George Eliot by Kathryn Hughes

Author:Kathryn Hughes [Kathryn Hughes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00-738160-9
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1998-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

On 15 March 1857 Marian and Lewes set out for the Scilly Isles. He needed to do more ‘naturalising’ for the second part of ‘Sea-Side Studies’, and her fiction work – she was just winding up ‘Mr Gilfil’ and about to begin ‘Janet’s Repentance’ – was portable. Marian recorded a careful account of their journey in her journal. The coach trip from Plymouth to Truro gave her a chance to cast her increasingly disciplined naturalist’s eye over her fellow travellers – a local lad who ate buns, an old sailor who was ‘a natural gentleman’, ‘a pretentious, vulgar young man with smart clothes, dirty nails, and original information in physiology’. She noted, too, details of the social and geographic landscape, including the way the clay industry changed the colour of the water around St Austell and the precise history of a ‘fine church tower’.58

For eight wet, windy days they were stuck in Penzance before travelling to St Mary’s, Scilly, on 26 March 1857 where they took rooms at the Post Office. The creeky shoreline was a perfect hunting-ground for the zoophytes, molluscs and annelids which Lewes had come to study at close quarters. In between expeditions to the rock pools Marian worked on ‘Mr Gilfil’, finishing the Epilogue out of doors on a sunny April morning.

After a seven-week stay Marian and Lewes moved on to the second stage of their island holiday. On 11 May they left for Jersey, where Lewes had spent a short but significant part of his boyhood, learning French and spending evenings ‘of perfect bliss’ at the theatre.59 Inevitably it all seemed smaller and rattier than he remembered. But it must have been interesting for Marian to see the place which was the nearest thing to ‘home’ for the rootless Lewes.

Childhood and family ties were in any case at the front of Marian’s mind now. While in Scilly she had received a letter from Warwickshire telling her that Chrissey’s family had been struck by typhus.60 One little girl, Fanny, had died on 26 March and another, Katy, and Chrissey herself were seriously ill. The letter had actually been written by Sarah Evans, on behalf of her husband who hated putting pen to paper. By 16 April, having heard nothing for over a fortnight, Marian wrote to Isaac begging for more news. Assuming Chrissey was now out of danger, Marian asked him to advance fifteen pounds out of her six-monthly income to pay for a holiday so that her sister could get away from ‘that fever-infected place’.61 Isaac wrote back immediately saying that Chrissey had taken a turn for the worse and was now gravely ill. Unfortunately he does not seem to have bothered to let Marian know when the danger had passed. It was from Fanny that she eventually got the news a fortnight later that both Chrissey and Katy had pulled through.62

The fact that Marian had felt bold enough to ask Isaac to advance fifteen pounds from her income, when two years previously he had

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