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Summary
Summary
A peripatetic scholar of 19th-century English literature and history, Hughes focuses more fully on Eliot's (1819-80) private life than other recent biographers. She details the scandal that cast her into social exile until her literary successes established her at the heart of the London literary elite. She finds her to have been by turns ambitious and insecure, cerebral and earthy, provocative and conservative. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Reviews (4)
Guardian Review
The long face, the flinty eyes and the open book in the background -- experts believe this is a sketch of the young Eliot and that it has a romantic story of its own to tell In February last year a London picture dealer called Andrew Sim was clicking through the online auction catalogue for a saleroom in South Oxfordshire, hoping that something might turn up while knowing that it probably wouldn't. In among the wavy mirrors and scuffed-up sofas, his attention was caught by a chalk pastel portrait of a young woman. "My first thought was that it was from the 1840s -- a period that interests me because it is so undervalued," says Sim. More specifically it looked a bit like the work of George Richmond, the pre-eminent portrait painter of the period who did everyone from Charlotte Bronte to Charles Darwin. Richmond, though, was always more than a mere memorialist. Drawing on the grammar of physiognomy, his talent was for producing portraits in which the inner life of a sitter might be read from the cast of a glance, the bulge of a nose or tilt of the chin. It was this psychological attention that flared off the picture that had caught Sim's eye. The young woman in it is revealed as an individual, not a type. Her long face, big nose and flinty grey eyes are the opposite of the generic dolliness that passed for beauty in the early Victorian period. And then there is her kinetic vitality: hair slightly dishevelled, she appears to be perched on the edge of the sofa, as if she has just this moment sat down and might jump up again at any moment. And while her glance veers off to one side, you get the feeling that she is perfectly aware of the artist's appreciative eyes resting on her. Portrait "taking" was the only occasion on which a respectable man might stare with impunity at a respectable woman and, in return, the respectable woman might feel pleased to be the object of his gaze. This woman looks pleased. So it was with reluctance that Sim concluded that the picture wasn't by Richmond after all. The technique was good but not good enough and the youth of the female sitter, not to mention her plain dress, made her an unlikely subject for a painter who charged [pound]50 a go. But if the identity of the artist remained unclear, what about the sitter? Sim found himself tugged back again to that singular young woman with her sheeny intelligence. "My facial recognition software kicked in and I said to myself in a flash: "that's a young George Eliot". Convinced of his hunch, and hardly daring to believe that no other bidder had spotted the likeness to the author of Middlemarch, Sim bought the picture for [pound]50, exactly what Richmond was charging 170 years earlier. Long-lost likenesses of 19th-century novelists have a habit of turning up in a fizz of excitement, only to fade away again when someone points out just why the thing is impossible. In 2012 and again in 2015 photographs of "the Bronte sisters" surfaced, quickly followed by a cacophony of commentators saying it couldn't be them (the bonnets were wrong, the women looked French, one of them was far too old). Then, earlier this year, the so-called " Rice portrait " of a young Jane Austen was declared to be of someone else entirely (something which the present owners dispute). In cases like these, the enthusiasts risk looking gushy and gullible and museum curators appear like spoilsports, refusing to venture an opinion unless there is a paper trail, showing an unbroken chain of custodianship back to the sitter or their family. And that is something that Sim doesn't have. Despite his best efforts, he has been unable to plot the provenance of his Eliot picture back before 2014 when it popped up on a market stall in Thame. From there it was bought by an elderly man in the hope it might be a Richmond. Realising it wasn't, the disappointed owner consigned it to a local saleroom to take its chances amid the chipped china and exhausted sideboards. Still, several Eliot scholars, myself included, think that there's a good chance that this portrait is the real deal. For Nancy Henry, professor of English literature at the University of Tennessee and author The Life of George Eliot and The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot, the picture "shows a remarkable resemblance to the famous photograph of Eliot, taken in 1858 when she was approaching 40, as well as to other portraits". For me the clincher is how strikingly similar this saleroom portrait is to a drawing of the 28-year-old Eliot made by a friend who traced her shadowed profile, a technique popular with amateur artists who worried about their ability to catch a proper likeness. Here is the same long nose, generous mouth and jutting jaw. If the woman in Sim's picture turned 90 degrees, you would say it was a match. Mary Ann Evans is known to have fallen briefly and deliriously in love in the spring of 1845 So let's set aside caution for a moment and imagine that this really is a portrait of Eliot. How