London (1851–1854)

Abstract

To reconstruct a picture of Marian Evans’s early years in London is a task hampered by her reticence. She confessed: ‘I cannot write about myself save to one or two people in the world’. Lack of candour also marked her close relationships; to Fanny Houghton, the most sympathetic member of her family, she wrote apologetically in 1851: ‘I always feel that out interviews are unsatisfactory, because I don’t like to talk of myself and my affairs and you may think that I have no sisterly confidence’.² Her work, however, spoke for her, and her article on Mackay indicated her intellectual position in 1850. Her friendship with Bray presented her with the opportunity to make her début in a metropolitan publication. In October 1850, John Chapman visited Rosehill with Robert Mackay, who was the assistant editor of the Westminster Review. Chapman had just published Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect as exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (2 vols, 1850). The book was strongly attacked in the British Quarterly Review in November 1850, but was defended in the Inquirer a year later by Dr Brabant, a move which Marian Evans warmly welcomed.³

When do we hear of women who, starting out of obscurity, boldly claim respect on account of their great abilities or daring virtues? Where are they to be found?¹