George Eliot
Evans, Marian [pseud. George Eliot] (1819–1880), novelist, was known under several names during her life: Mary Anne Evans (at birth), Mary Ann Evans (from 1837), Marian Evans (from 1851), Marian Evans Lewes (from 1854), and Mary Ann Cross (1880).
Early life
She was born Mary Anne Evans on 22 November 1819 at South Farm on the Arbury estate in the parish of Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, the third child of the second marriage of Robert Evans (1773–1849), manager of the large estates of the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall. Robert Evans's work on the estate was wide-ranging. He not only surveyed land and buildings, managed relations with the tenant farmers on the estate, collected rents, oversaw repairs, and arranged the buying and selling of land, but was also involved in negotiations with road builders and coalmining businesses in the area. His journals and correspondence with Francis Newdigate show Evans to have been an inventive and inconsistent speller, but a man of integrity and determination, and one in whom his employer invested a great deal of trust and authority. The eponymous hero of George Eliot's first full-length novel, Adam Bede (1859), is based in some respects—particularly in regard to his pride in his work and his determination of character—on Robert Evans.
Robert Evans's first wife, Harriet Poynton, with whom he had a son, Robert (1802–1864), and a daughter, Fanny (1805–1882), died in 1809. In 1813 he married Christiana Pearson (1788?–1836), the daughter of a local farmer. The children of this marriage were Christiana, known as Chrissey (1814–1859), Isaac (1816–1890), and Mary Anne, the youngest, born in 1819. Twin sons were born in March 1821, but survived only a few days.
In the spring of 1820, when Mary Anne was only a few months old, the family moved from South Farm to a house known as Griff, situated just off the main road between Nuneaton and Coventry. This was her home until she was twenty-one. It was a large house with stables and outbuildings, a dairy and farmyard, and an orchard. In her semi-autobiographical sketch, ‘Looking backward’, found in her last published work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot describes her native country as ‘fat central England’ with its elms, buttercups, and tree-studded hedgerows, but she remembers also the coalmining, the building of roads and railways, the cutting of canals to carry the coal from the mines. It was not all lush, rural, idyllic; many of the local villagers worked in the pits and lived in poor cottages on the Newdigate estate, and some of the tenant farmers lived in conditions of poverty rather than plenty. It was this varied nature of the rural life of her childhood that she later drew on for her novels, having as a child noticed the contrast between the lives of the tenants and that of the landed family at the magnificent Arbury Hall, where she was allowed, as a clever and serious schoolgirl, to browse in the family library.
At five Mary Anne boarded with Chrissey at Miss Lathom's school in nearby Attleborough; in 1828, when she was nine, she became a boarder at Mrs Wallington's school in Nuneaton. Here she came under the strong religious influence of an evangelical teacher, Maria Lewis, to whom most of her earliest extant letters—earnest, pious, and rather self-righteous—are addressed. From thirteen to sixteen she attended a school in Coventry run by Mary and Rebecca Franklin, the daughters of a Baptist minister. Religious dissent was strong in the midlands at this time; there were chapels of all denominations: Baptist, Wesleyan, Unitarian, Quaker, Congregationalist. Though her own family belonged to the middle-of-the-road Anglican community, Mary Anne herself was strongly evangelical. As a teenager she alarmed her brother Isaac by taking her piety to extremes, frowning on theatregoing and neglecting her appearance—going about ‘like an owl’, as she said, ‘to the great disgust of my brother’ (Cross, 1.157).
At the Franklins' school Mary Anne won prizes in French and in English composition, and was known for her fine piano playing. Her schoolfellows later remembered her as a serious, clever girl, but a shy and sensitive one, who hated performing in public, and who often ran out of the room in tears. At Christmas 1835, when she was just sixteen, Mary Anne came home to a domestic crisis. Her mother, who had been in poor health since the death of the twins, was dying painfully of breast cancer.
After her mother's death in February 1836, Mary Anne stayed at home to help her sister Chrissey keep house. Her brother Isaac was now helping his father with the estate business, and would eventually take over from him, working for the next generation of the Newdigate family. In May 1837 Chrissey married Edward Clarke, a doctor in nearby Meriden. Mary Anne was bridesmaid, and when signing the register after the wedding, she dropped the ‘e’ from her forename. She now became housekeeper for her father and her brother Isaac. Although her schooling had ended with her mother's death and the assumption of domestic duties, she had continued to read widely and had lessons at home in Italian and German from a visiting tutor, Joseph Brezzi. She also read, under Maria Lewis's guidance, improving works such as the life of Wilberforce.