and where could it have been made? The most promising hypothesis is that it is the work of the nameless young "picture restorer" with whom the young Mary Ann Evans -- still years away from becoming George Eliot -- is known to have fallen briefly and deliriously in love in the spring of 1845. We know from family letters that in March that year the young man had been staying at Baginton, a country estate just outside Coventry. Something about his "simple, earnest, unstudied" manner caught the eye of a local farmer's wife, Fanny Houghton who wondered if the visiting artist might make a possible suitor for her half-sister Mary Ann, who was still worryingly and conspicuously single at the age of 25. Mary Ann was duly summoned from her home in Coventry for a blind date. The result was a coup de foudre. Miss Evans breathlessly declared the picture restorer to be "the most interesting young man ... and superior to all the rest of mankind". The young picture restorer was equally "smitten", describing Mary Ann as "the most fascinating creature he had ever beheld ... a person of such superior excellent and powers of mind". He asked permission to write to Evans as a formal suitor and she agreed, returning home to the suburban villa she shared with her retired father "brimful of happiness". The only problem, everyone agreed, was that picture restoring was "not lucrative or over-honourable" as jobs went. The young man was not what you would call a catch for the daughter of a self-made businessman. This discrepancy in social standing became even more apparent the following week when the young picture restorer went to visit Evans in Coventry for a second date and, like a fish out of water, suddenly appeared nervous, clumsy and shy. On the spot Mary Ann made up her mind that she "could never love or respect him enough to marry him" and wrote to break it off. It wasn't easy though. Potential husbands were thin on the ground, and almost immediately, Evans wondered if she had been too rash. She toyed with the idea of starting the whole thing up again, fretting herself into a series of excruciating headaches. The identity of the picture restorer has always puzzled scholars. Even Gordon Haight, the Yale professor and pioneering biographer who amassed all the key Eliot letters and journals in the mid 20th century, never got further than drawing up a shortlist of 15 possible names. But in 2009 Jacob Simon, chief curator at the National Portrait Gallery, went public with a new theory. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement he explained that he had a candidate for the role of Eliot's lost lover, one whose name had not been previously been in the frame. George Barker, a picture restorer from Leamington, was exactly Evans's contemporary. What's more, he was employed on restoration projects in many of the great houses of England: Simon could show that Barker stayed at Baginton in 1841 and again in 1844, a few months before Evans was summoned to meet what she hoped would be her romantic destiny. Since Simon first floated the idea that Barker was the young picture restorer who wanted to marry the young Eliot, more biographical information has come to light. Barker was christened in the strict Calvinistic branch of the Methodist church, yet by the time he was an adult he seems to have left behind the sect's constricting straitjacket. Certainly his siblings regarded him as something of a black sheep, and on the 1881 census he is not recorded as living with his wife and daughter, suggesting a separation. This makes an intriguing parallel to Evans's own spiritual and romantic career (in the context of the Victorian period the two things were inseparable). She too was disowned by her siblings when, having given up formal religion, at the age of 35 she went to live with George Henry Lewes, an author who had recently separated from his wife and children. Her proposed match with the free-thinking Barker sounds like a match made in an unbeliever's heaven. The possibility of the young picture restorer being responsible for the newly discovered portrait makes sense to me. This, after all, is not a full-blown oil painting but a chalk pastel sketch, the sort of thing easily completed within the adrenaline-driven two days that the tentative couple spent together. The technique, suggests Sim, is professional though not expert, exactly the kind of thing that a picture restorer employed to touch up old masters might manage. This also explains the debt to the acclaimed Richmond, whom a competent copyist might automatically take as his guide. There is one last thing which, for those of us who want the portrait to be of Eliot, is a clincher. When Sim got it home and took it off its mount for cleaning he found that the painting extended further than he had initially realised. In its newly borderless state you can see the back of the sofa on which the young woman sits. On this rests an open book, which she has temporarily thrown down but has been careful to keep close enough so that it can be snatched up again at any moment. Books often appear in portraits of young women at this period, but they are mostly there as props or accessories, something to occupy slack hands or fill an awkward corner. Here, by contrast, it is presented almost as a sentient being, an essential companion. If this really is Evans, then the artist, whoever he is, has found the perfect object to place next to the woman who, as George Eliot, would one day change the reach and shape of English literature. - Kathryn Hughes.
