Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru Page A

She was dressed in a short soft satin walking dress with a lace wrap half shading the body, a costume most artistically designed to show her slenderness, yet hiding the squareness of age.” She added that there was not a single person in the room (including Eliot’s husband) “whose mother she might not have been. . . . She adores her husband, and it seemed to me it hurt her a little to have him talk so much to me. It made her, in her pain, slightly irritated and snappish. . . . He may forget the twenty years difference between them, but she never can.”
    Evans changed her name yet again, to Mary Anne Cross, but the marriage lasted less than a year. She died unexpectedly on December 22, 1880, at sixty-one—the same age at which Lewes died. Only a few days earlier, she and John had attended a concert and seen a performance of Agamemnon. In what is believed to be her final utterance, she complained of “great pain in the left side.” Then she was gone.
    Left to tend to the legacy of this towering figure, Cross had his own minor identity crisis; he was referred to as “George Eliot’s widow.” He only bolstered his image as “Mr. Eliot” when he published a biography of his late wife in 1885. It would be a stretch to assume that his marriage to Eliot had been consummated, but he is said to have truly loved and revered her. “I am left alone in this new House we meant to be so happy in,” he wrote to a friend. He never remarried.
    Even in death, Eliot paid a steep price for her unconventional life: in her will, she asked to be buried at Westminster Abbey, but the request was denied. She was dismissed as “a person whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian practice in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to dogma.” (This was certainly true.) Further, the church noted that despite the author’s wish for a funeral in the Abbey, “[o]ne cannot eat one’s cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters.”
    It was not until the centenary of her death that she would receive a memorial stone in Poet’s Corner. (She was in good company in that regard: Lord Byron, whose life was shockingly scandalous, died in 1824 and wasn’t given a stone until 1969.) The eminent scholar Gordon Haight had the honor of delivering the speech for the unveiling of her stone at Westminster Abbey on June 21, 1980, five years before his own death. “The novels of George Eliot provide the most varied and truthful picture we have of English religious life in the nineteenth century,” he said. Whereas the novel had often previously served as a trivial pastime, he noted, Eliot elevated it into “a compelling moral force.”
    After Eliot died, Henry James paid her a glorious tribute: “What is remarkable, extraordinary—and the process remains inscrutable and mysterious—is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures, without extravagance, assumption, or bravado, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man.”
    Today we take for granted how much Eliot sacrificed to become one of the greatest authors in the history of Western literature. She is simply George Eliot , literary master, staid historical figure, required college reading, admired by generations of authors. Her iconic Victorian visage now adorns posters, calendars, coffee mugs, stationery. But this pioneer could never forget the toll of her fame.
    Reflecting on her story, it is tempting to interpret one of the concluding passages of The Mill on the Floss as the author’s weary assessment of her own life:
    Nature