George Eliot’s Subversive Vision of Marriage

Eliot’s own marital trajectory was anomalous, and not just by the standards of her time. Marian Evans, as she was known when she arrived in London from the Midlands in 1851 to help edit the liberal journal The Westminster Review, had long despaired that “the bliss of reciprocated affection” was out of reach for the homely, brooding misfit she felt she was. In 1854, soon to turn 35, she eloped to live with a married man, and became a social pariah. Evans called him her “beloved husband,” and George Henry Lewes—editor, biographer, philosopher, critic, scientific writer—called her the “best of Wives,” though he never divorced the legal wife with whom he had three children. Evans credited their “blessed union,” and “the happiness which his love has conferred on my life,” with allowing her to discover “my true vocation, after which my nature had always been feeling and striving uneasily without finding it.” George Eliot was born.