Isaac married in 1841, and it was decided that he and his wife, Sarah, should live at Griff. Robert Evans retired as agent to the Newdigates, and he and Mary Ann found another house. In March 1841 they moved to a comfortable house in Foleshill, on the outskirts of Coventry. Perhaps Robert Evans hoped that his youngest daughter would find a suitable husband in Coventry despite her plain looks and serious demeanour. Instead, she made a new set of friends who were to have an important influence on her future life.
Mary Ann Evans's piety at the age of twenty was remarkable even in an age of pious evangelicalism among the provincial middle and lower classes. The correspondence between her and Maria Lewis was serious, preoccupied with religious matters, and somewhat sentimental. Mary Ann christened Miss Lewis Veronica, signifying ‘fidelity in friendship’, and was in turn given the name Clematis, which meant, appropriately enough, ‘mental beauty’. In their correspondence they discussed their reading, mostly of religious and morally edifying works. One such letter, written by Mary Ann in March 1841, ends with a paragraph full of earnest spiritual aspirations:
May we both in our diverse but I trust converging paths be upheld and guided by the staff of Divine consolation and the light of Divine Wisdom. How beautiful is the 63d Psalm. ‘Because Thy loving kindness is better than life my lips shall praise thee. Thus will I bless thee while I live, I will lift up my hands in thy name, my soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness, and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips’ etc. I feel strongly reproved by this picture of entire satisfaction in God as a portion. (Letters, 1.82)
Like her semi-autobiographical fictional character Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Mary Ann eventually reacted against such extreme piety and saintliness. Her intellectual curiosity led her to read widely in non-religious literature: Shakespeare, Scott, Cervantes, Schiller, Thomas Carlyle. After the move in 1841 to Foleshill she also came under the influence of the attractive Bray family of Coventry.
Life in Coventry
Charles Bray (1811–1884) was a wealthy ribbon manufacturer, a progressive in politics, and a philanthropist who used his wealth to set up schools and to support hospitals, all with a view to improving the social conditions of the poor. He was a freethinker in religion, a robust and original man, who did not care what his neighbours thought of him. In his autobiography, Phases of Opinion and Experience during a Long Life (1884), Bray remembered with pride how his large house, Rosehill, was a mecca for radicals and intellectuals who enjoyed the ‘free-and-easy mental atmosphere’ and ‘the absence of all pretension and conventionality’ which prevailed there. According to him, ‘Every one who came to Coventry with a queer mission, or a crotchet, or was supposed to be “a little cracked”, was sent up to Rosehill’ (Bray, 69–70).
Along with his quiet wife, Cara, herself inclined to piety but not an orthodox Christian, and Cara's sister and brother, Sara and Charles Hennell, Bray offered Mary Ann an intellectually challenging milieu. Already bookish and well read in several languages, she became interested in historical accounts of the Bible—one by Charles Hennell and several by German Biblical historians—which cast doubt on the accounts of miracles and on the supernatural elements in the gospels.
By the end of 1841, at the age of twenty-two, after reading, among other works of historical scholarship, Charles Hennell's Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), Mary Ann had come to the view that Christianity was based on ‘mingled truth and fiction’ (Letters, 1.28). On 2 January 1842 she refused to go to church. Her action resulted in anger and silence on the part of her father, which lasted for some months. Her brother Isaac told her she was jeopardizing the family's good name by associating with Coventry radicals and infidels. He despaired of her ever finding a husband, now that she was adding unorthodox opinions to her plain appearance. Robert Evans almost turned his daughter out of the house, but eventually he relented, and from then on an uneasy truce existed between them. She continued to keep house for him until he died in 1849, trying to be a dutiful daughter, but reserving the right to hold her own opinions on the subject of religion and to continue her friendship with the Brays.
At Rosehill, Mary Ann met many liberal thinkers, including the social philosophers Herbert Spencer and Harriet Martineau, the social experimentalist Robert Owen, the radical publisher John Chapman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson on his visits from America. At the end of 1843, when Charles Hennell married Rufa Brabant, it was arranged that Mary Ann should take over from Rufa the translation of David Friedrich Strauss's scholarly investigation of the gospels published in 1835–6, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined). Mary Ann was the obvious person to take on the task. She was the most learned member of the Bray–Hennell circle, having made a close study of the Bible, first as ardent evangelical, then as historical critic. And she knew German. In 1846 John Chapman published, in three volumes, her translation of this work, which painstakingly investigated the events of Christ's life as told in all four gospels and found them to be not historical, but mythological—the wished-for fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies. Mary Ann received £20 for her labours.
