Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru

and a judgmental public had listened and fallen silent. She was adored and admired, a literary giant—and a very wealthy woman. Whereas she and Lewes had once been exiles in London society, now they were celebrated, visited by Emerson, Turgenev, and other eminent intellectuals. A handsome American banker, John Cross, whom they affectionately called “dear nephew,” managed their business affairs. All was well.
    But on November 30, 1878, Lewes was dead by evening. Eliot had reported months earlier to a friend that Lewes was “racked with cramps from suppressed gout and feeling his inward economy all wrong.” The sixty-one-year-old had succumbed to cancer, though he had never received the diagnosis.
    They’d been together for more than two decades, and although Eliot was melancholic by nature, these had been the best years of her life. In a sense, Lewes had made everything possible. And when Eliot had received a manuscript of Adam Bede , bound in red leather, from her publisher, she had inscribed it to Lewes: “To my dear husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this M.S. of a work which would never have been written but for the happiness which his love has conferred on my life. Marian Lewes, March 23, 1859.”
    In her grief-stricken stupor, she felt unable to attend his funeral. Each new day without him represented “a new acquaintance with grief.” Her old friend Turgenev sent a letter of condolence assuring her that the whole of “learned Europe” mourned with her. When she responded to such letters, she signed herself “Your loving but half dead Marian.” She was severely depressed and weighed just over a hundred pounds. She found a sense of purpose by establishing a £5,000 grant in Lewes’s name at Cambridge University, and by devoting her waking hours to editing his final work. Eliot never wrote another novel. She would be dead within two years.
    Her fans demanded her attention more than ever; it seemed that her fame had grown after her loss, which she found deeply unsettling. Requests for photographs of the famous George Eliot were politely declined, as the author explained that she treasured her privacy and did not wish to be stared at in public. One particularly aggressive autograph hunter was finally silenced with a form letter, a reply that the author had dictated: “Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot), whom he has mistakenly addressed as Miss Marian Evans, has no photograph of herself and systematically abstains from giving her autograph.”
    One might expect that at this late stage of life—she was sixty—her knack for courting scandal would have been a distant memory. But she provoked rebuke once again, in May 1880, by marrying John Cross, who was twenty years her junior. He’d proposed to her three times before she accepted. Now she would have the legal marriage she’d always longed for; in this regard, she was rather old-fashioned, and had suffered from being unable to legitimize an otherwise blissful longtime union. At last, she could marry, if not the love of her life, a man she loved.
    For their honeymoon, John and Marian traveled to Venice, where a strange mishap occurred. One morning, suffering from a depressive episode, Cross jumped from the balcony of their suite at the Hotel Europa (where luminaries such as Proust and Verdi had stayed) and landed in the Grand Canal. He was perhaps embarrassed, but physically unharmed. Venetian newspapers reported the incident, and the local police recorded it as a suicide attempt. Eliot alerted John’s brother by telegram, and he joined them for the rest of their honeymoon. They blamed the heat for John’s bizarre leap, and the trio traveled on to Munich.
    Upon their return home, the couple attended a dinner party in their honor, after which a guest wrote a petty and unkind missive to her sister: “George Eliot, old as she is, and ugly, really looked very sweet and winning in spite of both.