Her greatest rebellion against Victorian moralism was to reclaim the sacred for herself.
“Literature bores me, especially great literature,” the narrator of one of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” says. George Eliot sometimes bores me, especially the George Eliot draped in greatness. Think of the extremities of nineteenth-century fiction: labile Lermontov; crazy, visionary Melville; nasty, world-hating Flaubert; mystic moor-bound Brontës; fanatical, trembling Dostoyevsky; explosive Hamsun.
But on Sunday, January 2, 1842, something wondrous and strange occurred. As if the new year demanded from her a new soul, the twenty-two-year-old Mary Anne Evans, who still lived at home as her father’s housekeeper, announced that she would not go to church. In the nineteenth century, there were at least three reliable germs of religious doubt; all three infected some people at once.
This was the writer and thinker who crossed paths with George Lewes, in a Piccadilly bookshop, in 1851: fierce, unrespectable, uninsured. She had arrived in London at the start of that year, had changed her name to Marian, and by the end of it was the de-facto editor of the capital’s leading progressive journal,.
There were plenty of English Victorians, Christian at least in their self-reckoning, who wanted to improve Marian Evans’s behavior, once the news emerged that she was living with a man who was not her legal husband. Her brother, Isaac, did not communicate with his sister for the next twenty-three years, breaking his silence only after George Lewes’s death, to commend her legal marriage to Lewes’s sapless successor, a banker named John Cross.
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