Chapman was also to publish The Essence of Christianity (1854), her second translation of a German work demystifying scripture, Ludwig Feuerbach's Das Wesen des Christenthums (1841). The translation was the only work to be published under her name, Marian Evans. Both Strauss, and, more particularly, Feuerbach had an influence on her own position, illustrated widely in her novels, as a humanist for whom relations between people have all the sanctity reserved in orthodox religion for the relationship between the individual and God.
Though still a serious young woman, inclined to depression and self-doubt and painfully conscious of her plain appearance, Mary Ann began to show that she was not just formidably intelligent and knowledgeable, but also sharp-witted and imaginatively gifted. In October 1846 Charles Bray received a letter in which she gave evidence that she possessed all the qualities required of a novelist: wit, wisdom, imagination, and an ability to turn her own experience to good account fictionally. She exploits with playful ease the hard intellectual labour, not without its longueurs, of translating Strauss's work in her description to Bray of a (fictitious) visit from a Professor Bücherwurm of Moderig University (Professor Bookworm of Musty University):
Down I came, not a little elated at the idea that a live professor was in the house, and, as you know I have quite the average quantity of that valuable endowment which spiteful people call assurance, but which I dignify with the name of self possession, you will believe that I neither blushed nor made a nervous giggle in attempting to smile, as is the lot of some unfortunate young ladies who are immersed in youthful bashfulness. (Letters, 8.13)
Professor Bücherwurm is, by his own account, ‘a voluminous author—indeed my works already amount to some 20 vols.—my last publication in 5 vols. was a commentary on the book of Tobit’. He has come to England in search of a wife who will double as the translator of his scholarly works, and he is idiosyncratic enough to desire, ‘besides ability to translate, a very decided ugliness of person and a sufficient fortune to supply a poor professor with coffee and tobacco, and an occasional draft of schwarzbier, as well as to contribute to the expenses of publication’. He expresses himself satisfied that Mary Ann fulfils these criteria, though he regrets that she has no beard, ‘an attribute which I have ever regarded as the most unfailing indication of a strong-minded woman’.
Mary Ann tells Bray how delighted she was by this proposal, since she is desperate to be saved from the ‘horrific disgrace of spinster-hood’ and to be taken away from England. The letter turns her learning to light-hearted and witty account, and makes a brave joke about her plain looks and her anxiety that, at the age of nearly twenty-seven, she may not find a husband, as well as providing a shrewd preparatory sketch for Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch. Furthermore, her ability here to illustrate her story by means of allusions, analogies, and metaphors drawn from literature, science, religion, and history gives a foretaste of the distinctiveness of her gifts as a novelist with a truly remarkable range of reference.
The next few years were for Mary Ann a lonely and painful time. She had to nurse her father through a long illness, during which he was demanding and often ungrateful. She was exhausted, physically and emotionally, when he died on 31 May 1849. Robert Evans was buried in Chilvers Coton churchyard, next to his wife. His property was divided between his sons Robert and Isaac; Fanny and Chrissey, who had been given £1000 each when they married, received another £1000 in his will, as well as household items. Mary Ann was left £2000 in trust, a sum which, when invested, would yield about £90 a year in interest, not quite enough to live on without supplementary earnings, but enough to encourage her to consider living independently. She might have gone to live with her married brother Isaac, resigning herself to a life of plain sewing, playing the piano, and reading to her nephews and nieces in a household of conventional religious and social observance which was to her stiflingly narrow. But she knew that she and Isaac disagreed about everything: politics, religion, and the duties of younger sisters to obey their older brothers. Although she got on better with her sister Chrissey, married to Edward Clarke, a struggling doctor (who died in 1852), she had no wish to settle with Chrissey's family either.
While Mary Ann wondered what to do next, the Brays generously offered to take her with them on a trip to Switzerland and Italy. After six weeks of travelling, the Brays returned to England, leaving her in Geneva, where she bravely took lodgings and spent a winter trying out her new found independence, and taking stock. A sympathetic family, the D'Albert Durades, took her in as a paying guest. François D'Albert Durade, who later translated several of her novels into French, was an artist. He painted her portrait in February 1850, representing her as modest, pensive, long-faced, but pleasant looking. Mary Ann spent her time in Geneva reading, walking, learning mathematics, and continuing with a translation (never to be finished) of Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus which she had begun during her father's illness.
