In July she wrote him a letter that was both pleading and bold. “Those who have known me best have already said that if ever I loved any one thoroughly my whole life must turn upon that feeling, and I find they said truly,” she declared. She asked him not to forsake her: “If you become attached to someone else, then I must die, but until then I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me. I do not ask you to sacrifice anything—I would be very glad and cheerful and never annoy you…. You will find that I can be satisfied with very little, if I am delivered from the dread of losing it.”
Finally, she added a climactic flourish: “I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this—but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar-minded women might think of me.”10
This letter represents a pivotal moment in Eliot’s life, with its mixture of pleading vulnerability and strong assertion. After the years of disjointed neediness, the iron was beginning to enter her soul and she became capable of that declaration of her own dignity. You might say that this moment was Eliot’s agency moment, the moment when she began the process by which she would stop being blown about by her voids and begin to live according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life.
The letter didn’t solve her problems. Spencer still rejected her. She remained insecure, especially about her writing. But her energies were roused. She exhibited growing cohesion and at times amazing courage.
This agency moment can happen, for many people, surprisingly late in life. Sometimes you see lack of agency among the disadvantaged. Their lives can be so blown about by economic disruption, arbitrary bosses, and general disruption that they lose faith in the idea that input leads to predictable output. You can offer programs to improve their lives, but they may not take full advantage of them because they don’t have confidence that they can control their own destinies.
Among the privileged, especially the privileged young, you see people who have been raised to be approval-seeking machines. They may be active, busy, and sleepless, but inside they often feel passive and not in control. Their lives are directed by other people’s expectations, external criteria, and definitions of success that don’t actually fit them.
Agency is not automatic. It has to be given birth to, with pushing and effort. It’s not just the confidence and drive to act. It’s having engraved inner criteria to guide action. The agency moment can happen at any age, or never. Eliot began to display signs of emotional agency when she was with Spencer, but it came to mature fruition only after she met George Lewes.
One True Love
The story of George Eliot’s love for George Lewes is almost always told from her perspective, as the great passion that gave coherence to her soul, that took her from a self-absorbed and desperate girl and provided her with the love she craved and the emotional support and security she required. But the story can equally well be told from Lewes’s perspective, as the central element in his journey from fragmentation to integrity.
Lewes came from a long lineage of family chaos. His grandfather was a comic actor who was married three times. His father was married to one woman in Liverpool and had four children by her, then left and set up a new household with another woman in London with whom he had three boys before he disappeared forever to Bermuda.
Lewes grew up moderately poor and educated himself by going to Europe and schooling himself in the leading Continental authors such as Spinoza and Comte, who were then largely unknown in England. He returned to London and supported himself with his pen, writing on any subject for anybody who would pay. In an age that was beginning to favor specialization and earnestness, he was slighted as a superficial journeyman writer.
The American feminist Margaret Fuller met Lewes at a party at Thomas Carlyle’s house and called him a “witty, French, flippant sort of man” who possessed a “sparkling shallowness.” Most biographers have followed this line, slighting him as a bit of an adventurer and opportunist, as a facile but shallow and not entirely reliable writer.
The biographer Kathryn Hughes persuasively takes a more appreciative view. Lewes, she writes, was witty and effervescent in a society that tended toward dour self-importance. He was knowledgeable about French and German life in a society that was often suspicious of anything that wasn’t British. He had a genuine passion for ideas and for bringing neglected thinkers to public view. He was freethinking and romantic in a society that was in a stringent, buttoned-up Victorian phase.
Lewes was famously ugly (notoriously, the only major London figure who was even less attractive than George Eliot), but he could talk comfortably and sensitively with women, and this served him well. He married a beautiful young woman named Agnes when he was twenty-three and she was nineteen. They had a modern, freethinking marriage, mostly faithful for the first nine years and then mostly unfaithful after that. Agnes had a long-running affair with a man named Thornton Hunt. Lewes sanctioned this affair so long as she didn’t have any children by Hunt. When she did, he adopted them as his own in order to spare them the disgrace of illegitimacy.
By the time he met Mary Anne, Lewes was living apart from Agnes (though he seems to have believed that someday he would move back, and their marriage would remain legally intact for the rest of his life). He was in what he regarded as a “very dreary wasted period of my life. I had given up all ambition whatever, lived from hand to mouth, and thought the evil of each day sufficient.”11
Mary Anne, for her part, was also lonely, but maturing. She wrote to Cara Bray, “My troubles are purely psychical—self-dissatisfaction and despair of achieving anything worth doing.” In her journal she embraced the sentiment that was first written by the feminist author Margeret Fuller: “I shall always reign through the intellect, but the life! The life! O my god! Shall that never be sweet?”12
But by this stage, in her midthirties, she was less frantic about herself: “When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business—that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time. But we begin at last to understand that these things are important only to one’s own consciousness, which is but as a globule of dew on a rose-leaf that at midday there will be no trace of. This is no high flown sentimentality, but a simple reflection which I find useful to me every day.”13
Lewes and Mary Anne met at a bookshop on October 6, 1851. By this time she had moved to London and had established herself as an anonymous contributor to (and eventually the editor of) the Westminster Review. They traveled in the same circles. They both had a close friendship with Herbert Spencer.
She was unimpressed at first, but before long she was writing to friends that she found Lewes “genial and amusing” and reporting that he has “quite won my liking, in spite of myself.” On his part, Lewes seemed to understand the quality of the woman he was getting to know. Flitting and peripatetic in other spheres of life, Lewes was completely solid and dependable when it came to his service to the woman who would become George Eliot.
None of their letters to each other survive. That is in part because they didn’t write very many (they were often together) and also because Eliot did not want later biographers raking over her private life and exposing the vulnerable heart that underlay the formidable novels. So we don’t know exactly how their love grew. But we know that Lewes was gradually winning her over. On April 16, 1853, she wrote to a friend, “Mr. Lewes, especially, is kind and attentive, and has quite won my regard, after having had a good deal of my vituperation. Like a few other people in the world, he is much better than he seems. A man of heart and conscience, wearing a mask of flippancy.”