Eliot was unwavering in her choice. She insisted on being known as Mrs. Lewes because even though her decision to be with Lewes had been an act of rebellion, she believed in the form and institution of traditional marriage. Circumstances had compelled her to do something extreme, but morally and philosophically she believed in the conventional path. They lived as traditional husband and wife. And they complemented each other. She could be gloomy, but he was a bright and funny social presence. They took walks together. They worked together. They read books together. They were exclusive, ardent, self-composed and self-completing. “What greater thing is there for two human souls,” Eliot would later write in Adam Bede, “than to feel they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of last parting.”
Her bond with Lewes cost her many friendships. Her family renounced her, most painfully her brother, Isaac. But the scandal was also productive in furnishing them with deeper insights into themselves and the world. They were forever on edge, looking for signs of insult or affirmation. Because they were cutting against the grain of social convention, they had to pay extra attention to what they were doing, to exercise special care. The shock of public hostility served as a stimulant. It made them acutely conscious of how society functioned.
Eliot had always been a sensitive observer of other people’s emotional lives. She had always devoured books, ideas, and people. People had always found her scarily perceptive—as if she was some sort of witch with magical powers. But now there was something more orderly about her thought processes. In the months after her scandalous departure with Lewes, she seems to have finally come to terms with her exceptional gifts. Everything was hardening into a distinct worldview, a settled way of seeing the world. Maybe it is simply that she could finally approach the world with a sense of self-confidence. After all her flailing about in life, Eliot had finally gotten the big thing right. She had taken a chance on Lewes. She had paid a fearsome price. She had endured a baptism of fire. But she was able slowly to come out the other side. The prize of a fulfilling love was worth the cost. As she put it in Adam Bede, “Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.”
Novelist
Lewes had long encouraged Eliot to write fiction. He wasn’t sure she could come up with plots, but he knew she had a genius for description and characterization. Plus, fiction paid better than nonfiction, and the Lewes family was always hard up for cash. He urged her to just try her hand: “You must try to write a story.” One morning in September 1856, she was fantasizing about writing fiction when a title popped into her head: The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton. Lewes was immediately enthusiastic. “Oh what a capital title!” he blurted.
A week later she read to him the first part of what she had written. He knew immediately that Eliot was a gifted writer. Eliot wrote in her journal, “We both cried over it, and then he came up to me and kissed me, saying, ‘I think your pathos is better than your fun.’ ” They both realized that Mary Anne would be a successful novelist. She would be George Eliot, the name she took to hide (for a time) her scandalous identity. The skill that he doubted most—whether she could write dialogue—was actually the area where her talent was most obvious. Lewes still wondered if she could create action and movement in her tales, but he knew she had all the other tools.
Before long he was her consultant, agent, editor, publicist, psychotherapist, and general counselor. He understood quickly that her talent was vastly above his own, and he seems to have felt nothing but selfless delight in the way she was bound to overshadow him.
By 1861, her brief diary entries make it clear how intimately involved Lewes was in the development of her plots: She would write during the day and then read what she had written to Lewes. Judging by her letters and diary entries over the years, he was an encouraging audience: “I read the…opening scenes of my novel, and he expressed great delight in them…. After this record I read aloud what I had written of Part IX to George and he, to my surprise, entirely approved of it…. When I read aloud my manuscript to my dear, dear husband, he laughed and cried alternately and then rushed to me to kiss me. He is the prime blessing that has made all the rest possible to me, given me a response to everything I have written.”
Lewes shopped her novels around, negotiating with different editors. In the early years, he lied about who the true author of the George Eliot novels was, claiming it was a clergyman friend who wished to remain anonymous. After the truth got out, he protected his wife from criticism. Even after she was celebrated as one of the greatest writers of her day, he would get to the newspapers first and cut out and discard any article that might mention her with anything but the most fulsome praise. Lewes’s rule was simple: “Never tell her anything that other people say about her books, for good or evil…. Let her mind be as much as possible fixed on her art and not the public.”
Arduous Happiness
George and Mary Anne continued to suffer from illnesses and bouts of depression, but they were generally happy together. The letters and diary entries they wrote during their years together bubble forth with assertions of joy and love. In 1859, Lewes wrote to a friend, “I owe Spencer another and deeper debt. It was through him that I learned to know Marian—to know her was to love her—and since then my life has been a new birth. To her I owe all my prosperity and my happiness. God bless her!”
Six years later Eliot wrote, “In each other we are happier than ever. I am more grateful to my dear husband for his perfect love, which helps me in all good and checks me in all evil—more conscious that in him I have the greatest of blessings.”
Her masterpiece, Middlemarch, is mostly about unsuccessful marriages, but there are glimpses in her books of happy marriages, and marital friendship, such as she enjoyed. “I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband,” one of her characters declares. She wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am happier every day, and find my domesticity more and more delightful and beneficial to me. Affection, respect and intellectual sympathy deepen, and for the first time in my life I can say to the moments, ‘Let them last, they are so beautiful.’ ”
Eliot and Lewes were happy, but they were not content. In the first place, life did not cease happening. One of Lewes’s sons from his earlier marriage came to them, terminally ill, and they nursed him until his death. Their frequent periods of ill health and depression were marked by migraines and dizzy spells. But through it all, they were impelled by their own need to cultivate themselves morally, to be deeper and wiser. Capturing this mixture of joy and ambition, Eliot wrote in 1857, “I am very happy—happy in the highest blessing life can give us, the perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own healthy activity. I feel, too, that all the terrible pain I have gone through in past years, partly from the defects of my own nature, partly from outward things, has probably been a preparation for some special work that I may do before I die. That is a blessed hope, to be rejoiced in with trembling.”