When she returned to England in March 1850, Mary Ann had more or less made up her mind to move to London and pursue a career in journalism. A short stay with Isaac and his family at Griff, followed by a rather less painful visit to Chrissey at Meriden, convinced her that she could not make her home among them. The decision to move to London was a momentous one, and was accompanied by a change of name. She now called herself Marian Evans, and in January 1851 she took up lodgings in the Strand.
Journalistic career in London
Thanks to the Brays, Marian Evans had an immediate entrée into the world of radical politics and journalism, of free thinking, and in some cases of free living too. The Chapman household at 142 Strand was itself a most unconventional one. The four-storey building, looking over Somerset House and the Thames at the back, was both the workplace and the home of the publisher John Chapman, who specialized in publishing works of a left-wing or sceptical tendency. He had been impressed by Marian's intellect and by her stamina in completing the translation of Strauss. He came to value these qualities even more when in 1851 he bought the great radical periodical, the Westminster Review, first set up in the 1820s to further the cause of political and social reform in the long run-up to the Reform Act of 1832. Marian Evans became, in effect, the editor of the Review, as well as one of its best and most widely admired reviewers.
On the upper floors of 142 Strand lived Chapman's family and a number of lodgers—mainly literary people whose books he published or who wrote for the Westminster Review. Chapman held Friday night parties, when writers gathered to talk about literature and politics of a mainly radical kind. It was through Chapman that Marian Evans met Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and his friend, the critic George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), with both of whom she was to fall in love. But first she succumbed to the charms of Chapman himself. He was handsome, worldly, successful, and his admiration for her abilities flattered Marian. Chapman lived with his wife, Susanna, a woman fourteen years older than he was—Chapman was thirty in 1851—their two children, and the children's governess, Elisabeth Tilley, who was also Chapman's mistress.
Into this unusual household came Marian Evans, a provincial young woman of plain and earnest appearance but of strong will and strong passion. Over the next few months a comedy was played out, with Chapman arousing the jealousy of both his wife (who seems to have accepted the governess's role in their lives) and his mistress by the attention he gave to the new guest. He visited Marian Evans's room, where she played the piano for him and taught him German. They were caught holding hands. Mrs Chapman and Elisabeth joined forces to expel the interloper, sending her, literally, to Coventry, where she fled in tears to the Brays, upset by Chapman's assurances that he admired her mental beauty (Clematis again), but found her lacking in physical charm.
Sensibly, Marian abandoned all hopes of Chapman as a lover and—establishing a pattern which she was also to follow with Herbert Spencer—settled down to a friendly, professional relationship with him. The women at 142 Strand relented, and in the autumn of 1851 Chapman brought Marian back to London, where she began to guide him in the editorial department of the Westminster Review. He was the nominal editor, while she, from a mixture of diffidence, modesty, and fear of playing a public role, was happy to remain behind the scenes, doing the work and letting Chapman put his name to it.
Marian's social life blossomed in London. Sometimes accompanied by Chapman, she attended lectures in geometry at the new Ladies' College in Bedford Square, later renamed Bedford College. She also frequently walked across the Strand to see plays put on at the Lyceum Theatre in Catherine Street (now Aldwych). Among these was The Game of Speculation, G. H. Lewes's successful adaptation of Balzac's Mercadet, which opened at the Lyceum in October 1851 and ran for ninety-four performances. It was in October 1851, too, that Marian Evans first met Lewes. Chapman introduced them on 6 October at William Jeffs's bookshop in the Burlington Arcade. Marian reported to the Brays that Lewes was ‘a sort of miniature Mirabeau in appearance’, a reference to his slight physique and plain looks (Letters, 1.367).
