Darwin’s account of evolution. Christian writers were rising up to defend the biblical account of creation. She read their books, too, but they backfired with her. They were so unpersuasive in rebutting the findings of the new science that they only served to reinforce Mary Anne’s growing doubts.
She was profoundly influenced by a book titled An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity by Charles Hennell, which she bought in 1841 at the age of twenty-one. Hennell parsed through each of the Gospels, trying to determine what could be established as fact and what was later embellishment. He concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prove that Jesus was divinely born, or that he had performed any miracles, or that he had been resurrected from the dead. Hennell concluded that Jesus was a “noble minded reformer and sage, martyred by crafty priests and brutal soldiers.”7
For most of this time, Mary Anne had nobody close to her intellectual level with whom she could discuss what she was reading. She invented a word to describe her condition: “non-impartitive.” She received information but could not digest it through conversation.
But then she learned that Hennell’s youngest sister, Cara, lived nearby. Cara’s husband, Charles Bray, was a successful ribbon merchant who had written his own religious tract, “The Philosophy of Necessity.” It held that the universe was governed by unchanging rules ordained by God, but that God was not active in the world. It was man’s duty to discover these rules and improve the world along their lines. Bray believed people should spend less time praying and more time involved in social reform. The Brays were bright, intellectual, unconventional thinkers who would go on to lead unconventional lives. Though they remained married, Charles fathered six children with their cook, and Cara had a close and possibly sexual friendship with Edward Noel, a relative of Lord Byron, who had three children of his own and an estate in Greece.
Mary Anne was introduced to the Brays by a mutual friend, perhaps in order to bring the Brays back into the fold of orthodox Christianity. If that was her intent, it didn’t work. By the time Mary Anne settled into their lives, she herself was already drifting away from the faith. The Brays immediately recognized her as a kindred spirit. She began socializing with them more and more, delighted to have found intellectual peers at last. They did not cause her defection from Christianity, but they catalyzed it.
It was dawning on Mary Anne that her growing disbelief would cause her no end of trouble. It would mean a rupture with her father, the rest of her family, and polite society generally. It would make it very hard for her to find a husband. In the society of her time, agnosticism meant ostracism. But she pushed on bravely toward what her heart and head told her was truth. “I wish to be among the ranks of that glorious crusade that is seeking to set Truth’s Holy Sepulcher free from usurped domination,” she wrote in a letter to a friend.8
As that sentence indicates, Mary Anne was not renouncing the spirit of religion even while she was coming to renounce Christianity. She discounted Christian teaching, and the divinity of Jesus, but she did not doubt, especially at this age, the existence of God. She rejected Christianity on realist grounds, out of distaste for anything abstract or fantastical. She did it after exhaustive reading, but she did not do it coldly or by the use of dry reason. Rather, she loved life with such an earthy passion that she had trouble accepting the idea that this world was subsidiary to some other world that obeyed different laws. She came to feel she could achieve a state of grace not through surrender but through her own moral choices, by living a virtuous and rigorous life. With this philosophy Mary Anne put a heavy burden on herself, and on her own conduct.
In January 1842, Mary Anne told her father that she would no longer accompany him to church. His response was to withdraw into what one biographer called a cold and sullen rage. Mary Anne was not only defying her father and God, as he saw it; she was also choosing to dishonor her family and to cast it into social disgrace. On the first Sunday after her refusal, Mary Anne’s father went to church, but he noted simply and coldly in his diary, “Mary Anne did not go.”
The next few weeks were spent in what Mary Anne called a “Holy War.” She lived at home at loggerheads with her father. He broke off contact with her but fought back in different ways. He enlisted friends and relatives to come plead with her to attend church, if only on prudence grounds. If she continued on this path, they warned, she would spend her life poor, cast out, isolated. These very plausible predictions had no effect on her. Her father also asked clergy and other knowledgeable scholars to come and persuade her by force of reason that Christianity was the true doctrine. They came, they argued, they were defeated. Mary Anne had already read every book they cited to make their case, and she had her responses.
Finally, her father decided to relocate the family. If Mary Anne was going to make herself unmarriageable, there was no use keeping the big house that had been rented to catch her a husband.
Mary Anne tried to reopen conversation with her father by writing him a letter. First, she made clear why she could no longer be a Christian. She said she regarded the Gospels as “histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life…to be most dishonorable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness.”
It would be rank hypocrisy, she told him, to appear to worship in the home of a doctrine she thought pernicious. She wrote that she would like to go on living with her father, but if he wanted her to leave, “I can cheerfully do it if you desire it and shall go with deep gratitude for all the tenderness and rich kindness you have never been tired of showing me. So far from complaining I shall joyfully submit if as a proper punishment for the pain I have most unintentionally given you, you determine to appropriate any provision you may have intended to make for my future support to your other children whom you may consider more deserving.”
At the first dawn of her adulthood, Mary Anne was not only renouncing the faith of her family. She was willing to go out into the world without a home, without an inheritance, without a husband, and without prospects. She concluded with a declaration of love: “As a last vindication of herself from one who has no one to speak for her I may be permitted to say that if ever I loved you I do so now, if ever I sought to obey the laws of my Creator and to follow duty wherever it may lead me I have that determination now and the consciousness of this will support me though every being on earth were to frown on me.”
This letter, remarkable for a woman so young, shows many of the traits the world would later come to see in George Eliot: an intense intellectual honesty, an arduous desire to live according to the strictures of her conscience, an amazing bravery in the face of social pressure, a desire to strengthen her character by making the necessary hard choices, but also a bit of egotism, a tendency to cast herself as the star of her own melodrama, an intense desire for the love of men even as she puts that love at risk.