A Woman of Many Names: Imagined Letters from George Eliot to Charlotte Brontë
A collection of imagined letters from George Eliot to Charlotte Brontë
I wrote this series of imagined letters as a creative experiment in voice. Each letter heavily incorporates scholarship surrounding both Jane Eyre and Middlemarch as well as criticism of Eliot’s personal correspondence.
Collected here is a recently discovered collection of letters from the inimitable Mary Ann Evans, perhaps better known by her pseudonym George Eliot. In this series, George Eliot addresses to Charlotte Brontë her thoughts on Jane Eyre as she reads it. Writing to Brontë as if she were a contemporary, Eliot’s letters remained unsent and tucked in personal journals until now. She began writing to Brontë in 1869, the same year she started writing Middlemarch. In this imagined letter-verse, Eliot picks up Jane Eyre in the summer of 1872 shortly after she published her own novel. The last unsent letter is dated 1880, the year Eliot married John Walter Cross and passed away.
In the words of Henry James, Eliot’s letters possess “a certain grayness of tone, something measured and subdued, as of a person talking without ever raising her voice” (Bodenheimer, 1). In the more acerbic opinion of Alice James, Eliot’s letters are characterized by “ponderous dreariness” and “futile whining” (2). The same may also be true of the following correspondence from Eliot to Brontë as she critiques her novel:
June 3, 1869:
Charlotte Brontë,
I hope you will excuse the “untidiness” of my penmanship, but I am writing because should you have been alive to receive such a letter, I am sure we would have made swift acquaintance (Bodenheimer 30). Your pseudonym, Currer Bell, at once struck my interest of some kind of posthumous kinship. Since you would not have read my work or heard of me, I will tell you that I carry a second name, myself. In 1856, I first offered “my prospective name as a tub to throw to the whale in case of curious enquiries” by editors. When I first became “George Eliot,” it “made a new era in my life, for it was then I began to write Fiction!” (Harris 130).
Now, I have endeavored to start a project of a greater magnitude to pen the “huge whispering-gallery” of this world. It is true that the “course of the world is very much determined” by the interference of “low people…however little we may like it.” This project will address the smaller communities that create “links of effect” over time in the stone of life (Middlemarch 387). It will also unveil the illusions of the lowly, which dissolve like “melting ice floating and lost in the warm flood of which they had been but another form” (190). I am, at present, lost in the fog of writing, as you may well know. I have also been quite diverted by a “long poem on Timoleon, and several minor poems” (Knoepflmacher 44-45). However, I am soon to pick up this Currer Bell’s Jane Eyre. He or she (what a beautiful blur!) has struck the fancy of many readers over the last two decades. I will reach out to you, in spirit, of course, as I study what is sure to be a fine novel. “Accordingly, I subscribe myself” to you as I do also to the “best and most sympathizing” of editors,
“Yours very truly,
George Eliot” (Harris 130).
November 5, 1871:
Charlotte Brontë,
I have just now emerged from a terrible illness I contracted in London, and I admit I am writing to you under the thumb of a drumming headache. You could say that, like Jane, “all my brain was in tumult” as I read the first few chapters of Jane Eyre, so I apologize for what is likely too harsh a sentiment (Brontë 19). I am nearly finished with my leviathan of a project that was keeping me from your novel, which I have turned to just this morning. You may “think me interminably loquacious, and still worse you will be ready to compare my scribbled sheet to the walls of an Egyptian tomb for mystery” (Bodenheimer 40). However, I shall be glad to know what you see in the violent swirl of anguish compacted into our first encounter with little Jane. The ghost of Gateshead inhabits the red-room as “some coming vision from another world.” The red-room fills with the tremor of fear and sound, as “a sound filled [Jane’s] ears, which [she] deemed the rushing of wings.” She became “oppressed, suffocated” by this ghost (Brontë 14, 21). This spectre of Gateshead haunts these pages like a beast that overshadows all the real details and human interactions of a story. However, I will continue in earnest.
Yours truly,
Marian Evan Lewes
November 8, 1871:
Charlotte Brontë,
“I pursue the same plan with [this] letter as I used when a little child with my pudding, that of dispatching the part for which I had the least relish first, and therefore I will dispose of such dry crust-like subjects as” my thoughts on Bertha Mason, which are less than sympathetic (Bodenheimer, 41). I believe that “All self-sacrifice is good – but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcase” (Harris 133). And Bertha can be considered no more than this: just as much chained as she is chaining.
