Eliot George - George Eliot: the last Victorian

Praise for George Eliot

Convincing.

London Review of Books

Fresh, graceful, and erudite.

Observer (U.K.)

[Hughess approach] brings a sense of close familiarity with this private, inward woman....[A] refreshingly intimate portrait.

Kirkus Reviews

This excellent, extremely readable biography shows that neither George Eliot nor the Victorians were what we sometimes lazily think them.... Hughes is supremely sympathetic toward her subject. Instead of debunking or psychoanalyzing, Hughes simply explains Eliots motivations, showing how the pressures of her public role took a toll on her happiness and emotional security. And Hughes treatment of the novels is assured, showing how each grew out of the changing circumstances of Eliots life, a life that was and remains an inspiration.

Newsday

Masterly.... This exhaustively researched biography, relying on primary texts, reveals Hughess impressive storytelling ability. She portrays Eliot as a woman of depth and intelligence, one who gave voice to the uncertainties of a tumultuous era. Highly recommended.

Library Journal

George Eliot cut a controversial yet popular figure in her day....[This] absorbing, exhaustively researched biography befits a subject who, according to the author, was among the most intellectually rigorous writers the nineteenth century produced.

Biography Magazine

[A] triumph, intelligent, persuasive, and beautifully written.London Sunday Times

Eliots emotional and intellectual development and freewheeling complexity are explored with a wonderfully fresh insight and authority.... Most praiseworthy, though, is Hughess ability to relate Eliots controversial love life with the paradoxical stance of social conservatism that pervades her fiction.

Independent on Sunday (U.K.)

[An] immensely readable, clear-sighted account of this remarkable novelists freewheeling life. The intelligent gusto with which [Hughes] performs her task is refreshing and delightful.

Independent (U.K.)

By the same author:

The Victorian Governess

The LAST
VICTORIAN

KATHRYN HUGHES

First Cooper Square Press Edition 2001

This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of George Eliot is an unabridged republication of the edition published in New York in 1999. It is reprinted by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Copyright 1998 by Kathryn Hughes

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Cooper Square Press
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
200 Park Avenue South, Suite 1109
New York, New York 10003-1503
www.coopersquarepress.com

Distributed by National Book Network

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hughes, Kathryn, 1959

George Eliot : the last Victorian / George Eliot.

p. cm.

Originally published: London : Fourth Estate, 1998.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-8154-1121-5

1. Eliot, George, 18191880. 2. Novelists, English19th centuryBiography. I. Title.

PR4681.H84 2001
823'.8dc21
[B]

2001028024

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.

For my parents
Anne and John Hughes
again

Several times during the writing of this book I feared that I had turned into Edward Casaubon, the fastidious blocked cleric from Middlemarch who has been working for far too long on the Key to All Mythologies. But unlike Casaubon, I did eventually start and finish writing and need to thank the many people and institutions who helped me along the way.

Anyone working on George Eliot bears a huge debt to Gordon Haight, the Yale academic who spent his life collecting her letters into nine immaculately edited volumes, as well as producing the excellent biography of 1968. Other Eliot scholars whose work has been particularly helpful include Rosemary Ashton and Ruby Redinger.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Warwickshire County Record Office and the Nuneaton Library all allowed me generous access to their manuscript holdings, from which I am very grateful to be permitted to quote. Thanks especially to Jonathan Ouvry, George Henry Lewess great-great-grandson, for allowing me to cite the unpublished journals of Eliot and Lewes held at Yale. I am also grateful for the help I received from the British Library, the London Library and London University Library.

George Eliot called John Blackwood the best of publishers. I could say the same of Christopher Potter at Fourth Estate, to whom I am very grateful for commissioning this book. My editor Katie Owen provided exactly that blend of insight and enthusiasm which authors fantasise about during the long, dark days of composition. Thanks go too to Ilsa Yardley for her immaculate copy-editing and to Leo Hollis for taking on the picture research. And, of course, I am indebted to Rachel Calder at the Tessa Sayle Agency for first putting me and Eliot together. More personally, Id like to thank Karen Merrin for her friendship and my brother, Dr Michael Hughes of Brunel University, for hours of phone support, not to mention a crash course in German philosophy. But my greatest debt is to my parents who have never, in all the years I have spent writing about the nineteenth century, hinted that there might be easier ways to make a living.

Kathryn Hughes
London, June 1998

181928

IN THE EARLY hours of 22 November 1819 a baby girl was born in a small stone farmhouse, tucked away in the woodiest part of Warwickshire, about four miles from Nuneaton. It was not an important event. Mary Anne was the fifth child and third daughter of Robert Evans, and the terse note Evans made in his diary of her arrival suggests that he had other things to think about that day. As land agent to the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall, the forty-six-year-old Evans was in charge of 7000 acres of mixed arable and dairy farmland, a coal-mine, a canal and, his particular love, miles of ancient deciduous forest, the remnants of Shakespeares Arden. A new baby, a female too, was not something for which a man like Robert Evans had time to stop.

Six months earlier another little girl, equally obscure in her own way, had been born in a corner of Kensington Palace. Princess Alexandrina Victoria was also the child of a middle-aged man, the fifty-two-year-old Prince Edward of Kent, himself the fourth son of Mad King George III. None of Georges surviving twelve children had so far managed to produce a viable heir to succeed the Prince Regent, who was about to take over as king in his own right. It had been made brutally clear to the four elderly remaining bachelors, Edward among them, that the patriotic moment had come to give up their mistresses, acquire legal wives and produce a crop of lusty boys. But despite three sketchy, resentful marriages, the desired heir had yet to appear. Still, at this point it was too soon to give up hope completely. Princess Alexandrina Victoria, born on 24 May 1819, was promisingly robust and her mother, while past thirty, was young enough to try again for a son. If anyone bothered to think ahead for the little girl, the most they might imagine was that she would one day become the elder sister of a great king.