Marian worked closely with Chapman on the Westminster Review until 1854. She was invaluable to him with her sharp brain, wide knowledge, willing labour, and ability to deal tactfully yet firmly with touchy contributors. Chapman himself lacked all these qualities, as one of the chief contributors and supporters of the Review, George Combe, pointed out to him. Combe was a well-known phrenologist, a practitioner of that ‘science’ by which character was to be read by feeling the contours of the head. In 1851 he felt Marian Evans's bumps at Bray's house, and concluded, ‘she appeared to me the ablest woman I have seen’, having ‘a very large brain’, and large bumps of ‘concentrativeness’, and ‘love of approbation’ (Letters, 8.27–8). He advised Chapman in December 1851 to ‘use Miss Evans's tact and judgment as an aid to your own’, continuing, ‘She has certain organs large in her brain which are not so fully developed in yours, and she will judge more correctly of the influence upon other persons of what you write and do, than you will do yourself’ (ibid., 8.33). On hearing three years later that Marian Evans had gone to Germany with the married G. H. Lewes, Combe was horrified. He wrote to Bray in November 1854: ‘I should like to know whether there is insanity in Miss Evans's family; for her conduct, with her brain, seems to me like morbid mental aberration’ (ibid., 8.129).
Marian gained from the partnership with Chapman a widened social circle, the experience of running a review under cover of anonymity, the freedom to take decisions, and the chance to review works for the Westminster on topics ranging from English, French, and German literature to science to philosophy to evangelical sermons. Although at first she worked in return for board and lodgings at Chapman's house, from 1855 she was paid between £12 and £20 per article, earning between £60 and £120 per annum for her journalism (Letters, 7.358–9). She found her voice as a writer in her work for the Westminster Review from 1851 to 1856. In the essayist, increasingly confident, wide-ranging, witty, and rhetorically complex, we can see many of the characteristics of the future novelist George Eliot.
Marian Evans's social position as a single working woman in London in the early 1850s was extremely unusual. Generally, women of small means either married (whereupon their income promptly became their husbands' property under the law) or took jobs as governesses or live-in companions to rich relations or acquaintances. Marian herself had thought of becoming a teacher in Leamington Spa when her father threatened to make her leave the house in 1842, but had not relished the idea of becoming a domestic slave in a strange household or boarding establishment. On the other hand, there was a risk attached to cutting loose. Her brother disapproved of the move to London, making her feel that she would no longer be welcome in his home, even for visits. She was now in a society composed entirely of men, and though it was intellectually stimulating to associate with them freely, she was risking her reputation in doing so. She must often, too, have missed the companionship of a female friend in London, although she still corresponded with Cara Bray and Sara Hennell in Coventry.
In one letter to them in May 1852 Marian reported a great occasion at 142 Strand. On 4 May Chapman held a meeting of publishers, writers, and booksellers to protest against the Booksellers' Association, a cartel of larger publishers which fixed the price of books, prohibiting small publishers like Chapman from offering discounts. Dickens took the chair, ‘preserving’, according to Marian, ‘a courteous neutrality of eyebrow, and speaking with clearness and decision’ (Letters, 2.23). Many famous liberals and radicals were there: Herbert Spencer, Lewes, the scientist Richard Owen, Wilkie Collins, and many more distinguished men. Marian Evans was also there—the only woman.
Marian's position was a remarkable one, as several of her acquaintances noted. In 1885 William Hale White read the biography of George Eliot written by John Walter Cross (1840–1924), whom she had married in 1880, and was moved to write his recollection of Marian Evans, who had been his fellow lodger in the Strand in the early 1850s:
She was really one of the most sceptical, unusual creatures I ever knew, and it was this side of her character which was to me the most attractive ... I can see her now, with her hair over her shoulders, the easy chair half sideways to the fire, her feet over the arms, and a proof in her hands, in that dark room at the back of No. 142, and I confess I hardly recognize her in the pages of Mr Cross's—on many accounts—most interesting volumes. I do hope that in some future edition, or in some future work, the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot's entirely unconventional life. (The Athenaeum, 28 Nov 1885)
Hale White was right. Cross took great liberties with his wife's letters, removing any phrases he thought controversial or compromising (Letters, 1.xiii). One wonders what Cross would have made of a letter to Chapman in February 1856, in which Marian vigorously urges him not to print in the Westminster an article by a Miss H on the French woman writer George Sand. She describes Miss H (Matilda Hays) as ‘one of the numerous class of female scribblers who undertake to edify the public before they know the proper use of their own language’. The article is made up of ‘feminine rant of the worst kind, which it will be simply fatal to the Review to admit’ (Ashton, ‘New George Eliot letters’, 121–2). Further, ‘I would not trust the most ordinary subject, still less the most delicate, to a woman who writes such trash’; and ‘Everything she says about George Sand is undiscriminating Bosh’.