I studied scripture as a girl before my own “Holy War” - a rejection of the religious doctrines of my youth. I now “regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction” (Bodenheimer 64). With this said, I am well versed in scripture, and I think your cutting off of Rochester’s left hand rather clever. I seem to remember Christ saying, “if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell” (“Matthew 5”). I do not see why Bertha should have been an impediment to a marriage with Jane, but I do see how she is merely a limb to cut. Rochester is purified in soul and marriage for pious Jane, who becomes “his right hand” as well as his “vision” (Brontë 519). I would have had Rochester with or without Bertha, who is as dead as a person can be when they are alive, as this self-sacrifice is too steep a price. I do not see how Jane’s blood curdled to “subtle violence” at the thought of such an empty vessel (334).
As you will see in my signature, I dwell with and carry the name of a man in a marriage to another woman. For this, I am ostracized, but his separation with her renders the legal entanglement a “carcase” I cannot, in all seriousness, respect. I feel kinship with Jane, as my George Henry Lewes cannot obtain a divorce or even the freedom Rochester does in the unfortunate - but ultimately necessary - demise of Bertha (Bodenheimer 55, Ashton 11). With that said, I do not think I would have acted in Jane’s likeness, and it is entirely too romantic that Rochester is rid of his wife in a great blistering fire. Like the ghostly apparition, this is all too unbelievable, but it is enjoyable to read. I found myself hoping the pair would end up in each other’s hands – I just wouldn’t have thought he’d have to lose one to do so.
Yours truly,
Marian Evan Lewes
November 12, 1871:
Charlotte Brontë,
I have sat for several days with this in mind, but I am writing to you briefly now on the subject of Jane. I can’t help but characterize her as one of those heroines in the “silly novels by lady novelists” with heroines of perfect piety who bring “rakish men…to penitence by her reproofs” (“Silly”). My Lewes has been reading your novel alongside me, and just yesterday he described her as “a little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old main. Yet what passion, what fire in her!” (Cross 221).
I confess that Dorothea, a character of my own creation, is like Saint Theresa, characterized by “the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, - or from one of our elder poets, - in a paragraph of today’s newspaper” (Middlemarch 7). She does remind me somewhat of your pious, steadfast Jane, who I have rather grown to like regardless of her fiery perfection beside the rakish Rochester. I am determined to make Dorothea rather less practical than Jane, though. She is not so much a heroine forged in fire. She will lack a classical education beside her far older and wearisome suitor, Casaubon. He will never fail to give “the English [translation] with scrupulous care” to her whenever he expresses himself in Greek or Latin (Middlemarch 23). Perhaps he is my tiresomely silly heroine.
Yours truly,
Marian Evan Lewes
November 25, 1871:
Charlotte Brontë,
I am writing to let you know that I have decided to invite your “exquisitely beautiful, graceful, fascinating” Rosamond into my own world of Middlemarch (Brontë 431). You let her avoid what would have been a disastrous marital entanglement to the most frigid corpse of the Corpus Christi, St. John Rivers. However, I do think that these little disasters of “love” are truer to our being than the consuming magic between Jane and Rochester or the heavy emotional swings of the Romantics. The misunderstandings and illusions we whisper to one another give us each a “whispering gallery” entirely disparate from even our immediate neighbors. These whispers especially abound about those who enamor us.
I am not entirely convinced that St. John would not have fallen for the deception of the passions over his “unwarped consciousness that [Rosamond] would not make [him] a good wife” (431). I have, thus, revised Rosamond’s ending with these little deceptions of the heart in mind. My Rosamond marries Tertius, a man of singular passion like St. John. She wants him for passion and his professional allure, but marriage quickly disillusions them both. When Tertius dies “prematurely of diphtheria,” Rosamond remarries and eventually obtains “happiness as ‘a reward’…for her patience with Tertius” (Middlemarch 782). This freedom in his death does not a happy life or second marriage make, but it does bear a curiously real link in the lives of the people around the two of them. They fundamentally misunderstood the other, whereas your John fundamentally understood the self and avoided their middling fate. He escapes the whispering gallery by predicting his disillusionment with Rosamond, saying that within a year of their marriage, the happiness of their union would yield to “a lifetime of regret” (Brontë 431). I happen to think this the wisdom of retrospect rather than reality, so my characters all fall to disillusion instead.
