the road to character (2)

George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, was born in early 19th century England. Her father was a successful carpenter-turned-businessman, her mother an ill-healthed woman who lost twin boys 18 months after Mary Anne's birth. She then sent her surviving children away to boarding schools to spare herself the physical effort of raising them when Mary Anne was only 5. 

She was called back to tend to her mother's health at age 16 and subsequently took over the role of supervising the household after her death.

As a young child, Mary Anne was precocious, strong-willed, if somehow awkward, and enjoyed the company of adults more than children of her age, with hunger for affection and fear of abandonment.

In her late teens and early 20's, she was first driven by moral ardor and spiritual perfectionism to become a priggish religious nut: She gave up reading fiction, believing that a morally serious person should focus on the real world and not imaginary ones; she forswore wine and as manager of her household forced those around her into abstinence as well; she adopted a severe and puritanical mode of dress and allowed music only when it accompanied worship.

But her roving mind and capacious intellect couldn't be contained in such straitjacket mode for long. Pretty soon, besides reading Bible commentaries, she was learning Italian and German, reading Wordsworth and Goethe, as well as Romantic poets including Shelley and Byron, whose lives certainly did not conform to the strictures of her faith.

She also read voraciously books on modern sciences, including those that tried to demythify and reconstruct the life of Jesus through biblical accounts, as well as those that tried to defend it. She found the latter unsatisfactory and unpersuasive and her doubts on her Christian beliefs continued to grow.

"While I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life… to be most dishonorable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness,” she said in a letter to her father.

Things finally came to a head when she declared a "Holy War" with her father and refused to go to church with him. She wrote to her father that she would like to go on living with him, but if he wanted her to leave, “I can cheerfully do it if you desire it and shall go with deep gratitude for all the tenderness and rich kindness you have never been tired of showing me. So far from complaining I shall joyfully submit if as a proper punishment for the pain I have most unintentionally given you, you determine to appropriate any provision you may have intended to make for my future support to your other children whom you may consider more deserving.”

She reconciled with her father a few months later, however, after realizing her selfish grand-standing had been hurting her beloved father and causing damages to the people surrounding and society in general. She agreed to accompany her father to church, so long as he and everybody else understood that she was not a Christian nor a believer in the doctrines of the faith.

She went on to meet and socialize with a variety of artists, philosophers and literati of the intelligentsia circle of London. Intellectually she was mature. The intensive reading she had done throughout her adolescence produced an impressive depth of knowledge and a capacity for observation and judgment.

Emotionally, though, she was still something of a basket case. By the time she was 22 it became a joke in her circle that Mary Anne fell in love with everyone she met. These relationships followed a general pattern: Desperate for affection, she would throw herself at some man, usually a married or otherwise unavailable one. Dazzled by her conversation, he would return her attention. Mistaking his intellectual engagement for romantic love, she would become emotionally embroiled, hoping their love would fill some void in herself. Finally he would reject her or flee, or his wife would force her out of the picture. Mary Anne would be left awash in tears, or crippled by migraines.

Her emotional maturity continued to grow through these heart aches, though, and at age 32, she met her true love and soul mate George Lewes, a self-made writer who was officially married to an estranged wife from whom he could not legally divorce.

Mary Anne and Lewes fell in love over ideas. In the years before they met they had been drawn to the same writers, often at the same time. They composed essays on overlapping subjects. They both took the search for truth with the same earnest intensity, and both subscribed to the idea that human love and sympathy could serve as the basis for their own morality as a substitute for a Christianity they could not actually believe in.

They finally decided to take the plunge and eloped to the European continent, where they spent the rest of their lives as husband and wife, and Lewes helped Mary Anne (now taking the pen name George Eliot) unleash her writing talent to become one of the greatest English novelists and writers of Victorian era, if not of all times.

They lived happily through their 24 year marriage together. “I am very happy— happy in the highest blessing life can give us, the perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own healthy activity. I feel, too, that all the terrible pain I have gone through in past years, partly from the defects of my own nature, partly from outward things, has probably been a preparation for some special work that I may do before I die. That is a blessed hope, to be rejoiced in with trembling."

"Adventure is not outside man; it is within,” she would write.