letter of 1871, looking back to the period, she likened her state of mind to that of
Mary Wollstonecraft at the time of the earlier writer's attempted suicide: 'Hopeless
ness has been to me, all through my life, but especially in the painful years of my
youth, the chief source of wasted energy with all the consequent bitterness of regret.
Remember, it has happened to many to be glad they did not commit suicide, though
they once ran for the final leap, or as Mary Wollstonecraft did, wetted their garments
well in the rain hoping to sink the better when they plunged.' At the age of twenty-one Evans moved with her father to the town of Coventry,
and in this new setting her intellectual horizons were extensively widened. As the
result of her association with a group of freethinking intellectuals, and her own stud
ies of theology, she reluctantly decided that she could no longer believe in the Chris
tian religion. Her decision created a painful break with her father, finally resolved
when she agreed to observe the formality of attending church with him and he agreed,
tacitly at least, that while there she could think what she liked. These preoccupations with theological issues led to her first book, a translation in
1846 of The Life of Jesus by D. F. Strauss, one of the leading figures of the Higher
Criticism in Germany. This criticism was the work of a group of scholars dedicated
to testing the historical authenticity of biblical narratives in the light of modern meth
ods of research. For the rest of her life, Evans continued to read extensively in English
and Continental philosophy; and when she moved to London in 1851, after her
father's death, her impressive intellectual credentials led to her appointment as an
assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a learned journal formerly edited by John
Stuart Mill. In the years in which she served as editor, she wrote a number of essays,
including 'Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft' and 'Silly Novels by Lady Nov
elists,' which she contributed to various periodicals in addition to the Westminster
Review. Her work at the Review brought her into contact with many important writers and
thinkers. Among them was George Henry Lewes, a brilliant critic of literature and
philosophy, with whom she fell in love. Lewes, a married man and father of three
children, could not obtain a divorce. Evans therefore elected to live with him as a
common-law wife, and what they called their 'marriage' lasted happily until his death
in 1878. In the last year of her life, she married an admirer and friend, J. W. Cross,
who became her biographer. Her earlier decision to live with Lewes was painfully made: 'Light and easily broken
ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who
are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done?they obtain what they desire
and are still invited to dinner.' Mrs. Lewes, as she called herself, was not invited to
dinner; instead, those who wanted to see her had themselves to seek her company at
the house that she shared with Lewes, where she received visitors on Sunday after
noons. These Sunday afternoons became legendary occasions, over which she pre
sided almost like a sibyl. However, her decision to live with Lewes cost her a number
of social and family ties, including her relationship with her brother, Isaac, to whom
she had been deeply attached since childhood. Isaac never spoke to her again after
her elopement. It is reasonable to conjecture that this experience affects the stress,
in all of her novels, on incidents involving choice. All of her characters are tested by
situations in which they must choose, and the choices, as in The Mill on the Floss
(1860), are often agonizingly painful. Although she had occasionally tried her hand at fiction earlier in life, it was only
.
1336 / GEORGE ELIOT
after her relationship with Lewes became established that she turned her full atten
tion to this form. Scenes from Clerical Life appeared in magazine installments in 1857
under the pen name that misled most of her readers (Dickens excepted) into believing