Kirkus Review
The third biography in scarcely as many years gets personal with the Victorian novelist known primarily through her intellectual achievements. While Frederick Karl's George Eliot: Voice of a Century (1995) perpetuated Eliot's image as a Victorian Sybil ('a massive, mythic figurehad, given to spouting riddles') and Rosemary Ashton's George Eliot: A Life (1997) tried to maintain a balance between her life and her work, Hughes (The Victorian Governess, not reviewed) focuses on her character behind the facade of fame, which Eliot could have done without. Although this approach requires some reading between the lines of early correspondence and Eliot's fiction, while Hughes often skims her intellectual and philosophical development, it also brings a sense of close familiarity with this private, inward woman. Hughes's rendering of Mary Ann Evans's life avoids gossipy revisionism and credibly fleshes out her transformation from Midlands evangelical to cosmopolitan Victorian intellectual and from an unnoticed London literary journalist to world-famous novelist George Eliot. In these pages, Mary Ann's youthful puritanical priggishness is offset by her deep emotional needs, which often arose in egotistic demands for attention from older, maternal women and in affairs with older, libidinous men, such as the philanthropist Charles Bray and the publisher John Chapman'and which typically led to ``embarrassingly sudden departures from other people's houses.'' Evans's break with her family is particularly painful here, as Hughes shows her first quarreling with her revered father over religion, then with her adored brother over her longtime liaison with the married George Henry Lewes (``one of the few people in London who was demonstrably plainer than herself'). Hughes gives Lewes special credit not only for his attentive support of Eliot's doubt-ridden career in fiction, but also for their emotional union, which flourished despite his reputation for frivolity and bohemianism. Not the whole story, but a refreshingly intimate portrait. (16 pages b&w photos and illustrations, not seen)
Choice Review
Scholars may question the need for another biography of Eliot following the publication of Rosemary Ashton's George Eliot: A Life (CH, Nov'97), now regarded as the standard biography, and Rosemarie Bodenheimer's The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans (CH, Apr'95). Still, Eliot's significance as a major Victorian writer and the seeming discontinuity between her public persona and her private life make this new biography by Hughes, a lecturer at several universities in the UK and author of The Victorian Governess (CH, Jul'93), a welcome addition to Eliot scholarship. Unlike Bodenheimer's study, which depends on a substantial knowledge of Eliot's work, Hughes's biography is directed toward a general audience and includes plot summaries of some less-known works. Nevertheless, Hughes provides meticulous but unobtrusive documentation throughout her study. And whereas Ashton seeks to provide a balance between Eliot's life and work, Hughes's primary interest is Eliot as a complex human being. Like Ashton, Hughes is judicious in speculating on some of the puzzles in Eliot's life (e.g., her marriage to John Cross) and grounds her conclusions in recent scholarship. Though not a replacement for Ashton, Hughes is a good resource for undergraduates and general readers. Moreover, Hughes writes with an uncommon blend of clarity, economy, and grace. All collections. R.D. Morrison; Morehead State University
Library Journal Review
A lecturer in 19th-century English literature and author of The Victorian Governess, Hughes takes a crack at capturing the protean Eliot on paper. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