Further, St. John’s letter of prayer, with which you end the novel, invokes the urgency of Christian doctrine. His “Master” says, “Surely I come quickly!” as he approaches death (Brontë 521). While I think “prayer, beyond that involved in culture” to be nothing more than “a vain offering,” I can appreciate the intellectual stamina of his long-suffering faith (Bodenheimer 65). My own novel ends on the note of death as well - only in the insignificance of a single person’s. My Dorothea lies in an “unvisited [tomb]” when she passes on, just as, I am sure, Jane and Rochester do after life’s trials exhume the fires of their passion into death (Middlemarch 785).
Yours truly,
Marian Evan Lewes
March 12, 1880:
Charlotte Brontë,
Many years have passed for me to read and re-read your work. So also has much time come and gone since I last wrote to you, and I confess I have not desired until recently to commune with my phantom sister. I was just now sitting in the parlor as rain pools around the stones outside. I am trying not to contract some kind of relentless chill, so I sat by the fire and picked up my pen to resume our necessarily one-sided correspondence. I am confident mine is a “bad debt” to you for my “frequent use of the personal pronoun,” so I will discuss at a distance my thoughts on your Jane Eyre (Bodenheimer 40-41). After all, thoughts of you and Jane have passed fleetingly through my mind many times these past weeks, and I hope now to catch them like buckets of rainwater.
I should start off by saying you need not be alarmed at the name with which I sign off. I have not re-painted the tub to throw at the whales - I am only recently remarried to John Walter Cross, and George Eliot is still very much alive off the pages of “his” novels. However, my dear Lewes has sadly passed. But enough, now, with the scribbling nonsense of my personal life – I have some final thoughts I have come to over the years regarding Jane:
Upon several readings of Jane Eyre, I think that overall, “the book is interesting - only I wish the characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports” (Harris 133). Your incorporation of the supernatural and the violent tumult of dramatic romance are both rather fantastical. It diverges significantly from my own Middlemarch, which prizes the “truth about loobies” and “low people.” It is a “provincial history” far from the bliss of Ferndean (Middlemarch 321). I enjoyed Jane’s spirit, though, even if it prevented an earlier entanglement with Rochester. I only wish I could discuss these matters with you in person or receive some correspondence from you, but my scribblings remain stuck between the pages of a diary so old the pages are crisp and stiff.
Yours truly,
Mary Ann Cross
Unsent as they are, in these letters, Eliot does not withhold her criticism for Jane Eyre’s gothic and romantic features. These characteristics catapult the story into a different category entirely than Middlemarch. Eliot’s interests lay in the ordinary and the deflationary, which exists at quite a distance from Brontë’s work. Her letters as well as other private writings have been subject to caustic criticism over the years. However, Henry James says that these letters are “only a partial expression of [Eliot’s] spirit,” so the revolt against them and Eliot’s perceived “high moral tone” does not account for her real character or the character of her novels themselves (Bodenheimer 2-3). While this may be true, they grant serious insight into her writing process as well as her opinions on romanticism and Gothic aspects of Victorian literature.
Works Cited
Ashton, Rosemary. Dickens, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. University of London, 1991.
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans. Cornell University Press, 1994.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Penguin Random House, 1847.
Cross, John Walter. George Eliot’s Life as related in her Letters and Journals, Volume I. Harper & Brothers, 1884. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43043/43043-h/43043-h.htm
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Penguin Random House, 1871.
Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Westminster Review, vol. LXVI, October 1856, pp. 442-61.
Hardy, Barbara. “Middlemarch and the Passions.” This Particular Web: Essays on Middlemarch, edited by Ian Adam, University of Toronto Press, 1975. Pp. 3-21.
Harris, Margaret. “George Eliot’s Conversation with Currer Bell.” Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies, no. 50/51, 2006, pp. 130–42.
Knoepflmacher, U.C. “Middlemarch and the Passions.” This Particular Web: Essays on Middlemarch, edited by Ian Adam, University of Toronto Press, 1975. Pp. 43-72.
Mahawatte, Royce. George Eliot and the Gothic Novel: Genres, Gender and Feeling. University of Wales Press, 2013.
Mitchell, Rebecca N. “The Rosamond Plots: Alterity and the Unknown in Jane Eyre and Middlemarch.” University of Texas-Pan American. Pp. 307-327.
“Matthew 5.” ESV Bible, www.esv.org/Matthew+5/.
Steedman, Carolyn. “Going to Middlemarch: History and the Novel.” Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume XL, Issue 3, 2001.