All of Marian's letters to Chapman about the conduct of the Review are like this, confident, wide-ranging, managerial, even magisterial towards her employer, the attractive, desirable, but intellectually inferior man of the world.
This unconventional young woman, who had attended lectures, theatre, and opera during 1851 with Chapman, was soon going to the theatre and opera with Herbert Spencer. By June 1852 Marian was reporting to the Brays that she and Spencer were seen so often in one another's company that ‘all the world is setting us down as engaged’ (Letters, 2.35). Marian would have liked nothing better, but Spencer was less keen. In July Marian went off alone to Broadstairs on holiday; from there she sent several managing letters to Chapman about the Westminster Review, careful letters to Combe, whom Chapman was pressing for money to help the Review out of a financial crisis, and, at the same time, love letters to Spencer. She wrote begging him to visit her at Broadstairs. All her passion and pride and humour are on display, as well as her loneliness and uncertainty:
Dear Friend
No credit to me for my virtues as a refrigerent. I owe them all to a few lumps of ice which I carried away with me from that tremendous glacier of yours. I am glad that Nemesis, lame as she is, has already made you feel a little uneasy in my absence, whether from the state of the thermometer [a reference to the very high temperatures that July] or aught else. We will not inquire too curiously whether you long most for my society or for the sea-breezes. If you decided that I was not worth coming to see, it would only be of a piece with that generally exasperating perspicacity of yours which will not allow one to humbug you. (An agreeable quality, let me tell you, that capacity of being humbugged. Don't pique yourself on not possessing it.) (ibid., 8.50–51)
Spencer did visit Marian briefly in Broadstairs and obviously discouraged her, for a week later she wrote again, almost proposing marriage to him:
Those who have known me best have always said, that if ever I loved any one thoroughly my whole life must turn upon that feeling, and I find they say truly. You curse the destiny which has made the feeling concentrate itself on you—but if you will only have patience with me you shall not curse it long. You will find that I can be satisfied with very little, if I am delivered from the dread of losing it. (Letters, 8.56–7)
Finally, she asserts her sense of self-worth, admitting that probably ‘no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this’, but insisting she is not ashamed, ‘for I am conscious that 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’ (ibid., 8.57).
These letters to Spencer give some insight into how, when she came to write fiction, George Eliot could be so penetrating in her analyses of the complex relations between men and women, both those who marry and those—like Maggie Tulliver with Stephen Guest and Philip Wakem, or like Gwendolen Grandcourt with Daniel Deronda—who have intimate relationships which do not end in marriage.
Life with G. H. Lewes
By 1853 G. H. Lewes had replaced Spencer in Marian Evans's affections, and fortunately he returned them. He, too, was a regular contributor to the Westminster Review, as well as theatre critic for The Leader, the weekly paper which he co-edited with his friend Thornton Hunt. Lewes, two years older than Marian, had had a busy and varied career. From an insecure background, brought up by his mother and a hated stepfather, with a miscellaneous schooling, he had worked his way to prominence in literary London by means of prodigious talent, versatility, and hard work.
When Marian Evans met Lewes in Jeffs's bookshop in October 1851 he was already the author of a popular history of philosophy; two novels; several plays and adaptations of French farces, some of which Marian saw at the Lyceum with Chapman or Spencer; a biography of Robespierre; and hundreds of articles and reviews. He was planning a life of Goethe. He had acted successfully with Dickens's amateur theatre company, and had even toyed with the idea of going on the stage professionally. Like Marian he was fluent in French and German, and widely read in literature, philosophy, and science. He had no religious faith. He was married and unable to sue for a divorce.
In February 1841 Lewes had married Agnes Jervis (1822–1902), the beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter of a radical MP, Swynfen Jervis. They had agreed to have an open marriage, the result of which was that in addition to having three surviving sons by Lewes, Agnes had by 1851 borne two children whose father was not Lewes, but his friend Thornton Hunt. She was to have two more children by Hunt in 1853 and 1857. Lewes, having entered on this open marriage, registered the first two of these children as his own. When he subsequently met and fell in love with Marian Evans, he could not sue for divorce, as under the terms of the law he had condoned his wife's adultery by registering the births of her children by Hunt in his own name. Though he was by 1853 disillusioned with his domestic arrangements—and notably did not register the birth of Agnes's daughter Ethel, born in October 1853—he had disqualified himself from ever seeking a divorce.
He had, however, left Agnes, probably in 1852, although he visited her and his children frequently at the
